A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man

Blarobbarg · 12-18-2012, 10:52 PM

Well that was incredible. That first song was pretty good, but that second was particularly incredible. I'll be checking this album out, fo' sho'.

**Janszoon** · 01-06-2013, 11:01 PM

9:00 pm
Harry Belafonte—Calypso (1956)

After running and running and running the invisible man finally begins to tire and finds himself far from the crowded downtown streets in some far-flung residential neighborhood he's never been to before. He wanders the quiet sidewalks for a while before the faint sound of Caribbean music drifts through the air around him. Following it, he winds up in a church basement packed with a large group of mostly geriatric Jamaicans. It takes just a little bit of observation and a little bit of eavesdropping for him to understand the circumstances that surround him. The crowd is dressed to the nines. A multi-tiered cake sits in a corner waiting to be cut and served. He hears comments here and there about childhood love back in Moneague, a lifetime of separation, a recent reunion late in life. A gray, wrinkled man and woman sway slowly in the middle of crowd of watery-eyed family and friends. These elderly newlyweds seem so happy to finally be together as they drift around the dance floor to Harry Belafonte's "I Do Adore Her". Love-scorned and jaded as he feels this evening, it's still hard for the invisible man to choke back the lump in his throat as he gazes on.

Harry Belafonte's breakthrough album Calypso has the distinction of being the first LP to ever sell over a million copies within a year of its release, and with good reason—it's absolutely flawless. The album functions as perfect slice of life really, full of innocence, joy and love, but also pain and struggle and even some disturbing socio-political content. It's an album of contradictions in many ways. The largely upbeat music is often coupled with surprisingly dark lyrics for example. It's also named Calypso despite the fact that it's full of Mento music not Calypso. And it's the biggest Jamaican album of its time despite being released by an American (though he did live in Jamaica from age 5 to age 13).

It starts with one of Belafonte's most famous songs: "Day-O (Banana Boat Song)", a prime example of the dichotomous nature of the tracks herein being that it's a somewhat gritty description of the lives of dockworkers set to a very upbeat tune. It immediately follows with the gorgeous "I Do Adore Her", a heartbreakingly romantic track which is revealed to be a tragic tale of regret and lost love on a closer listen to the lyrics. Similarly, the next track, "Jamaica Farewell", is filled with homesickness and longing despite its low-key arrangement. It's not until "Will His Love Be Like His Rum?" that we reach something truly happy, in this case a humorous and upbeat wedding song. Likewise, the next track "Dolly Dawn" is incredibly lively and uplifting. Side two opens with "Star-O", a sort of sequel to "Day-O", which is both weary-sounding and contented. "The Jack-Ass Song", the silliest three minutes of the album, follows and is one of the release's purest moments of joy. After the most religious song on the album, "Hosanna", we are treated to the bittersweet pairing of "Come Back Liza" and "Brown Skin Girl". The former being a heartbroken tune in the vein of "Jamaica Farewell" and the latter being the album's angriest track, deceptive in it's mellow arrangement but extremely critical of American exploitation its lyrics. Last is "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)", a jokey song that's substantially different from the rest of the album with its elaborate percussion and bigger sounding production.

Smiling, surprisingly, the invisible man bounds up the steps of that church basement, the sounds of clinking glasses and happy chatter following behind him. Flinging the doors at the top wide open, he strides out rejuvenated, ready to reach out to this city with a warm bear hug. Ready to strut.

Anteater · 01-06-2013, 11:34 PM

Wow, this is quite the chronicle: it appeals to my inner novelist who tends to get filtered and wrung out through my burgeoning review mesh. Keep it up sir!

Engine · 01-07-2013, 12:20 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Janszoon

Smiling, surprisingly, the invisible man bounds up the steps of that church basement, the sounds of clinking glasses and happy chatter following behind him. Flinging the doors at the top wide open, he strides out rejuvenated, ready to reach out to this city with a warm bear hug. Ready to strut.

Yet another transcendant, unparalleled entry, Janszoon.
The fact that it makes me pay serious attention to Belafonte for the first time is an unexpected bonus.

The Batlord · 01-07-2013, 08:21 AM

I wonder if Jaszoon might not have missed his calling as a music teacher. He has the uncanny ability to make me want to listen to music that I probably would have never had any desire to listen to otherwise.

**Janszoon** · 01-07-2013, 06:23 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anteater

Wow, this is quite the chronicle: it appeals to my inner novelist who tends to get filtered and wrung out through my burgeoning review mesh. Keep it up sir!

Heh. Thanks!

Quote:

Originally Posted by Engine

Yet another transcendant, unparalleled entry, Janszoon.
The fact that it makes me pay serious attention to Belafonte for the first time is an unexpected bonus.

Thanks man. It's always nice to see a response from you. And, yeah, Belafonte is well worth some serious attention.

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Batlord

I wonder if Jaszoon might not have missed his calling as a music teacher. He has the uncanny ability to make me want to listen to music that I probably would have never had any desire to listen to otherwise.

Haha, I think my head would explode if I had to deal with kids every day but thanks.

**Janszoon** · 02-15-2013, 10:25 PM

10:00 pm
Robotobibok—Nawyki Przyrody (2004)

The invisible man walks down an arrow-straight road beneath the steel supports of an elevated train track. After strolling past several blocks of abandoned industrial buildings he notices a small group of people milling around on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes outside the door of an old factory. He eavesdrops on their conversations for a moment as he examines the sign on the door. "SHOW TONIGHT", it says in rough, silkscreened letters. Slipping undetected through the entrance, he makes his way up a concrete ramp, past an old railing, and through an open doorway into a vast, wide-open space. In the middle of it a crowd has gathered in a circle to watch a performance art piece. As he approaches, he gets a clearer view. A cluster of glowing spheres of light in various colors hangs from the ceiling, illuminating the scene below them. On the floor, a woman clad only in galoshes and a Porky Pig mask writhes around, shredding a stuffed animal elephant with a steak knife. Standing above her in a circle, a group of five people in jumpsuits, wearing papier-mâché masks of various woodland animals—a deer, a chipmunk, a woodpecker, a bear and rabbit—clasp hands and dance in a circle. There is music playing around this quirky, humorous, jarring scene. The music is Robotobibok.

Formed in Wrocław, Poland in 1998, these guys played a unique style of music that, though rooted in the Polish yass tradition, drew heavily on free jazz, fusion, kraut rock, post punk, post rock and vintage electronica. The result was something unique and fun, hooky yet experimental, typically managing the astonishing feat of being both frenetic and relaxed at the same time. Despite only existing for ten years and having numerous lineup changes, they managed blaze a trail all their own across their three albums, creating a unique, hybrid form of jazz that, as far as I'm aware, is without peer.

All of their releases are good, but their last album, Nawyki Przyrody (which means "Habits of Nature" according to Google Translate), is definitely the most refined and eclectic. The production is amazing—vintage yet modern, a textural fusion of the organic with the synthetic, with a diverse array of sounds that snap together like sonic Legos. Beyond the studio magic, it can't be denied that these guys know their way around their (multiple) instruments, and they certainly know how to write an engrossing and often catchy tune. Starting with the opening track "Kamaji", which features a rare vocal performance and essentially sounds like a jazzy take on Kraftwerk, this is the kind of album which defies all expectation. The cinematic synth-jazz of "Symfonia Zmysłów" and "54 Kw" sound like a crazy, metamorphosing soundtrack to a detective movie that exists in both the 60s and 80s. "Skipping A" and "Skipping C" are free jazz companion pieces that sound like they come directly from the 60s. "100000 Lat Gwarancji" sounds like Devo collaborating with Charlie Haden on an instrumental interpolation of 90s gangsta rap. "Zemsta Gniewosza" plays like post punk colliding with free jazz. "Tylko dla Zwierząt"—with its collage of analog bleeps, horn squirks, cat meows and monkey sounds—seems reminiscent of White Noise or Faust. And the album closes with the markedly different "Jurij"—a gorgeous post rock track with a heartrending guitar lead.

The older I get, the harder it seems to find albums that really blow me away and redefine the way I think about music in the way albums did when I was younger and had heard less. But this this is one of those albums. The combination of styles, and the way they're put together, is really like nothing else that I'm familiar with and I think it's quite a credit to these musicians that they're able to forge something almost poppy out of such a style.

Engine · 02-17-2013, 08:30 PM

That Robotobibok entry is super-awesome.
Aside from the museik being a new excitement for me, this journal's prose has reached a level where I truly feel like I am your version of The Invisible Man as I read it.

**Janszoon** · 02-19-2013, 11:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Engine

That Robotobibok entry is super-awesome.
Aside from the museik being a new excitement for me, this journal's prose has reached a level where I truly feel like I am your version of The Invisible Man as I read it.

Thanks homes!

**Janszoon** · 05-20-2013, 09:20 PM

11:00 pm
Byetone—Death of a Typographer (2008)

Leaving the performance space behind him, the invisible man resumes his journey east under the el tracks. Each step on the concrete of the sidewalk brings fresh pain to his aching, bare, invisible feet. He can only imagine the size of the invisible blisters that are forming as he keeps moving. Presently he sees a taxi stopped just ahead. A couple from out of town with several pieces of musical equipment in tow are talking to the cabbie by the car's open trunk, trying their best to describe their downtown hotel, the name of which they've forgotten. During the confusion, the invisible man slips into the passenger's seat.

He had initially only planned on stowing away in the taxi long enough to deliver him downtown but the throbbing of his feet convinces him to stay in the car long after the couple has collected their instruments and disappeared though the revolving door of their hotel. He rides with the cabbie from place to place, picking up a trio of young women in microscopic skirts from a curbside and delivering them to a club, picking up a pair of paunchy middle-aged men in sport coats from a restaurant and delivering them to a piano bar, listening to talk radio in some unidentifiable foreign language, stopping at red, accelerating at green. Dioramas of urban life breeze by outside the windows. He begins to feel that he is a part of the vast circulatory system of the city—flowing and pausing to the rhythms of electrical signals, carrying essential nutrients from one corner to another.

This vital metropolitan electronic pulse is the raw material from which Death of a Typographer is constructed. It's an album of minimalism, space, and tiny precise detail that draws you in with that hypnotic power of feeling like you are a nanoscale circuit in some vast, important electronic network. Throughout the album, Olaf Bender, the guy behind Byetone, treats us to a number of urban heartbeat style tracks such as "Plastic Star", "Straight" and "Capture This [ii]" which call to mind sped up images of headlights and taillights streaking by, stopping and starting abruptly at traffic lights like luminous blood coursing through the city's veins. At other times, as on "Black is Black", he brings in more of a melodic, almost pop sensibility—the sounds of people interacting on the sidewalk or hopping into a taxi. Then of course he delves into the tiny, clipped percussive minimalism of "Rocky" and "Grand Style", both of which feel like the very electric signals that drive the traffic lights and power the street lamps crisscrossing beneath the city streets. Lastly, are the album's more ambient sections, "Capture This [i]" and "Heart", fuzzy droning moments that call to a taxi ride along the waterfront, windows down, zipping through the darkness.

When, after several laps throughout the city, the cab is hailed by a group of five large Texans, the invisible man knows his ride is finished. He slips out the door as a curly-headed fat man opens it, and drifts away down the street.

12-18-2012, 10:52 PM	#1 (permalink)
Blarobbarg Do good. Join Date: Feb 2011 Location: Minneapolis, Minnesota Posts: 2,065	Well that was incredible. That first song was pretty good, but that second was particularly incredible. I'll be checking this album out, fo' sho'. __________________ https://rateyourmusic.com/~Blarobbarg ｡･::･ﾟ★,｡･::･ﾟ☆　^my RYM^　｡･::･ﾟ★,｡･::･ﾟ☆ (◠‿◠✿)

01-06-2013, 11:01 PM	#2 (permalink)
Janszoon Mate, Spawn & Die Join Date: May 2007 Location: The Rapping Community Posts: 24,593	9:00 pm *Harry Belafonte—Calypso* (1956)** After running and running and running the invisible man finally begins to tire and finds himself far from the crowded downtown streets in some far-flung residential neighborhood he's never been to before. He wanders the quiet sidewalks for a while before the faint sound of Caribbean music drifts through the air around him. Following it, he winds up in a church basement packed with a large group of mostly geriatric Jamaicans. It takes just a little bit of observation and a little bit of eavesdropping for him to understand the circumstances that surround him. The crowd is dressed to the nines. A multi-tiered cake sits in a corner waiting to be cut and served. He hears comments here and there about childhood love back in Moneague, a lifetime of separation, a recent reunion late in life. A gray, wrinkled man and woman sway slowly in the middle of crowd of watery-eyed family and friends. These elderly newlyweds seem so happy to finally be together as they drift around the dance floor to Harry Belafonte's "I Do Adore Her". Love-scorned and jaded as he feels this evening, it's still hard for the invisible man to choke back the lump in his throat as he gazes on. Harry Belafonte's breakthrough album Calypso has the distinction of being the first LP to ever sell over a million copies within a year of its release, and with good reason—it's absolutely flawless. The album functions as perfect slice of life really, full of innocence, joy and love, but also pain and struggle and even some disturbing socio-political content. It's an album of contradictions in many ways. The largely upbeat music is often coupled with surprisingly dark lyrics for example. It's also named Calypso despite the fact that it's full of Mento music not Calypso. And it's the biggest Jamaican album of its time despite being released by an American (though he did live in Jamaica from age 5 to age 13). It starts with one of Belafonte's most famous songs: "Day-O (Banana Boat Song)", a prime example of the dichotomous nature of the tracks herein being that it's a somewhat gritty description of the lives of dockworkers set to a very upbeat tune. It immediately follows with the gorgeous "I Do Adore Her", a heartbreakingly romantic track which is revealed to be a tragic tale of regret and lost love on a closer listen to the lyrics. Similarly, the next track, "Jamaica Farewell", is filled with homesickness and longing despite its low-key arrangement. It's not until "Will His Love Be Like His Rum?" that we reach something truly happy, in this case a humorous and upbeat wedding song. Likewise, the next track "Dolly Dawn" is incredibly lively and uplifting. Side two opens with "Star-O", a sort of sequel to "Day-O", which is both weary-sounding and contented. "The Jack-Ass Song", the silliest three minutes of the album, follows and is one of the release's purest moments of joy. After the most religious song on the album, "Hosanna", we are treated to the bittersweet pairing of "Come Back Liza" and "Brown Skin Girl". The former being a heartbroken tune in the vein of "Jamaica Farewell" and the latter being the album's angriest track, deceptive in it's mellow arrangement but extremely critical of American exploitation its lyrics. Last is "Man Smart (Woman Smarter)", a jokey song that's substantially different from the rest of the album with its elaborate percussion and bigger sounding production. Smiling, surprisingly, the invisible man bounds up the steps of that church basement, the sounds of clinking glasses and happy chatter following behind him. Flinging the doors at the top wide open, he strides out rejuvenated, ready to reach out to this city with a warm bear hug. Ready to strut. __________________ A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man Time & Place 25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die last.fm

02-15-2013, 10:25 PM	#7 (permalink)
Janszoon Mate, Spawn & Die Join Date: May 2007 Location: The Rapping Community Posts: 24,593	10:00 pm *Robotobibok—Nawyki Przyrody* (2004)** The invisible man walks down an arrow-straight road beneath the steel supports of an elevated train track. After strolling past several blocks of abandoned industrial buildings he notices a small group of people milling around on the sidewalk, smoking cigarettes outside the door of an old factory. He eavesdrops on their conversations for a moment as he examines the sign on the door. "SHOW TONIGHT", it says in rough, silkscreened letters. Slipping undetected through the entrance, he makes his way up a concrete ramp, past an old railing, and through an open doorway into a vast, wide-open space. In the middle of it a crowd has gathered in a circle to watch a performance art piece. As he approaches, he gets a clearer view. A cluster of glowing spheres of light in various colors hangs from the ceiling, illuminating the scene below them. On the floor, a woman clad only in galoshes and a Porky Pig mask writhes around, shredding a stuffed animal elephant with a steak knife. Standing above her in a circle, a group of five people in jumpsuits, wearing papier-mâché masks of various woodland animals—a deer, a chipmunk, a woodpecker, a bear and rabbit—clasp hands and dance in a circle. There is music playing around this quirky, humorous, jarring scene. The music is Robotobibok. Formed in Wrocław, Poland in 1998, these guys played a unique style of music that, though rooted in the Polish yass tradition, drew heavily on free jazz, fusion, kraut rock, post punk, post rock and vintage electronica. The result was something unique and fun, hooky yet experimental, typically managing the astonishing feat of being both frenetic and relaxed at the same time. Despite only existing for ten years and having numerous lineup changes, they managed blaze a trail all their own across their three albums, creating a unique, hybrid form of jazz that, as far as I'm aware, is without peer. All of their releases are good, but their last album, Nawyki Przyrody (which means "Habits of Nature" according to Google Translate), is definitely the most refined and eclectic. The production is amazing—vintage yet modern, a textural fusion of the organic with the synthetic, with a diverse array of sounds that snap together like sonic Legos. Beyond the studio magic, it can't be denied that these guys know their way around their (multiple) instruments, and they certainly know how to write an engrossing and often catchy tune. Starting with the opening track "Kamaji", which features a rare vocal performance and essentially sounds like a jazzy take on Kraftwerk, this is the kind of album which defies all expectation. The cinematic synth-jazz of "Symfonia Zmysłów" and "54 Kw" sound like a crazy, metamorphosing soundtrack to a detective movie that exists in both the 60s and 80s. "Skipping A" and "Skipping C" are free jazz companion pieces that sound like they come directly from the 60s. "100000 Lat Gwarancji" sounds like Devo collaborating with Charlie Haden on an instrumental interpolation of 90s gangsta rap. "Zemsta Gniewosza" plays like post punk colliding with free jazz. "Tylko dla Zwierząt"—with its collage of analog bleeps, horn squirks, cat meows and monkey sounds—seems reminiscent of White Noise or Faust. And the album closes with the markedly different "Jurij"—a gorgeous post rock track with a heartrending guitar lead. The older I get, the harder it seems to find albums that really blow me away and redefine the way I think about music in the way albums did when I was younger and had heard less. But this this is one of those albums. The combination of styles, and the way they're put together, is really like nothing else that I'm familiar with and I think it's quite a credit to these musicians that they're able to forge something almost poppy out of such a style. __________________ A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man Time & Place 25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die last.fm

02-17-2013, 08:30 PM	#8 (permalink)
Engine air quote Join Date: Jun 2009 Location: pollen & mold Posts: 3,108	That Robotobibok entry is super-awesome. Aside from the museik being a new excitement for me, this journal's prose has reached a level where I truly feel like I am your version of The Invisible Man as I read it. __________________ Like an arrow, I was only passing through.

05-20-2013, 09:20 PM	#10 (permalink)
Janszoon Mate, Spawn & Die Join Date: May 2007 Location: The Rapping Community Posts: 24,593	11:00 pm *Byetone—Death of a Typographer* (2008)** Leaving the performance space behind him, the invisible man resumes his journey east under the el tracks. Each step on the concrete of the sidewalk brings fresh pain to his aching, bare, invisible feet. He can only imagine the size of the invisible blisters that are forming as he keeps moving. Presently he sees a taxi stopped just ahead. A couple from out of town with several pieces of musical equipment in tow are talking to the cabbie by the car's open trunk, trying their best to describe their downtown hotel, the name of which they've forgotten. During the confusion, the invisible man slips into the passenger's seat. He had initially only planned on stowing away in the taxi long enough to deliver him downtown but the throbbing of his feet convinces him to stay in the car long after the couple has collected their instruments and disappeared though the revolving door of their hotel. He rides with the cabbie from place to place, picking up a trio of young women in microscopic skirts from a curbside and delivering them to a club, picking up a pair of paunchy middle-aged men in sport coats from a restaurant and delivering them to a piano bar, listening to talk radio in some unidentifiable foreign language, stopping at red, accelerating at green. Dioramas of urban life breeze by outside the windows. He begins to feel that he is a part of the vast circulatory system of the city—flowing and pausing to the rhythms of electrical signals, carrying essential nutrients from one corner to another. This vital metropolitan electronic pulse is the raw material from which Death of a Typographer is constructed. It's an album of minimalism, space, and tiny precise detail that draws you in with that hypnotic power of feeling like you are a nanoscale circuit in some vast, important electronic network. Throughout the album, Olaf Bender, the guy behind Byetone, treats us to a number of urban heartbeat style tracks such as "Plastic Star", "Straight" and "Capture This [ii]" which call to mind sped up images of headlights and taillights streaking by, stopping and starting abruptly at traffic lights like luminous blood coursing through the city's veins. At other times, as on "Black is Black", he brings in more of a melodic, almost pop sensibility—the sounds of people interacting on the sidewalk or hopping into a taxi. Then of course he delves into the tiny, clipped percussive minimalism of "Rocky" and "Grand Style", both of which feel like the very electric signals that drive the traffic lights and power the street lamps crisscrossing beneath the city streets. Lastly, are the album's more ambient sections, "Capture This [i]" and "Heart", fuzzy droning moments that call to a taxi ride along the waterfront, windows down, zipping through the darkness. When, after several laps throughout the city, the cab is hailed by a group of five large Texans, the invisible man knows his ride is finished. He slips out the door as a curly-headed fat man opens it, and drifts away down the street. __________________ A Night in the Life of the Invisible Man Time & Place 25 Albums You Should Hear Before the Moon Crashes into the Earth and We All Die last.fm