Gavin B.

My Latest Video Project Vol. 3


The enigmatic Pittsburgh based Black Moth Super Rainbow

Black Moth Super Rainbow are as out-there musically as their name would imply. Psychedelia is the reference point, filtered through a childlike innocence and wonder, and implemented with bargain-basement instruments and electronics. Since the topic of my master's thesis in psychology was destructive cults, I've always had an urge to use their song Don't You Want To Be In A Cult as a video soundtrack, every since I first heard it a couple of years ago.

I recently spent an afternoon pulling old cult footage out of my video archives, and today I finally edited the footage and assembled this video:

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

Retro-Cool


Singers Noelle Scaggs & Michael Fitzsimmons (Fitz) of Fitz & the Tantrums

The neo-soul genre is finding a larger audience in the USA & the UK, thanks to performers like Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings, Bettye LaVette, and Duffy. A newer entry is the Hollywood based Fitz & the Tantrums, who are influenced by the Stax, Motown and Philly soul sounds of the Sixties & Seventies.

Singer Michael Fitzsimmons says he's as much influenced by contemporary indie pop and the Tantrums aren't trying to create an exact replica of the classic sound of soul music. On his decision not to use guitars in the band, Fitz says "I did want to try and make a big sounding record without guitars," he said. "For me, I just feel like in any music that has a band, the guitar is always there, it's always featured, it's always prevalent. I'm just sick of hearing it."

Prior to his incarnation as a neo-soul singer, Michael Fitzsimmons worked on the production side of the L.A. music scene , most notably with Beck's producer, Mickey Petralia.

Embedded below is Fitz and the Tantrums performing Pickin' Up the Pieces on the KCRW radio show Morning Becomes Electric. FYI: KCRW has a fantastic archive of live studio performances at their YouTube channel @ Morning Becomes Electric



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__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

The Return of the Strokes


The Strokes are a classic NYC rock band in the proud tradition of the Velvet Underground, Television, the Ramones & Luna

From my perspective, The Strokes were the only rock & roll band that really mattered during the first decade (2001-2010) of the 21st Century. It's especially true since nearly all bands of the past decade were playing blended forms of rock that blurred the all of the distinctions between rock and roll and other genres like hip hop, club music, electronica, funk and a wide variety of outernational music including reggae, worldbeat, Europop & the musical folkways of nations all over the face of the earth.

The rise of the post-rock era is an exciting development for contemporary pop music & the continuing success of electronica artists with an internationalist perspective; like Massive Attack, Bjork, Delorean, Jj, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Air, Thievery Corporation, Stereolab, the Blow, M.I.A., & Sigur Rós is evidence that the era of rock & roll is over and done with. For five decades, rock & roll music dominated the contemporary music sales charts but hip-hop, pop and dance music have chipped away at rock music's market share since the mid 80s & now in 2011, rock music has been relegated to the same outsider "specialty music" status that rock & roll once had; prior to the rise of Elvis & the Beatles way back in the late 50s and early 60s.

The down-side to the prevailing post-rock paradigm is last week's Billboard album sales charts were dominated by light weight pop/dance artists and rappers like Eminem, Niki Minjah, Rihanna, Katie Perry, R. Kelly, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, Lady Antebellum, Cee Lo Green, Lil Wayne, Taylor Swift & the Black Eyed Peas. Not a single rock & roll band among the 20 best selling albums, unless you count the tepid, MOR roots music of Mumford & Sons as authentic rock & roll. There's hardly an album worth listening in the entire Billboard Hot 100 listing of best selling albums. It's deja vous all over again and it reminds me of early 60s pre-British Invasion years when the vapid pop music of Bobby Rydell, Shelly Fabres, Bobby Vinton, Joey Dee, Paul & Paula, Andy Williams, Pat Boone, the Four Seasons & dance craze music dominated the pop music charts from 1958 until the rise of the Beatles in 1963. Even Elvis had reinvented himself as a clean cut, middle of the road pop music crooner by 1960.

The Strokes may end up being the last great rock band or the first great post-rock band depending on your own unique view of the paradigm shift that took place in pop music during the first decade of the 21st Century. The Strokes's musical foundation is the same back-beat & rhythm & blues that Chuck Berry so aptly describes in his 1955 jukebox hit Roll Over Beethoven.

Along with the Black Keys, White Stripes, or the Kings of Leon, the Strokes are on the endangered species list of bands that play what the elders remember as pure rock & roll. Chuck Berry would be rolling in his grave over the decline of rock & roll, however Mr. Berry still alive and well and doing his monthly gig at Blueberry Hill in his hometown St. Louis at age 84. I attended a recent gig at Blueberry Hill and Chuck can still do everything except his trademark duck-walk which is a bit of a strain on your knees at his age.

The good news is that the Strokes are back after a five year hiatus from recording and their long awaited album, Angles is set for release on March 22, 2011. Embedded below is Under the Cover of Darkness, the first scheduled single release from Angles:


Album cover for Angles, the new Strokes album due for release on March 22



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More Good News for Strokes Fans!


Album art for The Collection a digital only compilation of all the songs from the Strokes first three studio album releases.

In addition the much anticipated March release of Angles, last Tuesday the Strokes have released an "MP3 only" download of their full content of their first three albums: Is This It (2001), Room on Fire (2003) & First Impressions of Earth (2006). The 36 song, high quality digital download titled The Collection is available at both Amazon & iTunes for the very reasonable price of $14.99, I downloaded The Collection this morning on Amazon and the crisp high definition 320 kbps. digital files are far superior than my patchwork of 196 kbps. & 256 kbps music files of the first three Strokes albums that are currently on my computer.

Finally comes this announcement from the Strokes camp in my email this morning. The Strokes are set to play a free show at this years’ SXSW in Austin, Texas. The just announced gig scheduled for March 17, will feature the band playing songs from their new album Angles at Auditorium Shores Stage and is free to any fans who show up. A video of the show will be posted on the band’s website @ http://new.thestrokes.com/ the next day.

As fitting send-off for this post I'm embedding a live performance of Take It Or Leave It to serve as a reminder of their past glories and to celebrate the promise of the Strokes future accomplishments. Lest we forget: The oldest member of the Strokes is only 33 years old and age 30 is the new 20 in the world of contemporary pop music.



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__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

From the NY Times:


Owsley Stanley, Artisan of Acid, Is Dead at 76


Owsley Stanley, left, with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead in a 1969 publicity photograph. Mr. Stanley was a financial backer of the Dead and also provided the band with a supply of LSD.

Owsley Stanley, the prodigiously gifted applied chemist to the stars, who made LSD in quantity for the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, Ken Kesey and other avatars of the psychedelic ’60s, died on Sunday in a car accident in Australia. He was 76 and lived in the bush near Cairns, in the Australian state of Queensland.

His car swerved off a highway and down an embankment before hitting trees near Mareeba, a town in Queensland, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Stanley’s wife, Sheilah, was injured in the accident.

Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere.

Once renowned as an artisan of acid, Mr. Stanley turned out LSD said to be purer and finer than any other. He was also among the first individuals (in many accounts, the very first) to mass-produce the drug; its resulting wide availability provided the chemical underpinnings of an era of love, music, grooviness and much else. Conservatively tallied, Mr. Stanley’s career output was more than a million doses, in some estimates more than five million.

His was the acid behind the Acid Tests conducted by the novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, the group of psychedelic adherents whose exploits were chronicled by Tom Wolfe in his 1968 book “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.” The music world immortalized Mr. Stanley in a host of songs, including the Dead’s “Alice D. Millionaire” (a play on a newspaper headline, describing one of his several arrests, that called him an “LSD Millionaire”) and Steely Dan’s “Kid Charlemagne.”

So widely known was Mr. Stanley that he appears in the Encyclopedia Britannica article on LSD under the apparently unironic index term “Augustus Owsley Stanley III (American chemist).” The Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for the noun “Owsley” as “an extremely potent, high-quality type of LSD.” In 2007, Mr. Stanley was the subject of a long profile in an issue of Rolling Stone magazine commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love.

In short, Mr. Stanley lent the ’60s a great deal of its color — like White Lightning, Monterey Purple and Blue Cheer, the varieties of his LSD that were among the most popular. (He did not, contrary to popular lore, release a product called Purple Haze; in interviews, he sounded quite miffed that anything emerging from his laboratory could be thought to cause haziness rather than the crystalline clarity for which he personally vouched.)

He also lent the era much of its sound, developing early, widely praised high-fidelity sound systems for live rock concerts, including the Dead’s towering “wall of sound.”

Mr. Stanley was previously a ballet dancer and a member of the United States Air Force.

Augustus Owsley Stanley III was born on Jan. 19, 1935, to a patrician Kentucky family. His paternal grandfather, for whom he was named, was a congressman, governor of Kentucky and United States senator. (Somewhat prophetically, given his grandson’s future pursuits, the elder Mr. Stanley was a vigorous public foe of Prohibition.)

Young Owsley, whose adolescent hirsuteness caused him to be known ever after as Bear, was sent to a military preparatory school in Maryland. He was expelled in the ninth grade for furnishing the alcohol that, as he told Rolling Stone in 2007, had nearly all his classmates “blasted out of their minds” on homecoming weekend.

He briefly attended the University of Virginia before enlisting in the Air Force, where he learned electronics. He later worked in Los Angeles as a broadcast engineer for radio and television stations. He also studied ballet and for a time was a professional dancer.

In 1963, Mr. Stanley enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley. The next year, he encountered LSD, a transformative experience. “I remember the first time I took acid and walked outside,” he said in the Rolling Stone interview. “The cars were kissing the parking meters.”

Mr. Stanley had found his calling, and at the time it was at least quasi-legitimate: LSD was not outlawed in California until 1966. What he needed to do was learn his craft, which he accomplished, as Rolling Stone reported, in three weeks in the university library, poring over chemistry journals. Soon afterward, he left college and a going concern, the Bear Research Group, was born.

In 1965, he met Mr. Kesey, and through him the Dead. Enraptured, he became their sound man, early underwriter, principal acolyte, sometime housemate and frequent touring companion. With Bob Thomas, he designed the band’s highly recognizable skull-and-lightning-bolt logo. Mr. Stanley also made many recordings of the Dead in performance, now considered valuable documentary records of the band’s early years. Many have been released commercially.

Mr. Stanley remained with the band off and on through the early ’70s, when, according to Rolling Stone, his habits became too much even for the Grateful Dead and they parted company. (He had insisted, among other things, that the band eat meat — nothing but meat — a dietary regimen he followed until the end of his life.)

His other clients included John Lennon, who, according to “The Beatles,” a 2005 biography by Bob Spitz, contracted to pay Mr. Stanley for a lifetime supply of his wares.

In 1970, after a judge revoked Mr. Stanley’s bail from a 1967 drug arrest, he served two years in federal prison. There, he learned metalwork and jewelry making, trades he plied in recent years.

Mr. Stanley, who became an Australian citizen in the 1990s, was treated for throat cancer in 2004. In the Rolling Stone interview, he attributed his survival to his carnivorous diet. (A heart attack he had suffered some years earlier he ascribed to eating broccoli as a child, forced on him by his mother.)

Besides his wife, Sheilah, Mr. Stanley’s survivors include two sons, Pete and Starfinder; two daughters, Nina and Redbird; eight grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Though he helped transform the culture, Mr. Stanley asserted that he had never meant to do so. As he told The San Francisco Chronicle in 2007, he had set out only to make a product he knew he could take, because its ingredients were known.

“And my friends all wanted to know what they were taking, too,” Mr. Stanley said. “Of course,” he added “my ‘friends’ expanded very rapidly.”

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

starrynight

Yes! I know the music of Fitz and the Tantrums! They would be among my top 50 albums of last year.

That Black Moth Super Rainbow is slightly hypnotic in it's tempo and the long note melody is like from some trance song maybe. Not bad.

Gavin B.

Two Excellent Live Performances

Warpaint in Santa Monica



The first video is a performance of the Los Angeles based Warpaint. Warpaint was originally formed by notable screen actress Shannon Sossman & her sister Jenny Lee Lindberg. Sossamon left due to conflicts with her acting schedule and was replaced by Stella Mozgawa. At the core of Warpaint's intriguing neo-psychedelic sound are the pair of singers & guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman. This live studio performance of "Undertow" was filmed on March 2, 2011 at the KCRW radio studios in Santa Monica for the excellent "Morning Becomes Electric" show.

Warpaint's debut album "The Fool" was on my year end list of best albums of 2011.



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Blonde Redhead In Brooklyn



The second performance is performance of the NYC based Blonde Redhead at a outdoor appearance at a Brooklyn Park a couple of years ago. Blonde Redhead's singer Kazu Makino is my favorite rock music performer and has long been my own personal muse. I have a 10 minute videotaped interview I did with Kazu last year which I can post on this blog if MB members are interested in seeing it.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

25 Notable Indie Release of the First Quarter of 2011


Will 2011 be the Year of Yuck? Stay tuned, music lovers.


Here's my shortlist of some of the more notable indie pop & rock albums released in the first three months of 2011:

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• Deerhoof- Deerhoof vs. Evil
• The Radio Department- Passive Agressive: The Singles 2002-2010
• John Vanderslice- White Wilderness
• Yuck- Yuck
  Forget about the awful band name, Yuck plays some first rate shambling & snarky Pavement-Replacements influenced postpunk rock:

• Abagail Washburn- City of Refuge
• Nicole Atkins- Mondo Amore
• BOAT- Dress Like Your Idols
• Young Galaxy- Shapeshifting
  "Shapeshifting" is an appropriate title for Young Galaxy's third album ( released Fed. 8th, 2011 via Paper Bag Records). Going from an art-rock band hitting epic highs with their previous work, to a band channeling their love of New Order, the Knife and the Eurythmics. The result is unlike anything the four-piece have done before.

• The Go! Team- Rolling Blackouts
• Toro y Moi- Underneath the Pine
• Braids- Native Speaker
• Faun Fables- Light of a Vaster Dark
• Destroyer- Kaputt
• Cloud Nothings- Cloud Nothings
• Lia Ices- Grown Unknown
• James Blake- James Blake
• Chikita Violenta- Tre3s
• Surf City- Kudos
• Jessica Lea Mayfield- Tell Me
  Jessica Lea Mayfield plays a countrified form of borderwave music reminds me of the dream rock of Hope Sandoval & Mazzy Star as well as the folksy Americana music of Marissa Nadler, Lissie and Adrienne Pierce.

• Lykke Li- Wounded Rhymes
• Papercuts- Fading Parade
• Kurt Vile- Smoke Ring For My Halo
• Beach Fossils- What A Pleasure (EP)
• Wye Oak- Civilian
• The Joy Formidable- The Big Roar
• J Mascis- Several Shades of Why
• Ramadan/Pearson Sound- FabricLive 56

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Caveat emptor (Let the buyer beware) The 25 albums I've listed here represent a broad range of musical styles, some of which may not appeal to you. Don't purchase any of these albums on my word because three months from now, I may hate every album listed above. I think it takes about six months to a year for the music of any album to completely sink into the swamp lands of my subconscious mind and during that period of hibernation, my opinion on any given new album release is in a constant state of flux on almost a daily basis.

Everybody's opinion of what constitutes "good music" is random, arbitrary and totally devoid of any higher metaphysical meaning. Such is the existential state affairs in insular world of critical thought.

Nearly all the albums I've listed have songs available on YouTube to sample before you take the plunge & lay down your hard earned cash to purchase them. My admonishment is to purchase the music that you really love instead of downloading in for free at a pirate site. In many ways the advent of file trading services has made digital music files similar to shareware files of software programs. Like shareware, you're on your honor to pay for the music files you really like and by the same token, you should delete the free files that you don't like or never listen to.

All of the albums on my Frist Quarter of 2011 list are flawed & it's rare for me to find an album that in which I like more than 3-5 selections. Given that reality I tend to have a bias toward those musicians who have a fresh perspective on the popular music form because after 50 years in the musical mainstream, rock music is no longer a revolutionary force and most of the current music is derivative, revivalist or self referential. Like the fashion industry rock music is just an endless cycle of new trends based on stylistic innovations from earlier seasons.

I'll be posting an updated list at the end of the second quarter of 2011, which will be around the end of June.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

starrynight

My opinion definitely establishes far quicker than that. Certainly if I don't like something at first it's highly unlikely I would grow to like it at all. If I do find it interesting at first and consistent enough from start to end then in the vast majority of cases I will continue liking it to some extent.

I don't think it is all completely random. The more you hear the more good stuff you can find, then you compare the best you have heard to new music to higher the standard. The more you hear a style the more you can see where something is generic or more creative. What is random tends to be what gets famous and what doesn't, and that is often about other factors like fashion, marketing and image more than the music.

Same with me. Most albums I'll probably like hardly anything off them. But the more I hear the more goodies I find.

Rock/pop or whatever does recycle old styles but as long as the music is good I'm happy. There's plenty of variety out there which is good.

Gavin B.

Thanks for your thoughtful response to my post. There are definitely albums that I can be completely infatuated with for a period of 4 to 8 months when suddenly it occurs to me that this group doesn't have a lot going on, aside from some bright shiny production techniques and a couple of seductive songs. It's the more complex and challenging music that often takes a longer period of incubation for me to fully appreciate. Early on I didn't quite see what the big deal with Beach House was and then one late night at around 3 am I put on Beach House's debut album and all at once, I had an epiphany & full understood why there was such a large cult of devotees to the band.

I don't care if 95% of rock music is recycled from earlier trends, each new generation offers some fresh perspective on the original idea. There definitely more good musicians around in 2011 than in 1969 or 1976; which were supposedly the two peak years of revolutionary innovation in rock music.

__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt

Gavin B.

New Adventures in Dub


Trentemøller (left) & Peaking Lights (right) are two modern day electronica artists who incorporate elements of classic dub reggae into their trademark sound.


What is dub music?

The word 'dub' today is used to describe a genre of music that consists predominantly of instrumental re-mixes of existing recordings. These re-mixes radically manipulate and reshape the recording through the use of sound effects. The production and mixing process is not used just to replicate the live performance of the recording artist, but audio effects and studio 'trickery' are seen as an integral part of the music. The roots of dub can be traced back to Jamaica in the late 1960s, where it is widely accepted that Osbourne Ruddock (aka King Tubby) pioneered the style Ruddock turned the mixing desk into an instrument, with the deejay or mixer playing the role of the artist or performer. These early dub examples can be looked upon as the prelude to many dance and pop music genres.

Dub takes its name from the “dub plates” that were cut as instrumental B-sides to the hit ska, rocksteady, and–later–reggae singles of ’60s Jamaica. Producers routinely dropped vocal and rhythm tracks in and out of mixes to test sound levels. Many of the early dub music artists were influenced by the sounds of late Sixties psychedelic music in the United States and refined many of the druggy electronic effects of those bands.

Time Has Come Today by the black psychedelic soul group the Chambers Brothers is landmark song and producer Bob Irwin's use of reverb and sustained echo effects influenced the first generation of Jamaican dub reggae artists. During the '60s, Irwin produced hit singles for a plethora of aspiring psychedelic groups including the Byrds, The Syndicate of Sound, The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, The Standells, Barry & the Remains, Big Brother & the Holding Company & Sagittarius. A good number of the hit singles on the first two Nuggets collections were produced by Irwin & early reggae dub artists were enthralled by Irwin's studio wizardry.

Over the past decade, dub sound–rhythms, bass lines, mixing sensibilities, and vibe is experiencing a massive resurgence that is stretching across contemporary music, from the bass-heavy trip-hop of Massive Attack and Portishead to new instrumental post-rock bands such as Tortoise to the manic, cut-time beats and subsonic rumble of U.K. jungle and even into some punk bands, such as Fugazi. Meanwhile, producers and deejays as Bill Laswell, Tricky, the Orb, Mad Professor, Adrian Sherwood, Dubmatrix, Thievery Corporation, Blackbeard, Peter Kruder and Richard Dorfmeister and others continue to push toward the 21st century and are taking dub along with them.

I'm hoping to use New Adventures in Dub as a periodical feature in my music blog to bring you some of the electronic dubwave artists who have incorporated the soundboard techniques of reggae dub artists like King Tubby & the Mad Professor into contemporary electronica or indie musical forms.
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Trentemøller

The first featured artist is Trentemøller, a Danish dance deejay who incorporates elements of dub in most of his remixes. This spacey, reverb soaked dub version of Chris Isaac's Wicked Games (embedded below) has been circulating the internet as a free download for a couple of years now. Trentemøller pumps up the bass line & adds crashing waves of dub echo effects and his remix sounds better that Isaac's original version to my own humble set of ears.



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Peaking Lights

The experimental dub duo, Peaking Lights, establishes an infectious primitive funk groove on All the Light That Shines from their newly released album entitled 936. Peaking Lights consists of former San Francisco Bay Area natives Aaron Coyes & Indra Dunas who also operate a vintage clothing, vinyl & cassette store in Madison WI. Relocating to the wilds of fly-over country in the mid-west United States proved to be a good career move for Aaron & Indra. They are a music act with a large regional following and the proprietors of a successful vintage curio shop.

Peaking Lights reverse engineers the current state-of-the-art digital technology to obtain the authentic analog sound heard on the late 70s & early 80s recordings of classic Jamaican dub reggae.

I have to confess that I'm in awe of the Peaking Lights' dubwise skills. This hypnotic effect of groove on All the Light That Shines bores into your brain like a laser beam. It's the best headphone song I've heard in over a year.



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__________________
There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt