One of the most fun and adventurous so far, this edition of the Jukebox Heart Podcast requires a bit of a warning for language and adult content. But I’ll talk about that at the approrpriate moment. For now, let it be said that this installment of Jukebox Heart covers a lot of ground, from Perfect Pop to Raucous Rock to Cerebral Seduction to Ekstrapolated Eksperimantalism and the entire continuum between. The most perfect and fitting image for this podcast blog entry was provided with enthusiasm from my old friend Shawn Syms. Thank you Shawn. Everything you touch turns to gold.
As usual, the playlist is below and contains as many links to the artists and labels as possible, Below the cut, the playlist is expanded to show imagery and information about the releases included here. Please feel free to do more research on any of the material presented here, and write back to me with your comments.
In addition, Check out the updated Press To Play feature, avaialble only at the website, featuring an archival WZBC radio program from September 19, 2001 and music of Bourbonese Qualk and related bands. Four videos as well, including our very own BLK w/BEAR, Animal Collective, Nurse With Wound and exciting reunion concert footage of Teenage Jesus and the Jerks.
Click the link below to download. Click the arrow above to listen online. Or better yet; subscribe and get them loaded into your podcatcher automatically.
Jukebox Heart 014: The Secret Alphabet of Jukebox Heart.
Playlist
Cyberphobe – Hallo (extract)
(Various Artists – Free Spech For Sale, no label, 2002)
David Grubbs – Don’t Think
(Rickets and Scurvy – Drag City 2002)
The Burning Paris – Building My Own COffin
(The Burning Paris – Magic Bullet, 2003)
Charles Hayward and Nick Doyne-Ditmas – My Secret Alphabet
(My Secret Alphabet – Sub Rosa 1993)
Stop Children – Medicine Head 24 Hour (extract)
(Various Artists – Free Spech For Sale, no label, 2002)
The Fakes – Safety Cuts
(Real Fiction – Chainsaw 1993)
Slumber Party – Electric Ocean
(Musik – Kill Rock stars)
Le Tigre – Mediocrity Rules
(From The Desk of Mr. Lady – Mr. Lady 2000)
Lifestyle – It Doesn’t Mean That I Don’t Love You (If I Forget To Call You Back)
(Frontier – Archenemy 2002)
Reggae Death Squad – Gek Op Mac Donald’s (extract)
(Various Artists – Free Spech For Sale, no label, 2002)
Flin Flon – Shuffleboard
(Boo Boo – Teenbeat 1999)
Mental Health Hotline Clip
The Go-Find – Over The Edge
(Miami – Morr Music 2004)
Moving Units – Scars
(Dangerous Dreams – Rx Records 2004)
Jima – All He Sees is You (extract)
(Various Artists – Free Spech For Sale, no label, 2002)
Komeda – Flabbergast
(What Makes It Go – Minty Fresh 1997)
Panda and Angel – Ohio December 24th
(Panda and Angel – Jade Tree 2006)
King Of Woolworths – Bakerloo (main titles)
(Ming Star – Mantra 2001)
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Cyberphobe – Hallo (extract)
Stop Children – Medicine Head 24 Hour (extract)
Reggae Death Squad – Gek Op Mac Donald’s (extract)
Jima – All He Sees is You (extract)
From an obscure and almost completely anonymous compilation indicitng the state of Free Speech in the US, these tracks all give a funny and fascinting collage-style investigation of he uses and abuses of the First Amendment.
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David Grubbs – Don’t Think
David Grubbs is a guitarist, pianist, and vocalist with quite a lineage. He was a founding member of the bands Squirrel Bait, Bastro, and Gastr del Sol. He has also played in The Red Krayola and The Wingdale Community Singers.
Squirrel Bait was a 1980s Louisville, Kentucky punk rock group that released a 12″ EP and an album on Homestead Records. Grubbs’s next group was Bastro, which released two albums on Homestead. In 1991 Bastro morphed into the more avant-garde Gastr del Sol. This project soon became essentially a partnership between Grubbs and Jim O’Rourke. The albums released by the duo (including Crookt, Crackt, or Fly, Upgrade & Afterlife, and Camoufleur) have been described as a visionary and theoretical deconstruction of the songwriting process.
Since the partnership’s breakup in 1997, Grubbs has released numerous solo and collaborative records, mostly on the Drag City label. In 2000, his album The Spectrum Between was named “Album of the Year” in the London Sunday Times. He operates his own label, Blue Chopsticks, which has released both new and archival recordings from Luc Ferrari, Derek Bailey and Noël Akchoté, Workshop, Van Oehlen, and Mats Gustafsson. He has appeared on recordings by Tony Conrad, Matmos, Palace Music, Pauline Oliveros, and many more. Grubbs is also known for his collaborations with writers Susan Howe, Rick Moody, and Kenneth Goldsmith as well as with visual artists including Anthony McCall, Angela Bulloch, Stephen Prina, and Cosima von Bonin.
Grubbs’s soundtrack work includes music with Matmos for Thierry Jousse’s feature film Les Invisibles. He has composed the soundtracks for Angela Bulloch’s installations Z Point and Horizontal Technicolour, and Hybrid Song Box.4, and his music appears in two installations by Doug Aitken. Grubbs’s sound installation “Between a Raven and a Writing Desk” was included in the 1999 group exhibition “Elysian Fields” at the Centre Pompidou. Grubbs has also contributed music to the Red Krayola’s soundtrack to Norman and Bruce Yonemoto’s film Japan in Paris in LA as well as to Augusto Contento’s film Strade Trasparenti, Braden King and Laura Moya’s film Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks its Back, and John Boskovich’s film North. Music by Gastr del Sol appears in the P.B.S. television series The United States of Poetry, Hal Hartley’s film The Book of Life, and Doug Aitken’s film The Diamond Sea. Grubbs composed music for Karl Bruckmaier’s radio adaptation of Peter Weiss’s Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, which was named “Hoerbuch des Jahres 2007” (Audio Book of the Year) by Hessischer Rundfunk.
From 1997-99, David Grubbs was a part-time instructor in the Liberal Arts and Sound departments at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He is currently an assistant professor of Radio and Sound Art at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and director of Brooklyn College’s graduate programs in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA). Grubbs received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. His criticism has appeared in Conjunctions, Bookforum, Texte zur Kunst, and Purple, and from 1999-2007 he regularly contributed music criticism to the Munich newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. In 2006 he was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
David participated as drummer 23 in the Boredoms 77 Boadrum performance which occurred on July 7th, 2007 at the Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park in Brooklyn, New York.
Grubbs lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Cathy Bowman, and their son Emmett Bowman-Grubbs.
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The Burning Paris – Building My Own COffin
The Burning Paris formed under the guise of creating rock music in a different way. Layers of sound and reverb and delay soaked instruments subtly play off of each other to create the sound known as The Burning Paris. This six piece ensemble boasts cello, vocals, guitars, drums and keyboards. The band released their formative debut Coral City Ruin to a suprising and curious public. THis follow up EP finds them in full form once again. The Burning Paris are a local band, based on the North Shore in Beverly, MA.
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Charles Hayward and Nick Doyne-Ditmas – My Secret Alphabet
Experimetnal music luminary and This Heat founder along with long-time collaborator Nick Doyne-Ditmas, member of experimental band Crckle, give us the namesake of this installmetn of Jukebox Heart and title track to their 1993 album on Sub Rosa.
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The Fakes – Safety Cuts
From the opening sound of the bong hit to the off-mic hysterical laughter closing this track, this is one emotional manipulation after another. The big swing between playing on the listener’s sympathy and playing on their private lust so brilliantly transcends this from gratuitous controversial material to a moment of sheer briliance. Vocalist (presumably Billie Strain) launches to the altitude of other similar performers such as Kathy Acker’s 1987 performance of The Empire of the Senseless. The Fakes have ties to Mocket, The Need, The Fucking Champs, Bikini Kill and Le Tigre. But because of the strong content and the language contained in this track, I have to inform you this is not work safe and intended for a mature audience.
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Slumber Party – Electric Ocean
Slumber Party play a dynamic, moody, keyboard driven kind of pop music that sounds unlike anyone else. An understated vocal delivery, with all members contributing harmonies, adds an element of overall sweetness to their often-shadowy musical landscapes. Aliccia Berg’s songs oscillate between straightforwardness and abstraction.
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Le Tigre – Mediocrity Rules
Initially envisioned as a live back up band for Hanna’s solo project Julie Ruin, Le Tigre mixed the politics and feminism of riot grrrl with fun electronic samples and lo-fi beats. Other members included Johanna Fateman and JD Samson. JD joined Le Tigre as a full member when co-founder Sadie Benning left the band before the Feminist Sweepstakes album was recorded. JD had previously worked with the band as a roadie and the operator of Benning’s slide show during live performances in support of their first record. The self-proclaimed “underground electro-feminist performance artists” combined visuals, music and dance in their performances. JD is a gay rights activist, and the excerpts in “New Kicks” are from an actual protest that JD recorded herself. Kathleen is a public speaker against sexual abuse. Yabba Dabba Dabba Doo, man…
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Lifestyle – It Doesn’t Mean That I Don’t Love You (If I Forget To Call You Back)
Harking back to the mid 1980s when Kevin Bacon had a mullet and everyone pushed up he sleeves of their suit jackets, Lifestyle gleefully embrace the vapid and the vacuous with a remarkably entertaining result. This is the opposite end of the spectrum anchored by mid-period Human League, OMD and Depeche Mode, only without the British Accents.
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Flin Flon – Shuffleboard
A Teenbeat supergroup featuring Mark Robinson of Air Miami & Unrest, Nattles of Cold Cold Hearts, and Matt Datesman of True Love Always. Flin Flon serves up more new wave pop on their second full-length, Boo-Boo, which was completely re-recorded and remixed for the vinyl version. Using a minimalist approach, the band combines strong basslines as the backbone of each song, with tight, staccato drum-machine beats and guitar accents. The result is a very retro ’80s sound with catchy riffs, quirky rhythms, and random, almost nonsensical lyrics. For example, in “Upper Ferry” the number “34” is repeated as a chorus, and “Virgin Arm” features computerized voices. While most of the album is whimsically upbeat, it also has its darker, moodier moments, such as “Mistaken Point” and “St. Patricks,” an eight-minute dirge reminiscent of Joy Division.
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The Go-Find – Over The Edge
The Go Find, is a one man project, from Antwerp, Belgium. His name is Dieter Sermeus, he became Morr Music’s latest signing, after collaborations with artists such as Styrofoam. Miami is the album Elliott Smith would have made if ever in his short life he was trapped on a desert isle with a guitar, an iBook, and a copy of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn. The Go Find is a one man band, the living sweat of former Orange Black guitarist Dieter Sermes, who was so indie he then opened for the likes of Pavement and Stereolab. Given the tools he used to make it, this album should not sound as rich as it does, but his long-time friendship with Morr producer Arne “Styrofoam” Van Petegem more than likely had a lot to do with that being, as he taught Dieter the basics of electronic music production and all. With its mixture of cheap synths, uncomplicated guitar work, traveling beats, and rich sound with a hint of distortion, Miami sounds like a chance jam session between Luke Vibert and The Cure, which probably isn’t that far off from Orange Black jamming with Styrofoam now that I think of it. According to Dieter, the best way to enjoy his music is driving down the highway at dusk, but I’ve since found this situation to be very hard to write in, what with the driving and the darkness and all; so you’ll just have to trust his judgement and my memory that it’s good road music. Miami is upbeat yet calm, contemplative, interesting, and emotional. It’s a classic representation of the kind of quality indielectronics Morr should be world famous for and everything you need to pleasantly kill an hour of a trip.
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Moving Units – Scars
I first heard Moving Units when I saw their video for “Available” in a Palm Pictures showcase on Comcast On Demand. Love the band, but only recently has a copy of their CD turned up locally. This is a great CD, and the band has recaptured the sound of the pre-23 Envelope 4AD years. Don’t believe me? Listen to this track, then go here and compare for yourself. The band was formed in 2001 by Chris Hathwell, Blake Miller, and Johan Boegli, when Hathwell’s previous band, Festival of Dead Deer, broke up. They released their debut EP, Moving Units, on Three One G in early 2002. Their touring experience includes opening slots for Hot Hot Heat, The Pixies, Blur, and Nine Inch Nails. Their debut full-length album, Dangerous Dreams, was released on October 12, 2004 by Palm Pictures. Moving Units released their second studio album, Hexes For Exes in 2007. The album was released on Metropolis Records (who they signed with in January 2007) and the first single, “Pink Thoughts”, was released through the band’s MySpace page. So Sweet released a one-off limited edition 7 inch vinyl single “Crash N Burn Victims” in the UK coupled with a remix of the same track by Felix Cartal in November 2007.
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Komeda – Flabbergast
The most immediate reference is going to be Emperor Tomato Ketchup – era Stereolab, and this would be a great compliment to the band if the band did not stand on its own merit already. Yes, the similarity is evident, but this song is so fucking brilliant that it is more of a congratulatory reference than a jaded influence. Komeda is a Swedish pop/indie band from Umeå. The group is named in honour of the late jazz musician Krzysztof Komeda. The band started in 1991 as a pit band for a Buster Keaton festival. Forming as a quartet, Komeda consisted of vocalist Lena Karlsson, guitarist Henrik Andersson (in 1994 replaced by Mattias Norlander), bassist Marcus Holmberg and Holmberg’s brother Jonas on drums. During 2001 the band was reduced to a trio with the departure of Norlander. Komeda’s music has been heard in Old Navy and Nintendo commercials.
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Panda & Angel – Ohio December 24th
On their first release for Jade Tree, Seattle’s Panda & Angel paints a passively angst-filled portrait of lovelorn, heartache and loneliness. Panda & Angel’s eponymous, introductory EP combines the sedated dissonance of early LOW and Chan Marshall (Cat Power) with the melancholy-filled distortion of My Bloody Valentine and the stark truth of PJ Harvey. Anchored by the haunting and hypnotic voice of Carrie Murphy (Touchdown Angel), Panda & Angel offers a heavy-hearted perspective on losing one’s way and ultimately starting anew. The end result is a poignant memoir of melancholic regret, cathartic revelations and vibrant but tempered pop orchestrations.
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King Of Woolworths – Bakerloo (main titles)
Thanks to the patronage of Radio 1 DJ Jo Whiley, Jon Brooks AKA King Of Woolworths could almost be called flavour of month in the world of electronic/experimental music. ‘Ming Star’s strength is its sheer variety and the artist’s ability to excel at whatever mood he turns his attention to. Shifting moods dominate from the Sean O’Hagan-sampling of ‘Bakerloo’ to the downright sinister ‘Stalker Song’; the latter’s inclusion of a dialogue between a stalker victim and a policeman given an unnerving twist by the distortion of the detective’s repeated warnings. Techno is the dominant force on ‘Colcannon’ but this is followed by more inspired dialogue, this time snatched from Hammer horror film ‘To The Devil A Daughter’ set against a trip-hop backdrop. The rest is superior chill-out music, none quite as effective as ‘Kite Hill’s glorious employment of strings. At different times both disturbing and relaxing ‘Ming Star’ is an excellent debut from one of Britain’s most adventurous talents.
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