Cosmic, Man

Take an hour to relax and enjoy Stuart Arentzen's "a suite of recent synth fiddlings" via SoundCloud.

Listen in the title link above, or spin it in the embedded player below. What to expect? Let's say you're having a bubble bath with Carl Sagan and then you realize it's not a bathtub but a wormhole that shoots you out of the Milky Way, through a black cloud of dark matter and eventually into a nebula where juggling is encouraged.

Pimpf

8-Bit Operators: Tribute to Depeche Mode: Enjoy the Science
Various Artists
(8-Bit Operators)

Note: Since editor-at-large S.L. Kreighton was actually alive when Depeche Mode put out its first single, and he has a grasp of what "chiptune" music is, we made him listen to this new tribute collection. Then when he fell asleep, we took his notes and published them here, exactly as written.

1. "But Not Tonight" - Bacalao
Drives home the significant charm of Dave Gahan's voice. Instrumental bed is fine, and the treated "ooohs" are pretty.

2. "Enjoy the Silence" - Herbert Weixelbaum
Oh Herbert! This doesn't have the immediate-joy of his 8-bit "Tansmusik" from the Kraftwerk tribute.

3. "Boys Say Go" - GOTO80
Dunno this one

4. "Policy of Truth" - Matt Nida feat. Lisa Schumann
Instrumentally, much of this sounds as if it could be an early DM composition. Good choice for vocalist, as Lisa Schumann's gender gives the words a different spin.

5. "Strange Love" - ComputHer
THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT. ComputeHer's reading of "Strangelove" recalls the future-fear of battered VHS horror films with plots involving a computer becoming obsessed with a human and going all Lifetime bad-boyfriend on any meatspace occupier foolish enough to get in the way.

6. "Martyr" - gwEm
Eh.

7. "Clean" - Laker feat. ONTBG
Really does something different with the tune and adds something (possibly) not done by DM: a guest verse from rapper ONTBG.

8. ffwd
[The song is "Photographic (Megamix)" - 8-Bit Operators -- ed.]

9. "New Life" - Patokai
Just a sped-up cover of a song that's already locked in the era in which it was created.

10. "(Set Me Free) Remotivate Me" - Aonami
I don't recall this song. The Web tells me it was a b-side to "Master and Servant." Huh.

11. "Never Let Me Down Again" - crashfaster
Why does the Vocoder (well, Vocoder-like) voice process suit chip-tunes so well? Because it removes the last human element. Hands down the best song DM ever wrote. Not a bad cover.

12. "Dreaming Of Me " - gameboymusicclub
Topic exhaustion sets in.

13. Somebody - Naomi Sample
I'm pretty sure I cried myself to sleep listening to this song at least once when I was 15.

14. "I Just Can’t Get Enough" - Yerzmeyey
Oh, we probably can. Yerzmeyey's treatment is fine. But after Nouvelle Vague, covering this should have stopped.

15. "Behind The Wheel" - Inverse Phase
Pretty, but I'm going to open the door and do the Adam-12 roll. Enough.


Reference materials: Remember when you found that old cassette of the first Depeche Mode album and the keyboards sound like toys now? And it's kind of cool, still, but maybe a little annoying when you're not in the mood? Yup.

Free Music: Interpretations & Trip-hop by Any Other Name

Let’s start this three-part offering of links to free music with the double-scoop ATCO: A Tribute from Xiomara, a musician from San Francisco.

Radical re-workings of rap are a dicey game, often producing novelty (which isn’t automatically bad) but usually cringe-inducing. But once in a while, the right performer picks the right material and does something genuinely interesting with a style of pop music not necessarily suited to cover treatment.

Xiomara spritzes Outkast’s “So Fresh, So Clean” with a nearly a capella first verse to show off her Depression-era blues voice that, appropriately rides into a sort of gypsy-jazz breakdown at the end. The flipside puts a daydream drift across “Electric Relaxation” by A Tribe Called Quest. It’s a watery, soft and positively sensual reading of ATCQ’s already drowsy tune. The original is a request, Xiomara’s reading is pure promise keeping.

Get it, spin it, dig it.

***

Electric Wizard’s legend is mostly true. The English doom metal act has conjured a certain strain of creepy, occult-shaded metal sludge so filthy that listening to them can still feel transgressive. But turn off the amps and most classic metal, and a fair amount of doom, can sound like folk-blues that trades in murder-ballad imagery.

So what happens when a talented fan scrubs the druggy fuzz from Electric Wizard’s music? Acoustic Wizard answers that with some of the scariest campfire jams you’ll ever hear. The first two volumes, each with three tracks, are called Please Don’t Sue Me, which seems unlikely as we imagine the members of Electric Wizard would be all over this. It’s an act of pure love, with wonderfully gloomy results.

***

Electronic music site Earmilk calls Goldbloc’s Black Gold EP “one of the best slept on acts of our time." The term “slept on” seems to have lost its potency in this era of music consumption. After all, there’s so much new music that even dedicated genre fans are going to miss out on something. It’s just too hard to keep up. That said, Goldbloc really is a fantastic duo from Boston.

As our headline says, the four songs comprising Black Gold are trip-hop. Whether Goldbloc calls it that doesn’t matter. Don’t go in expecting the languorous, end-of-the century angst of Portishead, nor the jazz-lite chillout sound that made coffee houses seem cool in the late ‘90s. Seriously deep bass rolls with midnight menace beneath slightly glitchy treatment of vocals that recall the post-coital rasp of Elin Kastlander from jj. This is where soul music should be today.

You can download the EP for free by liking them on Facebook. We got a download error message, but that’s just Facebook being willfully difficult. You should be able to see the Dropbox link where you can grab the compressed zip file. Roll up.

Experimental Music on Children's TV

We're going to be visiting this blog regularly. Join us.

[Once again, thank you, James Barnes.]

Dip Your Bowl Into the Cosmic Cauldron

We don't know a whole lot about the blog The Ghost of the Weed Garden, and we like it that way.

The person or people behind it go by an owlish tag that looks like this: {{{{o\/o}}}}

As you might imagine, that anonymity delights us.

On the site are music mixes  you can stream or download, scanned artwork from the covers of horror, fantasy and science fiction paperbacks, as well as covers from cryptic, sometimes self-published looking books on magick, philosophy and other occult oddities.

Honestly, it's the sort of stuff that would have made a much younger Typing Monkey freak out and think about church.

The most recent music mix posted on Weed Garden is titled "Cosmic Cauldron." And as the site itself says, it's packed top to bottom with "Psychedelic, Acid Folk, Kosmische, Electronic, Occult, [and] Haunted VHS."

We spun it today and it fit the sunny autumn afternoon just right. As the evening brought chilling fog, "Cosmic Cauldron" swirled with creepy acid folk, devilish weirdness and a few good dabs of resin-smeared psych.

Have fun.

Send Me a Postcard

The unofficial end to summer approaches, a time reserved for listening to Nat King Cole on AM radio, eating fruit you picked right off that tree in the alley near the end of the block, and wondering how quickly your tan will fade.

Here's a music video that constructs a fantasy "wish you were here" greeting from a vacation to a magazine advertisement in the mid 1970s. Good job, Royksopp.

Let's Get Weird

Black Heel Marks' debut long player Feel Free will be available for purchase on June 25. In the meantime, stream the whole thing here.

Lava, Delta, Bravo

We were going to title this post "Do You Even Have a Blog Anymore?" but decided that was selfish. Also: Shut up.

Portland, OR duo LAVA make the kind of melted-ice-cream pastel pop that's perfect for putting through your headphones as you walk around and enjoy the pink perfume of spring.

Their new long-player, Wrest showed up on Bandcamp on March 6, so we're a month late in getting to this. And for that, LAVA (with delta/triangles where the "A's" should be), we apologize.

Do your ears a favor and spin Wrest here, then realize how deficient your life has been without it and buy it. They ain't doing this for free. Not intentionally anyway.

This Is Just ... Cool!

Read more about Dam Drum 2.0, if you'd like.

Things the Intertoobs Taught Us in 2011

Most media outlets publish carefully cultivated best-of lists for the end of the year. Some take it very seriously and that’s fine. Journalists and other media types generally like to argue and debate so making best-of lists feeds that urge.

The Typing Monkey is not immune to such impulses but we simply don’t consume enough new material to effectively create some sort of all-knowing inventory of things we think matter in music, film, television or whatever else.

Like the average jerks we are, we just mess around on the Web and document the things we find that entertain us. Some of those things make it to the blog.

In the spirit of year-end wrap ups and the critic’s inflated sense of influence, here is the first (and possibly last) "Things the Intertoobs Taught Us"

THE MUSIC
A. Dd+ – Dallas-based MCs Paris Pershun and Slim Gravy (!) slipped passed wider recognition. Too bad that, because they’re funny and smart, willing to lob lines such as “surprising everybody, reading a damn book” (“Likeamug”) in the midst of the kind of throwback boasting that workaday schmucks can actually visualize. On their March LP When Pigs Fly the duo was backed by wonderful soul-soaked production from Picnictyme. Grab the free download of their singles-collecting EP Loosies and thank A.Dd+ by paying for a copy of Pigs Fly.

CHRISTIAN MISTRESS – Given the TMI offices are in Seattle we must apologize to this Olympia, WA quintet for not discovering their classic blues-based metal until this year. Singer Christine Davis may have started smoking in the 3rd grade in order to get that voice (tremble men, you can’t handle her). The rhythm section knows when to boogie, when to boom, and the clean, dual guitar leads muscle in right next to the Saxon patch on your denim. Get on this already, they’ve been at it since 2009.

“I’m In Your Church At Night” by ACTIVE CHILD – Pat Grossi, the man behind the name, has released plenty of good music over the past year. This single came out in November 2010 but we didn’t find it until February of 2011 so we’re including it here because nothing else he’s done moves quite like this majestic, crystalline work of weirdo pop. Dig the video and it will all make odd, wintry sense – just lovely.

BELL WITCH – A drum/bass duo from Seattle (again, where were we?) whose funeral-doom rumbles come with uncharacteristic peals of bright, cleansing light in the form of madrigal-like harmonies. The match makes perfect sense and the band gives the six-string bass guitar a home. Four dollars gets you their demo and that’s four bucks well-spent.

NYEMIAH $UPREME -- A Queens rapper whose mixtape Bad will probably draw comparisons to more mainstream/current peers but sounds more to us as if she's standing on the shoulders of MC Lyte and high-fiving Fannypack on her way up. There's a day-in-the-life narrative to Bad that actually works amid the sketches of beats, bass and police-procedural keyboards. Bad could come off as typical "because I'm worth it" aphorisms wrapped in party music. A deeper listen reveals an independent woman a little pissed off that too many men around her are there because they think they're worth it, and more, that she should agree.

“Mountaineer” by WHITE SEA – The video for this single gets the teens-being-teens aspect right but missed an opportunity to craft the John Hughes homage that the song embodies. Soaring, tragic, self-aware, Morgan Kibby sings the lyric “it’s a teen dream” as if she’s trying to reassure a teary heroine, and the whole affair has you running back to give that sensitive rich kid another chance because maybe you two can make something of this after all. “Mountaineer” is pure Kate Bush-style drama with all the synthesizers and crashing drums to realize its grand ambitions.

Worth Following – We doubled up our coverage of SP-33 and XII Boar since we discovered both their free EPs on the same day. The former is Chicagoan Ezra Funkhouse, whose Escape the Carter smeared Lil Wayne vocals onto bleak synth grime from John Carpenter's soundtrack to Escape from New York. The latter is a stoner-metal quartet from England who managed to graft some hardcore fury and pumelling doom onto their resin-stained melodies.

Since then SP-33 has put out a woozy ambient mix and an original single titled "These Moments" both of which show Funkhouse deliberately branching out. Meanwhile, XII Boar promises a new release in 2012 and continue to play around the UK and the continent.

Reference material: We wouldn't know about three of these bands without regularly visiting the essential Cosmic Hearse blog. The Typing Monkey staff also spends a fair amount of time at RCRDLBL, Ill Roots, and enjoy mining for great rewards at Cover Me.

SUPER HAPPY BONUS FUN TIME!

Beats, Intl.

All around the Web, blather about a recording called Kinshasa One Two is bubbling up like yeast proofing in warm sugar-water. Let's not be left out, because it's very much worth blathering about.

Damon Albarn (Blur; Gorillaz; The Good, The Bad, The Queen; experimental opera composer and performer) travelled to the Democratic Republic of Congo with a few choice music makers this past July. In just five days, they recorded as much music as they could. They collaborated, sampled, performed and mixed on the fly, and then put together an album sponsored by, and benefitting, Oxfam.

Say what you want about Albarn and the Britpop culture from which he sprang. But while his peers have muddled around doing the same old thing or simply breaking up, (hi, Oasis!) Albarn has proven his appetite for creative stimulation and willingness to act on his convictions with numerous projects far beyond recycling Bowie and The Kinks.

Since some of the Soundcloud embeds on various sites seem to have trouble loading, here's a link to the DRC Music page where you can hear the entirity of Kinshasa One Two and a couple BBC interview with Albarn and a couple of his collaborators. And do listen to the BBC interviews, as it makes Albarn's motiviations clear.

If the music pleases you, pay for it and feel better about yourself. Here's a few quick impressions of what we heard:

"We Come from the Forest" -- Two kalimba loops gallivant in the sun, then race to see who gets to the alien disco rhythm first.

"Ah Congo" -- Whooshing voices pan across the speakers while a man speaks the title (and more) in a basso profundo, outdone only by the molten bass wobble that soon joins in.

"Respect of the Rules" -- Drops a flute onto some Moog-y squish, a melting Alan Hawkshaw theme for off-duty customs officials having grilled cheese sandwiches and soup.

"K-Town" -- Bears the unmistakable stamp of Dan the Automator. Seriously, if that beat isn't his ...

"The Departure" -- More of that dubstep sub-bass rumble lurks below an near-ambient treble. Don't fall asleep!
 
***

Reference material: If you liked Albarn's Mali Music or went (justifiably) bonkers over Congotronics, this is for you.

Not Too Dear

On June 18, 2011 Paul McCartney turned 69. And based on recent news that he's getting married again, The Cute One isn't at all worried that somebody will still need him, still feed him, well beyond 64.

Say what you want about Macca. The songs he wrote with The Beatles, even some of the post-Beatles compositions, are solid enough to be molded and reformed by other performers and work just as well. Surely that's the mark of good songwriting.

8-Bit Operators, a collective of musicians who use the sound chips from the Nintendo Entertainment System, Speak & Spell and other similarly low-tech electronic devices, to make music. Two years ago they made a compilation of Beatles covers called I Want to Hld Yr Handheld, Vol. 1.

Like their previous tribute to Kraftwerk, it's a wildly uneven mix but then somebody such as poke-1,170 (aka Julian van Aalderen) puts it all together and knocks out a version of "When I'm 64" that makes perfect sense delivered in the cutesy bleeps and bloops of an old home video game console:



If that embed isn't showing up, here's a link. You might as well also lend an ear to Sloopygoop's take on "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and Bubblyfish's reading of "Piggies" that gives the Walter/Wendy Carlos treatment to a song that was already tonally close to A Clockwork Orange.

Free Music: Keepaway

As of this writing, the Brooklyn-based trio Keepaway is putting the finishing touches on a debut LP. In 2009 they self-released an EP, Baby Style, announcing their presence with joyous pop bursting with bright synthesizers, sampled voices and noises and perucssion -- lots of percussion that clatters and falls into place just so.

This past November they released a second EP, Kompetitor on Lefse records. The second EP stacks even more summer-drunk fun onto the pile. Opener "100", with it's reggae-guitar and beats that sound like they escaped from a drum circle, could be a stew of urban-bohemian bullshit, especially with the line "I just hope you think of me when you get high" repeated a few times throughout.

However, there's real longing in the just-out-range vocal and the warble of the canned strings. The echo effects makes it feel a bit like a memory. Don't get us wrong, it's still playful and feels almost improvised. And though there are probably plenty of more current references, for some reason "100" makes us think of the "hey, we just fell into this song" attitude of The Tremeloes' "Here Comes My Baby."

The other three cuts are just as good and with two remixes of "100" included (DJ Seashell's ambient take being a total deconstruction) Kompetitor makes for a good springtime pick-me-up. Grab the EP at Keepaway's Bandcamp site for the low price of your e-mail address and then fork over some cash for the forthcoming LP. Thanks, Keepaway!

Free Music: XII Boar and SP-33

Music distribution has changed, just in case anybody here hasn't been paying attention. Giving away singles, EPs and sometimes full albums is often the method emerging artists use to get attention in a crowded marketplace.

The viability of that model is and has been discussed ad naseum -- it's all speculation and only time and failure will reveal the best path. By then we'll have already reached a destination.

Meanwhile, three dudes from the U.K., with a deep and abiding love of Motorhead, doom/stoner metal and other heavy sounds, decided to form a band last year. They're called XII Boar and they're giving away a four-song EP titled XII.

XII Boar spew high-density sludge with moody curls of smoke filling up the spaces in between the blasts. They have a good feel for dynamics and at least one of them digs hardcore ("Train Wreck").

The EP's closer, "Skol" follows a sparse percussion break with a tonal shift in which the band does a quick variation on Blue Cheer's "Summertime Blues" trick by letting each member of the trio take two quick measures to hammer down a short solo and step back to make room for the next guy in line.

Find multiple download links for XII here. [And an enthusiastic goat's head to Angry Chairs.]
 
***
 
The Typing Monkey knows nothing of the DJ/producer/musician known as SP-33. Statistics favor a dude in his mid-to-late 20s behind the moniker but for all anyone knows SP-33 is two teenage girls. What we do know is that we've been playing SP-33's Escape from Tha Carter a couple times a day since we downloaded the free LP a week ago.
 

SP-33 chopped up John Carpenter's soundtrack from Escape from New York and spliced it with equally shredded vocals from Lil Wayne's Tha Carter discs. (Mostly from Tha Carter III.) It's standing on the shoulders of Dangermouse's Grey Album in order to reach past mash-up status and into collage territory.
 
Escape retains the desolate tone of Carpenter's compositions and often grinds up Weezy's vocals -- already treading into drain-cleaner territory -- into a coarse paste that blends well with the music's zombie-Vangelis sound.
 
Get the download here or if you want to save bandwidth play it on Soundcloud. [Wink & a nod to XLR8R.]

Haunted Disco

Perhaps this stretches the thematic content idea a little thin, but music label Ghostly International gives out free songs often enough that it's like Halloween there all the time. Just drop by their Website and chances are they'll have some forward-thinking electronic musical delight to sweeten your ears and make your life better.

Though it's more than a month old, the nine-song Ghostly Essentials: Rarities Vol. 2 may have slipped past your senses. Rectify that as soon as you reach the end of this post, and in no time you'll be looking out the window at the changing leaves and graying skies while Locsil's cold, cosmic "Umbra" worms its ambient digital textures into your brain.

The Typing Monkey also digs the game of musical tag played between analog bleeps and something that sounds an awful lot like an acoustic guitar in "Between Rooms" by Myers Briggs. And the instrumental version of JDSY's "All Shapes" bounces with a flabby square-wave bass melody -- like The Great Pumpkin walking home all self-satisfied as the light of November 1st begins to bleach the sky.

Did we mention that it's free?

What's Your Vocoder's Name?

The always interesting, frequently outstanding Stones Throw label is about to issue a compilation of music by the late Canadian electronic music pioneer Bruce Haack. This particular assembly collects compositions and experiments done with an electronic vocal device that Haack named "Farad."

Get the details on Farad: The Electric Voice here, along with a couple free tunes. Then get in line for a copy and pick up one for a friend.

[This isn't Farad, but it is Mr. Haack with a device he called "M" -- photo courtesy of BruceHaack.com]

Where You Been At?

The Typing Monkey is back, and we mean it this time. Nobody was worried really, and you didn't ask, but we moved the TMI headquarters to a location we are contractually obligated to call URB, or for the black-ops division, "The Beach." And no, it wasn't easy. Out: the forest lair. (We'll miss you.) In: sub-basements and fiscal year 2011.

Now then, we'll spread some words around shortly. But it's a holiday weekend and inbetween racing personnel-transporters down the empty TMI corridors and rotating the canned chili, we've been watching this video re-edit of The Beatles cartoon synched to Leftside Wobble's remix of "Tomorrow Never Knows."


[courtesy LeftsideJM]

Tasty freedom.

Mash It Up

DJs professional and amateur continue to blend existing pop songs into mash-ups. And though the form enjoyed a concentrated dose of popularity around the turn of the century via brilliant, seminal works by 2 Many DJs and DJ P & DJ Z-Trip, it was going on long before then and will likely go on much longer.

Ryan Brockington of The New York Post's "Popwrap" section posted for free download a 22-song playlist of mash-ups made in 2009. 

Some of the source material is unfamiliar to the ears of The Typing Monkey staff, but that's one of the precise joys of mash-ups: For every clever piece that juxtaposes two or more known compositions into a fun, new context, there are mash-ups that lift the best bits of hits we missed, often making them more fun than the original.

Of course, some mash-ups dull the dazzle on otherwise solid pop tunes. (We're looking in your direction, DJ Lobseterdust, as your Lady Gaga vs. Nirvana mash "NirGaga" just doesn't move us.) But that's the the way this works, isn't it? 

Roll the dice with the free download link here.

The "Monolith" Monster

CFCF (aka Mike Silver) plays the kind of mechanized electronic mood-pop you thought had gone away when your parents gave their Vangelis records to a charity shop. 

Where French duo Air and their many imitators gaze dew-eyed toward a floral, early 1970s space, CFCF looks straight down the barrel of the Harold Faltermeyer '80s. (Or if you really want to geek out, the Fabio Frizzi '80s.)

After winning a Crystal Castles remix contest, the Montreal native began loosing various remixes onto the Web, and posting his original compositions as well. An EP, Panesian Nights, came out in January '09 followed in October by a full-length, Continent.

While you wait for The Typing Monkey to review Continent, listen to/download "Monolith" and while doing so, pretend you're on a train to somewhere exciting.

Seasonally Effective

BIBIO
Ambivalence Avenue
(Warp)
The press materials for Bibio's fourth LP claim that his switch from the Mush label to Warp "reflects a difference in musical output." This is one of those rare instances in which the PR one-sheet is correct.

Bibio, aka Stephen Wilkinson, sings on the majority of the 12 songs comprising Ambivalence. Granted, he uses his voice as another instrument most of the time, masking the clarity of his lyrics, but it's a big step for a man who previously hid behind his hypnotic guitar exercises. The bigger change here is the move toward actual songwriting.

Previous compositions relied heavily on Bibio's brassy guitar picking, looped into brittle melodic cycles. They were not without their charms, but here he's opened up the melodies and stretched them out, creating a broader spectrum of moods and pushing himself into unexpected territory. (His Curtis Mayfield falsetto ribbons around a freeze-dried funk in "Jealous of the Roses.")

The experimental aspects of his work -- field recordings, salvaged equipment not necessarily designed for professional use -- are all still in place. What's different is that he wields them better here. Chopped up recordings of children's voices stutter through the first half of "Fire Ant" and the separation between digital, analog and purely organic instruments is pleasantly, deliberately blurred.

Ambivalence Avenue shifts easily from sun-warmed music to fly kites by ("Lovers' Carvings" and the title track) to autumnal psych-folk ("The Palm of Your Wave" "Abrasion") while still leaving room for sampler & drum machine fun.

Reference materials: Calibrate your interest based on enthusiasm for Boards of Canada, Koushik and loads of other musicians who successfully dress muffled hip-hop beats in psychedelic finery. Or if you liked the direction J Dilla was taking before his death (e.g. "Nothing Like This") you might find new joys in Bibio's music.