Mad History

Hey kids, we're kind of on summer hiatus here.

Okay, we admit it. We've closed the offices down in favor of an epic bender. Fine. We said it. Are you happy now?

While we're gone, you should make time to read Jeff Weiss' history of the album that made Stones Throw: Madvillainy by Madvillain. Don't know what we're talking about? Read Weiss' blow-by-blow of how it came about and you'll be sold. It's hyperbolic, but that's standard for Pitchfork. And really, if it's not filled with purposely frilly sentences, it wouldn't be music writing, would it?

And now: "Searching for Tomorrow: The Story of Madlib and DOOM's Madvillainy"



We're going back to sleep for now. See you soon!

Black Magic Woman

We've mentioned legendary doom metal band Electric Wizard at least once before. With a new album due this fall, The Typing Monkey figured it was time to (re-)acquaint readers with a terrific interview with Electric Wizard's guitarist -- no, the other one. Yeah, her, Liz Buckingham. The one who isn't Jus Osborn.

In 2011, Kim Kelly, of NPR's music blog The Record, interviewed Buckingham. Asking smart questions to get smart answers, Kelly illuminates Buckingham's inspiring motivations. Like the best female musicians stomping around in a field still dominated by men, Buckingham isn't a female guitarist, she's a guitarist. Right on, Liz Buckingham. Right on.

Read it all here and get hip to the massive, too-much-to-smoke power of Electric Wizard.

Free Music: Aleph Null

Heavy metal has more subgenres than any reasonable person can keep up with. Tastes at The Typing Monkey offices skew toward the blues-based stuff from the '70s, the NWOBHM, and the nearly self-explanatory genres: doom, stoner and sludge.

It's within those last three that Düsseldorf, Germany trio Aleph Null operate. The trio can blast out riffs heavier than a bison's balls during mating season -- the classic Black Sabbath devil's chord blooze that's been the cornerstone of metal since the 1970s. And they can pull it all back to fuzzy, lingering drones that build the kind of tension that is a hallmark of doom metal. Throw in the shredded, grunge-style vocals and kids, you've got a winner.

We call your attention to Aleph Null not only because they're a good band with a strong sense of dynamics and mood, but because so far, every recording they've made is offered up for free download via their Bandcamp site. And their new LP Nocturnal is a bruiser.

If you're doom/stoner/sludge-curious, you can't beat free, and Aleph Null isn't a bad place to start. Play "Black Winged Cherub" for a taste:


We admit that Nocturnal didn't bowl us over as immediately as their previous EP Belladonna (2013). The four tracks on that collection sound looser and a little more cosmic to our ears. Check out "Solar Sail" to hear the contrast:


If you like what you hear, Aleph Null says download it, people, for this music is like Jesus' love. It is ours to accept. And if this sort of brain-melting sound pleases you, enjoy your wanderings around the Web to seek out more of the same. Many doom/stoner/sludge metal bands offer "pay what you can" downloads, so do that. And buy a t-shirt.

Stonerobixx and Doommantia, are two great websites dedicated to these subgenres. And we'd be remiss not to mention the late, great Cosmic Hearse blog, our gateway into most of this stuff.

Experimental Music on Children's TV

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

[Once again, thank you, James Barnes.]

Witch Fight!

Anybody with their compass pointed in the right direction knows that Feb 2, 2014 was Imbolc. Yes, it was also Groundhog Day and the day the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl.

While most of us were either tuning into the game, or doing anything else, spring -- real spring, not that Gregorian calendar impostor due in March -- quietly stepped onto the season cycle and began pedaling.

And we get it: It's ugly cold out across North America and throughout the Northern hemisphere nobody's about to step outside in tank top and sandals to sip iced tea and feel the sun's heat.

But do go out when you can and have a look around. Trees and bushes are budding. Bulb flowers are rocketing through the soil, arms of defiant green reaching for daylight that grows longer each evening.

We don't report this in a desperate grab for anything to stave off winter gray. We share this old world information because if you relax and let it in, the feeling of spring is there. Nature is waking up.

Here are two versions of a song written and made famous by Scotsman Donovan. The test of good songcraft is how well a composition holds up to different interpretations. The original has the nip of autumn about it that, when combined with the chorus, recalls October.

But Lou Rawls and his band find the Hammond B3 funk under the pile of leaves and loosen the tune up, adding considerable warmth:

[courtesy of marmalade166]

While Super Session takes it further still, opening the song up into a lengthy California stoner jam that skews closer to simmering blues and jazz while still landing, like Rawls, on the secret funk rhythm that has always been the backbone of the song:

[courtesy of jaquenuno]

Neither of these has anything to do with the Imbolc, but we dig 'em and used this post as an excuse to share. Happy spring to you.

Please Enter Your Password Now

Perhaps you've never been part of a corporate conference call. If not, you're missing out on a naturally strange and often absurdly funny bit of accidental theatre, for the average conference call often sounds as if it were scripted by Eugene Ionesco.

Participants accidentally talk over each other. There are awkward pauses and sometimes bouts of great silence. Technical glitches haunt the proceedings and very little actual communication happens.

Now you can experience for the first time, or re-live, the magic of a conference call via the wonderfully bizarre conference call simulator. Click the link, follow the simple instructions and disappear into corporate madness.

[We give a firm handshake to Brooklyn's own James Barnes for giving us the passcode to join this thing. Hi James!]

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.

French-Goth-Surf-Pop

The French band La Femme has a decidedly surf- and noir-influenced sound, with just the right shades of psychedelia, ye-ye, and first-generation goth (Banshees, Bauhaus, Specimen).

And lucky for us, they made a long-form video for their song "Hypsoline." A long form video. That's so ... Duran Duran.

The film creeps around as if a loose adaptation of an M.R. James or J. Sheridan Le Fanu story, finally wrapping around to a nightmare party that we'd still happily attend. (French girls!)

It's lightly spooky and a great exercise in matching song to visuals. Here, drink this ...

What's Inside a Quas?

Mass Appeal just published an interview with Jeff Jank, the art director for music label Stones Throw.

The focus is on the creation of Quasimoto, the alter-ego of dj/producer/rapper Madlib. It won't change your life, but it's fun to hear Jank talk about how much the music influenced the design.

Yeah, But Have You Listened to Bach on Acid?

The Typing Monkey recently peered through the magic keyhole of On An Overgrown Path, a blog that holds a flickering candle into the odd corners of the world of classical music. Cancel your meetings and forward the phones, 'cause you're going to be doing some reading.

Overgrown Path's (sole?) contributor goes by the hand Pliable, and whoever that is, he or she is about to go away for a while and put the blog on hold. No matter. That will give you time to catch up.

To get you started, here are a few links to stories from Overgrown Path that will keep your attention:

From "JSB on LSD" -- "'Let me advise you, if you ever use mescaline or LSD in therapy, to try the effect of [Johann Sebastian Bach's] B-minor suite.'" That's an excerpt from a letter Aldous Huxley wrote to psychiatrist Humphry Osmond. The B-minor suite will always trump Pink Floyd.

And do make sure to read the one-two punch about Edward Elgar, who has a gossamer connection to early LSD experiments, and a clear connection to the Order of the Golden Dawn. Who knew?

There's much more to On An Overgrown Path -- listening and reading recommendations galore -- so have fun.

The Mothership Is Getting Crowded

Cordell "Boogie" Mosson died on April 18, 2013. News of the P-Funk bassist's death didn't circulate as fast as it might have, given that he died during a week where the news was concerned with bigger stories.

That does not diminish his passing. Mosson played bass for the legendary funk collective, taking over the low end when Bootsy Collins left to pursue a solo career. But Mosson was, by all accounts, equally adept at drums and rhythm guitar.

One sad day, the Mothership will be operating with a full crew again, in some other galaxy, and our loss will be that other world's gain.

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.

Norton!

Perhaps you missed the news about a "Frankenstorm" called Sandy that slammed into the Eastern Seaboard just before Halloween, leaving unavoidable destruction of the natural disaster sort.

As residents of New Jersey, New York, et al. clean up and assess damage, the staff at Norton Records found that their Brooklyn warehouse took quite a bit of water damage.

There are few things that make us sadder than books and records (CDs, LPs, 45s and such) being destroyed. And Norton does good work, providing new and re-issued music that concentrates on the r&b, soul, early rock, surf, garage, jump blues and general outsider tunes from the first half of the 20th century. They've also been re-issuing obscure pulp paperbacks too, which you can imagine got us all in a dither.

Norton's staff is still cleaning up the mess, but when they're done, help 'em out by buying something. The wheels of Capitalism are greased with your hard-earned dough, so you might as well grease the wheels you like, no?

"... every sort of filth."

Dig this fan-made video for "Wizard in Black" by doom-metal legends Electric Wizard. It's eight minutes of punishing, bleak guitar fuzz and brontosaurus beats with Lovecraftian lyrics rasped for maximum effect. And that's just the music.

To accompany this crucial cut from the band's Come My Fanatics... LP is a series of horror film clips of corpses rising from their graves, ostensibly coming to tell you to turn down the goddamned noise and put the bong down because you have work tomorrow. Or maybe they just want braaaiins.



And if you want to know which films were used by the video creator, "thofilo13," here's a list straight from the source:

Let Sleeping Corpses Lie (1974); City of the Living Dead (1980); The Plague of the Zombies (1966); Tales from the Crypt (1972); Zombi (1979) The Beyond (1981) Return of the Living Dead Part 2 (1988).

Gruesome!

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!

Of Donuts and Mushrooms

Today is October 1, 2011. Have you eaten a donut yet?

Once again, The Typing Monkey performs our civic duty by reminding our readers that October is national donut month.

We shall observe the commencement of this sacred time by enjoying a couple selections from Seattle's premiere vegan donut shop, Mighty-O Donuts. Vegan donuts, we said it. And we're proud. They're free of dairy, eggs and lard, but they'll still kill you if you eat too many -- a tasty death.

Before things get all spooky up in here with the commencement of the 4th Annual Typing Monkey Halloween Frenzy, we wanted to draw your attention to a recent study conducted by Johns Hopkins University of Medicine in Baltimore.

Researchers at the school gave human subjects psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in so-called magic mushrooms.

The study found that even a small dose increased the subjects' level of "openness" -- a personality trait that's crucial to creativity and curiosity.

Further, a single dose increased those tendencies for nearly a year. The test group was small, but continues to bolster previous positive research by the school on the hallucinogen's affect on the human mind.

This is not an endorsement of the drug. However we found it interesting that academics in the United States are conducting this sort of research. Read the report here.


[Image culled from Chris A.'s deviantART gallery]

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!

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.