rubytipped

seen

2009-07-12T17:12:00.003+10:00

wall & poster, richmond, melbourne

the ruby three.4

2009-07-12T16:14:00.007+10:00

Currently feeling:

Me Ship Came In! (mp3) by the Style Council. From Cafe Bleu, 1984. Post-Jam/pre-acidjazz.

Samba Soul (mp3) by N.A.S.A. Featuring Del Tha Funkee Homosapien and Qbert. From The Spirit of Apollo, 2008. The richest modern hiphop imaginable.

Under The Night (mp3) by Lucie Thorne. Melbourne songwriter. From her sixth album Black Across The Field, 2009. Atmospheric to say the least. She's a moodist.

dope

2009-07-09T16:58:00.006+10:00

Kenny Dope's incredible breaks-mix available via Martini & Jopparelli right here. Full album, breaks and beats and scratches and cuts, anthems, classixx. Originally released in 2004 through Dopewax.

stefan 'koze' kozalla

2009-07-08T22:01:00.007+10:00

DJ Koze has a real name and it is Stefan Kozalla. He's from Hamburg (here's his studio) which is a point of difference in itself within the context of German electroid music. That is: not Cologne or Frankfurt or Berlin. To me he's the Ricardo Villalobos of Germany in that mnml is merely the start point for startling explorations into house music. It's as if he's seized on the opportunity to use something bare and skeletal and keep it bare and skeletal but water-coloured with microscopic little flourishes and twirls and curtseys and tiny drills and silent bleeps, distant beeps.

I'd heard the odd tune of his on a few of the Kompakt Total kompiles and he has three albums now but the latest - Reincarnations - is remixes done between 2001 and now and I'm giving you six. Blissblog says he has "atomised" mnml into a "fragrant cloud of texture droplets" and I love that and the atomised thing is true because Koze seems to explode all notions of house music here, like Villalobos does, like Moodyman does, like Kenny Larkin did, not through abstractions and extremities but by actually sticking to the point of house music, sticking to its ideas and its rules, but microscopically attending to those rules and making every note accountable and deeply musical. Thus Koze stays close to the dancefloor, closer than Villalobos, and closer than Kompakt, yet in interviews talks in a humble, detached way of being bemused by the Villalobos idea of playing records at 4pm, 16 hours into a four-day party cycle. Koze says by then the "people are morphing into monsters" and he can't relate to that. He says the German techno tyranny is boring and depressing because it's always the same yet hip-hop, where he came from, DJing at DMC comps in the late 80's, is great because it never leaves him sad and lonely.

In his remixes he bursts other people's house and techno and mnml free from their structures in tiny ways: the Blagger track here is about Chicago with that jack-grunt but Koze's drums are soft-bombs around the jazz chords and the vocal, which is crying and desolate, '88-style: Adonis, Marshall Jefferson, Frankie Knuckles. Naked is more your Moodyman idea of layer upon layer upon layer of Prince and super-magnified sounds of a human breathing and, again, Chicago acidhouse right down beneath, submerged. T A P E decreed his incredible and witty, wise re-rub of Matias Aguayo's Minimal as one of the best remixes of 2008, amongst a whole bunch of dubstep. Dans Avec Moi has Dani Siciliano on it and that's crucial because she was Herbert's singer and again has her diamond-life voice recontextualised and re-jazzed and laid totally, beautifully bare like the oldest idea in the world by a master micro-house producer at the absolute top of his game.

Atlas (mp3) by Battles, the Koze rmx. (2007)

Strange Behaviour (mp3) by Blagger, the Koze Swhaimi rmx. (2009)

Guinea Pic (mp3) by Ben Watt, the Koze rmx. (2009)

Naked (mp3) by DJ Koze vs Sid Le Rock, the Koze rmx. (2007)

Minimal (mp3) by Matias Aguayo, the Koze rmx. (2008)

Dans Avec Moi (mp3) by Noze feat Dani Siciliano, the Koze rmx. (2008)

ruby.dollar.1

2009-06-28T16:23:00.008+10:00

I thought I'd add a new segment on vinyl records I've found round the traps for just a couple of dollars. I'm no crate-digger but I do have the odd crate and I have a really disproportionate, emotional relationship with my vinyl and I really enjoy finding funny old records in strange little shops and buying them for loose change.

The cover was ratty on this one but it looked to me when I found it last week that it hadn't been played. $2 for this. Shirley Bassey started making records in 1957. Her biggest hit, Goldfinger, for a Bond movie, was in '67. She was reprised thirty years later by The Propellerheads when Fatboy Slim proved big-beat would chart.

This record was more a humble big-band orchestra-soul thing from 1969, a retreat from Goldfinger even. It has the Broadway song I'll Never Fall In Love Again on it but I kind of like this poignant but strong rainy-day-woman epiphany at the tail of Side A.

I Only Miss Him by Shirley Bassey (mp3)

seen

2009-06-28T15:39:00.005+10:00

hospital, ballarat, australia

blame it on the boogie

2009-06-28T15:18:00.003+10:00

This right here from the Observer (UK) is the definitive piece on Michael Jackson. It expands on the changeling nature of the man, which I had begun to think, since he died, would be what he was most remembered for. NOT the music. Although some of the music was great. And some -- Rock With You, Billie Jean, Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough - was better than great. But I started to think straight away as the pictures of him dead on the trolley near the ambulance filtered in and tmz.com started beaming a live stream of people doing and saying nothing outside the hospital that his real meaning was not these songs but his incredible physical transformations. His willingness to warp his own humanity in very physical ways to reconcile his own neuroses. Peter Conrad in The Observer explores all that and more and I think in the end all the rest except one silver glove lying below a sad and drawn velvet curtain is distraction.

Don't Stop Til' You Get Enough feat Jay Z (mp3): From the Cookin' Soul tribute mixtape, available here.

Billie Jean, the Dsico Dancehall edit (mp3)

wild horses

2009-06-21T18:58:00.010+10:00

In All The Pretty Horses, a 1992 novel by Cormac McCarthy, 16-year-old Texas boy John Grady and his cousin Rawlins ride away to Mexico alone and find themselves breaking wild horses on the 11,000 hectare Hacienda de Nuestra Senora de la Purisima Concepcion.

This is the bit where the boys first enter the pen where the wild horses are to handle them and wrestle them and come into that unique contact which inspires so much art...

"The horses were already moving. He took the first one that broke and rolled his loop and forefooted the colt and it hit the ground with a tremendous thump. The other horses flared and bunched and looked up wildly. Before the colt could struggle up John Grady had squatted on its neck and pulled its head up and to one side and was holding the horse by the muzzle with the long bony head pressed against his chest and the hot sweet breath of it flooding up from the dark wells of its nostrils over his face and neck like news from another world...."

And:

"They did not smell like horses. They smelled like what they were, wild animals. He held the horse's face against his chest and he could feel along his inner thighs the blood pumping through the arteries and he could smell the fear and he cupped his hand over the horse's eyes and stroked them and he did not stop talking to the horse at all, speaking in a low steady voice and telling it all that he intended to do and cupping the animal's eyes and stroking the terror out..."

Horse (mp3) by Dirty Three. From the great Horse Stories album, 1996. Phenomenal Melbourne Australia band. Dirt and ecstasy and love masterpiece.

Bandit (mp3) by Neil Young & Crazy Horse. From Greendale. The way the strings rattle is cowboy and pure like Bob Dylan in Blood On The Tracks.

Horse With No Name (mp3) by America. 1972. The ultimate existential cowboy song in which the power and magnitude of the desert engulfs mere human flesh-and-blood so much that the desert becomes a sea. Human form reddens and cracks and dies. Horses are reduced to anonymous carriers; identity is stripped. Dali-esque.

Brokeback Mountain 1 (mp3) by Gustavo Santaolalla. From the soundtrack. Just like All The Pretty Horses, but gay.

White Horse (mp3) by Laid Back. Early 80's electro classic from Copenhagen.

The Funeral (mp3) by Band of Horses. Amazing modern Americana rock with tear-stained cheeks that also brilliantly soundtracks Danny MacAskill's post-modern Edinburgh BMX tricks.

beatle-mania

2009-06-14T09:20:00.004+10:00

Excellent funky, funny 47-minute mix of Beatles' soul covers right here, from DJ Double K's Parkdale Funk Show podcast straight outta Toronto. Normally I avoid things like this. Nothing worse than novelty in music and playing themed songs because of the theme not the song. But the tunes all stand alone here, the blend is wonderful, the humour is tight and just right and it sounds great. Listen especially for Hey Jude (by Clarence Wheeler and the Enforcers) and Come Together (by Richard 'Groove' Holmes and Ernie Watts): righteous!

soul-dot-music

2009-06-08T15:00:00.008+10:00

The thing about soul is it's the beginning as well as the end. To a beginner I say of the whole world of soul: start here. To those in trouble I say: use this. To those who have seen it all I say: take one of these.

It was named what it is named for a reason.

Same with jazz and rock and blues. Together they are the four cornerstones but soul is the boss and of course it was begat by other things: Aretha didn't say much truth be told (when she wasn't singing) but she did once say: ..."now there's a plain bare fact, soul came up from gospel and blues, that much you can write down..." yet when pushed she concluded it was music that somehow bought to the surface whatever was happening inside.

James Brown took it back further in time when he said he first danced in order to earn more coins from WW2 serviceman going past in rural south troop-trains: "...I probably had some years-old African beat in my brain.''

Nu-soul is just as good as old-soul. Some of the most soulful music I've heard was made by machines. Soul covers everything: a cook can be soulful, a sporting contest, a sentence, the slope of a particularly gorgeous roof. Rock can be soulful, jazz can and blues can. Everything can if it is done with spirit and truth and meaning.

These are old soul songs from off the track slightly.

Gloria Jones was the B-list soul babe on Motown who did Tainted Love, a massive northern soul hit, in 1964. It's been famously re-done a couple of times since. Then she went off and sung with Marc Bolan and became his girlfriend and then was the driver of the car in which he died. This song was between times, an album cut and vinyl rip from 1973's Share My Love.

Baby Dont'cha Know (I'm Bleeding For You ) (mp3) by Gloria Jones

Bonnie and Sheila I don't know much about but they were from New Orleans and this was originally released in '71 on a seven-inch on King, for whom James Brown recorded. It's a sister-piece to Mr Big Stuff by Jean Knight.

You Keep Me Hanging On (mp3) by Bonnie and Sheila

Finally, Ben E King, the 60's crooner in the way of Percy Sledge who reinvented himself after the heights of Stand By Me and Spanish Harlem with a 1975 comeback-special southern- soul album from which this is the opener. Vinyl rip.

Supernatural Thing Part One (mp3) by Ben E King

the ruby three.3

2009-06-01T09:13:00.010+10:00

Currently feeling:

Tausend Tränen Tief (Steve Bug Loverboy remix) (mp3) by Blumfeld & DJ Koze

Strange anthemic mnml from the year 2000 on Koze's Music is Okay album. Blumfeld are a German chart-pop band; the 'original' is theirs. Loverboy was the first ever track released by Bug's Poker Flat label in '99 or so. Here DJ Koze, also German, a Kompakt/Get Physical man, kind of mashes both.

Not Fair (Style of Eye remix) (mp3) by Lily Allen

Sweet Lily's 2009 stuff is shit and so are all the remixes except this one from Swedish oddball mnmlist Style of Eye aka Linus Eklow who has recorded for Classic, Dirty Bird and Pickadoll.

This Time (mp3) by Jonny L & Roni Size

Lovely old jazzy drum 'n' bass from 1997. Vinyl rip. Not exactly rare but not exactly easy to get. So gorgeous I almost can't believe it's real.

barry spoils the illusion

2009-05-27T16:44:00.009+10:00

(via letmeride)

your undies are showing

2009-05-25T12:08:00.020+10:00

The people over at circlesquaretriangle put up a radio thing with post-Presets Sydney duo Ted & Francis a few days back. Now the EP has landed, through etcetc and hipster French label Kitsune, who have their undies showing and have to lie down to put their jeans on.

This is a lovely track from Ted & Francis, so of the moment, so melancholy and eyelined and sure. I like it a lot.

Erlend (mp3) by Ted & Francis

Meanwhile in a bizarre convergence, Kitsune (which is also the Japanese word for fox) will soon do their 7th compile of hipster anthems. The Classixx remix of Pheonix from the new Phoenix album Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix (which itself is really, really great, especially that Love Like A Sunset two part epic in the middle) is awesome: it's boogie, it's '83, it's ELO. Classixx are from LA. Here's a funky amateur video of them DJing...and what the hell is that first track? Heartsrevolution do an interlude style runout groove which steals deliciously from The Beatles' Across The Universe but they're allowed to do things like that because they're impossibly young and feted and from New York and don't yet use their real names. And Lindstrom's mate Prins Thomas' re-reub of James Yuill is perfect barefoot space-pop. No need for slip-ons if you wear no shoes while walking on the moon.

Lisztomania (Classixx version) (mp3) by Phoenix

Untitled (mp3) by Heartsrevolution

This Sweet Love (Prins Thomas sneaky edit) (mp3) by James Yuill

afro-central

2009-05-18T10:04:00.011+10:00

Ashley Beedle is one of my favourite music people. Black Science Orchestra are totally the bomb; the Soul Power Music EP is one of my treasures; his remixes of Beng Beng Beng by Femi Kuti and Weak Become Heroes by The Streets are jewels in The Crate; the Grass Roots compile of lost disco and lush Philly changed my ears, as did The Ballistic Brothers and at least some of X-Press 2. He's also, in some way, behind Black Jazz Chronicles and Delta House of Funk, East Village Loft Society and Disco Evangelists. On killer labels like Junior Boys Own, Strut, Nuphonic and ffrr. A great producer.

So it was with some delight I re-found the Afro-Art Greatest Hits Volume 1 double disc submerged in the archive. Afro-Art is the label he co-founded in the late 90's at the crest of the broken beat/Phil Asher wave to release a lot of that kind of music (where breakbeat fused with deep house and jazz) but also swags of backroom breakbeat, afro-house, garage, the beginnings of 2-step/dubstep and even some drum 'n' bass. Here's 3 of 18.

Headspace Lullaby (mp3) by Black Science Orchestra is from 2001: moody, time-shifting, lush early dubstep.

Ghetto: New Yorkshire (mp3) by Supafix is from the year 2000: a funky breakbeat with old acid noise alerts.

Question? (The Phillysophical Soul mix) (mp3) by The Man feat Ashley Slater is also from 2000: superdeep and righteous jazzy house with a preacherman vibration and Rhodes.

Ashley Beedle has just recently done a thing with Horace Andy: they talk it through here.

john juan

2009-05-11T11:34:00.014+10:00

Juan Maclean's real name is John but he changed it to Juan and also added a 'The' so that he became The Juan Maclean which is totally cooler than just John.

He's from New York and he was one of the first to release music on DFA; that's because he knew DFA boss James Murphy from a 90's post-grunge band called Six Finger Satellite. In fact the first song on the first DFA compile was the basic electro sinewave By The Time I Get to Venus, the title alone a play on musicological history. So in many ways Juan created the template for the majestic DFA sound. Apart from, that is, James Murphy's own DJing as Death From Above around about the year 2000 when he would play Krautrock to club kids. Juan's just done his second album The Future Will Come. He's the new Gary Numan, the sad robot. Juan told the Village Voice that the cult in modern life of being "above average" and the quest to be in the "99th percentile" was deep and entrenched would stay -- yet somehow the idea of being automatic or from a factory which you'd think would go down quite well if you want to be better/faster/stronger than everyone else would be was something that didn't compute. I heard Who Made Who as well, from Denmark. They're the same. Sad, sad robots drinking cognac on tragic, lonely planes and wanting to be punished. It's odd, all this. Kraftwerk never said robots should be sad.

Here's four from Juan.

These first two are from The Future Will Come.

The Juan Maclean No Time (mp3)

The Juan Maclean Accusations (mp3)

This one's a brand new remix of Montreal band Duchess Says

Duchess Says Black Flag (The Juan Maclean remix) (mp3)

Lots more synthy nu-wave biz on this Canadian blog here.

And this is from 2003, from the second DFA compile.

The Juan Maclean Give Me Every Little Thing (mp3)

remaining in light

2009-05-07T10:52:00.008+10:00

Author Christos Tsiolkas selects a top ten for Cyclic Defrost magazine.
Great writing about great music.
Seems he feels the same way about Remain in Light by Talking Heads as I do. Greatest Album Ever Made and all that. His early novel Loaded inadvertently contained some of the best music journalism I've read: the feeling of being young and fucked up and doomed but about to be saved, and about to have your life rescued by a song.
In the novel the narrator listens to cassettes on a Sony Walkman. Here, Paul Kelly writes about mixtapes. It's down the bottom of the forum thread, spread over two posts, titled C90.
It's all happening.

can it all be so simple?

2009-04-26T21:41:00.015+10:00

It's nine months since I posted. Glastonbury is long forgotten and Jay Z may well be dead or white.

I have no new children and my job is the same.

I have lost no limbs, not one. I have not suffered in any way or undergone any radical transformations.

There will be weekly posts minimum.

The time came and this is how I feel.

The tune he's playing, at 7.15am, to a crowd who are clearly rather pleased with the way things have turned out in LA overnight, is Get It Up For Love (mp3) by Tata Vega from 1979 on Motown. He's pitched it down to about minus 5 by the sound of it, as befitting the hour.

king of the world

2008-07-05T21:01:00.006+10:00

First Jay Z mashes up Oasis and AC/DC at Glastonbury...

Then Jay-Z mashes U2 into his own mash of Bobby Blue Bland, at Glastonbury...

the ruby three.2

2008-07-03T20:32:00.014+10:00

no burble, just tunes. the second in a regular ruby series.

lowell fulsom tramp (mp3 removed)
Big old blues singer, dead, this song a '67 soul-funk special later covered by Otis (Redding) and Carla (Thomas).

midfield general teddy bear (mp3 removed)
In which Damien Harris from Skint goes all 10-4 big buddy on yo ass in a Daisy Duke/big-beat/rock-spider/cripple-love style. From new album General Disarray. Disturbing.

shearwater the snow leopard (mp3 removed)
Intense falsetto-led Texan orchestra-rock from the lovely but difficult new album Rook, in which seabird themes, post-rock and nu-folk swim through oil.

these are the ones who will save us

2008-06-22T20:44:00.005+10:00

Madonna feat. Justin Timberlake: Four Minutes.

There's so, so much to love about this - and her "tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock" thing is one of them.

Produced by Timbaland.

liszt this: "...in my dream your fat mouth was a gun..."

2008-06-18T22:01:00.034+10:00

I’ve been asked in the real world to contribute some ideas toward a list of the greatest Australian albums of the last 50 years. The occasion is that Johnny O’Keefe’s Real Wild Child/Oh You Beautiful Doll 7’’ was released in 1958, meaning that rock music in this country has been deemed officially alive for fifty years, which is a problematic notion in itself.
Wasn’t there a Melbourne band called The Thunderbirds who played rock ‘n’ roll shows at a Drill Hall in Ascot Vale in 1957? Well - yes there was.
Birth – so slippery, so gravely at risk of appropriation by outside forces.
The List is devilishly hard to administer. I think if I were an editor I would never commission one: although I did once, which was a list of the best songs about Melbourne, and that turned into a valuable exercise, but only because the premise had a big fence around it...songs about something.
In this case though, the fiftieth thing, what records actually get in the from the 1950’s – when there were few albums – and the 1960s? Even the 70’s? In the end in some ways it comes down to who is asked to contribute and what preconceptions and hang-ups they bring to the process. Another issue is political correctness. Another is ego. Journalists and music critics are enormously driven by these things. So it comes down to the records that people THINK should get in rather than the ones they want to get in, which is wrong. It distorts history and it distorts truth. And it distorts memory, which is what music, in the end, is about. Memory and truth. In that order.
With my ten I can’t contribute anything from the 50’s or 60’s because either a) I haven’t heard them, or b) I haven’t heard anything I like. From the 70’s there’s Skyhooks, obviously, but I don’t like Skyhooks. I didn’t grow up with them, can’t include them. It’s fiddly and complicated, I don’t like it. I know it’s important, but not to me. What about Ready To Deal by Renee Geyer, from ’75? Incredible soul-funk album. I know Joelistics from TZU has stuck it in his top ten and I’ll pay him that, and I love the album, but it couldn’t fly.
I wanted to include some Australian beats. The Avalanches are in my list. I loved an album by a Sydney crew called Moonrock, but, really, it couldn’t make it. There was a period in the early 90’s when there was some fantastic techno and electronica being made but who cares about albums in those realms? Third Eye. Severed Heads, paving the way from industrial to acidhouse before anyone knew what time it was. Josh Abrahams.
Bias B, an MC from Melbourne, can tell stories of my city like I’ve never heard before. Ed Kuepper, from the Saints, in particular his spectral 1991 album Honey Steel's Gold where guitar playing felt thick and voluminous and beautiful. Oh my God the Hoodoo Gurus. The Necks. Not Drowning Waving, especially when they got really ‘world’ on yo ass. Tendrils. Triffids.
Jeez.
There was this scuzzy, baggy band called Harry’s Laundry back in the early 90’s in Melbourne and they used to play pilled-up dance-rock on the back of a truck outside of the Razor nightclub at 4 in the morning in Albert Park, guerrilla style. I’d list them any night. Fragmentary, isolated, important.
There was this song that I heard, in an Australian lift, alone and stuck, in Australia, wearing a hat and suncream, and thongs, while drunk. Australian, it was. Unlike me.
But I can’t remember it now.
I’m in love with fragments and moments and feelings, which is why DJ culture suckered me so, and also why MP3 culture is threatening to and why the only albums I keep now are the ones that can sustain and that can mean something in the long format. It’s rare. To list them seems somehow too detailed. Having said that, the last album I bought, actually the last two, from the same $10 shop in Colac, on holiday, were Hunky Dory and Sticky Fingers, and this week I’ve been listening to the new Holly Throsby album A Loud Call – which is Australian -- and marvelling at how she can sustain such emotional intimacy.
Yet I’d like to make a list of my top ten moments, top ten feelings. Maybe next week, with songs to match. They’d come from a live experience, probably, all of them. Meantime, I’ll confess I do like looking at Robert Christgau’s lists, but it’s kind of vicarious. I don’t enjoy them or look forward to seeing them or take anything valuable from them.
I think one of the main things about lists is that they’re in list form. Sometimes I think this is the main thing they have going for them. That a list is small and meaningless.

Robert Christgau’s top ten from 1977 was, in list form:
1. Television: Marquee Moon
2. Kate & Anna McGarrigle: Dancer with Bruised Knees
3. Fleetwood Mac: Rumours
4. Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols
5. Ramones: Rocket to Russia
6. Andy Fairweather Low: Be Bop ‘n’ Holla
7. Parliament: Funkentelechy vs. the Placebo Syndrome
8. Ornette Coleman: Dancing in Your Head
9. Al Green: The Belle Album
10. Hot Chocolate: 10 Greatest Hits

Here’s what I submitted for the Australian music thing.
Paul Kelly and the Messengers – So Much Water So Close To Home
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – The Good Son
Midnight Oil – 10-1
Hunters and Collectors – Hunters and Collectors
The Avalanches – Since I Left You
The Go-Betweens – Spring Hill Fair
AC/DC – Back In Black
The Dirty Three – Ocean Songs
INXS – Kick
Crowded House – Crowded House

And here’s three Australian-ish songs that’ll never make any lists, ever. Except maybe the BeeGees. But not the other two. Future Rubytipped shiznit shall include lengthy nonsense on skiphop (specifically Bias B, Pegz and Muph), that wondrous Hunters and Collectors record from ’82 and, oh, I dunno, Little River Band.

The Bee Gees: To Love Somebody (mp3) From their first album. 1967.

Deepchild: For A Reason (Colourblind rmx) (mp3) Deepchild is Australian. He makes satisfying liquid beats and wears dreadlocks. This a French remix. Which is not Australian and could therefore never be considered for any list of anything connected to Australia.

The Plums: Gun (mp3) From 1994. Singer Caroline Kennedy (Deadstar, The Tulips) is a painter and sculptor now and she assembles like she sings and writes: plain, no bullshit, strange dreams, odd lines, obvious, beautiful:

"… in my dream your fat mouth was a gun…”

They had another song, called The Trip, and there’s a line in it which became a kind of mantra to me: “…I could catch it, cage it, but the colours start to slide…” In other words, this band's virtues were unlistable, but immense.

moon:balloon

2008-06-09T10:34:00.005+10:00

beatless nostalgia djing becomes one long artful play on notions of cutting, scratching and 'huckleberry friends.' by kid koala + audrey hepburn

the robots

2008-05-28T20:54:00.016+10:00

Dancing to techno, I never thought about the robots. Except for this one time. But they made me promise not to tell what happened out there on the perimeter where there were never any stars and the DJs took pills and played for 7 days, so I'm not saying nothing.
But, really, it's all about the robots, it's all about the production line. It's about Detroit and the noises inside the car factories. It's about P-funk and white funk. Juan Atkins coined the term 'techno' in a song of his called 'Techno City' and what was going through his mind back then in the early 80's was a kind of Alvin Toffler/Prince/Kraftwerk scenario in which ideas from hiphop and afrocentrism blended with the practicalities of the mixer, the utility of Kraftwerks's metronome beat and the notion that cold blackness would win the urban war. It was Atkins who said that Kraftwerk were so white they were funky and his protege, the great musical innovator Derrick May, was the one who annointed Atkins as “the fire...the matrix.”
Around the time that May told me that I went to listen to Juan Atkins playing records in Melbourne. He is my Leadbelly, my Blind Lemon Jefferson. Late 90's, this was. Juan was fat and wore glasses and people complained he couldn't mix but it was never about the mix. At least now we know that.
I wrote then: ''...he’s playing beautiful records that glisten with soul and just a little bit of menace. A little twist of the alien, the subphonic. It’s techno all right and it’s going quickly crazy for us squashed up there beneath him as he does it. He drops “Bingo Bango” by Basement Jaxx followed by a bracket of samba-house; he goes through stretches of wild and deep electro; he drops “Beau Mot Plage” by Isolee. We love that. We’re mad for that. It’s Detroit in the area. Original style. He’s a big man and his glasses are fogging up but you can tell he’s a quiet man behind all the thunder of the records.''
Here then is his defining electro track from 1985, on Metroplex.

Model 500 Night Drive (mp3)

He also recorded as Cybotron, but there was also a cooking 70's/80's electro outfit from Melbourne of the same name. They were into Krautrock, into Tangerine Dream. They were and still are desperately, brillantly obscure. Picked this one up from Bumrocks even though the geezers probably live just down the street. In, perhaps, Moorabbin. Or even Bentleigh, if they had a good royalty deal.
The fact that two pioneering techno outfits could use the name Cybotron -- and it's worth pointing out the Melbourne version came first - is a tribute to the power of the robot. The tron. The Man-Machine. We'll talk Kraftwerk later, OK?

Cybotron Suite 169th Floor (mp3)

Which brings me to Gary Numan. Here's his great track about dislocation and what it must feel like to have a kind of alien love for another creature in the uniform of authority even though he/it wants to either kill you outright or gore you for the amusement of gourmet diners.
Juan Atkins, incidentally, thought Gary Numan was "dope."

Gary Numan Down In The Park (mp3)

the ruby three.1

2008-05-17T17:51:00.018+10:00

No burble, just tunes. The first in a regular Ruby series.

the menahan street band make the road by walking (mp3)
Where Jay-Z got the horns for 'roc boys' from 'american gangster.' They're from New York on Daptone.

renee geyer sweet love (mp3)
The first lady of soul where I live. This is a funk cut from 1975. She has Aretha's name tattooed on her skin.

wiley wearing my rolex (burns rmx) (mp3)
The first grime tune to go top ten in Britain. This is the shimmery French disco remix by Burns, via the marvellous Shoplifters.

amerykahn roots

2008-05-12T10:42:00.028+10:00

The Roots are the perfect American rock 'n' roll band, a kind of groove machine based on old skool hiphop, psychedelic soul, rock 'n' roll, the notion of the jam and obtuse riddims making for a sometimes hellbound passageway into the trance.
Then politics. This is serious afro-political agitation, a theme I go back to again and again in the endless quest for musical purity and truth; the emancipation of black races, the elucidation of the struggle, the rising of the underclasses, the things that must be heard. Soul, funk, Philly, reggae, hiphop of course, disco, house, techno.
On their newest, eighth album "Rising Down" - the title again filched from a political tract; drummer ?uestlove has said, incredibly, that the record is their most ''incendiary'' and ''political'' yet - it's an unapologetic, American-election-year fight for rights and justice in high volume the whole way. There was a sweet little ditty on it with the white singer from Fall Out Boy but they removed it because it didn't fit.
"I Will Not Apologise" - with floating members Dice Raw and Porn joining Black Thought and Talib Kweli on the mic - is the blueprint. Cosmic blackness, the newest danger, heavy shit, the real deal. The sample is from Fela Kuti, a sign in itself. It makes the intro sound like ''Christiansands'' by Tricky. What a load. What a sonic weight.

Check it: "...don’t blame the nigga/ blame America/ it's all business/actin' like a monkey is the only way to sell tickets/ shit, I can dig it/ niggas gossip silly digits white kids buy it its a riot/ when we talking about pimpin' or sippin on old English brew or whatever they think we do/ spraying double Uzis cause you know they think we live in zoos...''

the roots i will not apologise (mp3)

Then Erykah Badu joins the campaign. This a long journey from "Baduism" and all that light, night-light, tranquil blended nu-soul business. What she's done now is simple: she's made the boldest and most strident American hiphop record -- and the most deeply, deeply political -- since the one where Mos Def played heavy metal to get his point across.
"New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)" is ridiculous in its intensity. In part it's a paean to dead beloved producer J-Dilla; there's a handful of songs that use his premature end and the talent he held in his hands as a metaphor for the death of yet another young black American dream. One track, written with ?uestlove from The Roots, called "Telephone", is a kind of bizarre dreamscape conversation between Ol' Dirty Bastard, J Dilla's mother and Badu's own sense of the afterlife.
Producers are Madlib, Ninth Wonder and Sa-Ra. Georgia Anne Muldorow guests and even co-writes.
Badu is out on her own here. This is space rock gone hiphop gone desperate and combative. Apparently she'll drop a sequel before the end of the year. I've included the album opener "Amerykahn Promise" here not because it's representative but because it's totally the shit, the funkiest sister-dance since 'A Message From The Soul Sisters Part 1 & 2' by Vickie Anderson, and twice as orchestral. 'The Healer', however, is where she's at. Redemptive, dark, searching, hopeful, down, still strong, never weakened.

If somehow still unconvinced, somehow, read this. Or just cut straight to the New York Times, who also took an amazing photograph.

erykah badu amerykahn promise (mp3)
erykah badu the healer (mp3)

And finally, the pairing, from 1999. The birth of neo-soul. Real gone golden days.

the roots featuring erykah badu you got me (mp3)

swedes, norweigans and tom of finland

2008-05-05T13:56:00.017+10:00

The dark European forces make detailed, mechanical pop-tech with animal action and angels floating past your face and, in the case of Supermayer's component-overhaul of Hot Chip, a little bit of "You Sexy Thing" by Hot Chocolate.

One of these is brand new and the other isn't particularly, and newness is the ultimate currency within the tyranny of the 12", and I used to be a total slave to all that yet now you could say things move a little slower towards me - even with Beatport and Frostwire - so here is Norweigan producer Todd Terje dressing up like some kind of Tom of Finland guy come to life in a cold place in a hot sweatshop tech-house party. He revitalises a Swedish electro-pop tune by Fox 'N' Wolf into a dark exercise in technological, ecstasy-ridden pop with wolf noises and an air of nocturnal terror and cathartic druggy redemption.
It's superb, and about two minutes in it threatens to dub itself to such an extent that it turns in on its maker, crumbling and disappearing right there in the mix, a Jamaican-Norweigan version of what it feels like to be lost in a dance. Later it breaks down to nothing and what emerges is remarkable: an old-skool hip-house verse in a Neneh Cherry stylee.
The vocal is a pure house music blueprint in that it's distant and alien and clearly from somewhere else other than the experience at hand yet it implores the music forward. She's an angel in distress at this point; a crying angel, that picture all dreamy and shimmered transposed on the rafters of the club, wailing at you, beckoning at you, and then she is gone.

Likewise Supermayer's compulsive remix of Hot Chip's "One Pure Thought." Supermayer know what they're doing, no doubt; the Cologne pairing of DJ/producers Michael Mayer and his mate Aksel Schlaufer from Superpitcher - part of the Kompact management team, minimal freaks, micro-house pioneers and, now, deep techno explorers - construct a beautifully morphing series of sections on the remix here; this is pretty much the perfect example of microscopic shifts in texture and tempo and detail adding up to a whole lot more than what was initially promised. "One Pure Thought" never breaks down as such. It merely evolves through a slippery hi-hat addition, a distorted funk guitar note or, even, a chord, a bare sequence of single chimes. In these realms one single note from a thirty year old guitar riff can make the whole thing shift seismically on its axis.
The vocal, again female, is solitary and repetitive: ''...there is nothing greater...''

fox 'n' wolf claws against knives (todd terje rmx) (mp3)
hot chip one pure thought (supermayer rmx) (mp3)

she's won the battle but now comes the fear

2008-04-29T09:06:00.014+10:00

There's five of them and they come from London and Bernard Butler from Suede is involved but there's nothing winsome here nor is there any of his deliciously nonsense-'63 constructions from the Duffy record, which was nice for a minute then turned out to be kind of sick, as if, well, as if we'd been cheated. I listened to it a lot and then Adele and particularly "Chasing Pavements" and read that SFJ thing in the New Yorker here about Amy Winehouse and her retro junkie cool, and saw The Dap-Kings live with Sharon Jones in this time, a few months back, and lived within all that for a while, and came to realise that the Dap Kings were as vaudevile as anyone and Jones has a seriously embedded schtick, but the thing is: Then I was in an op-shop and got a $5 shirt but then also a Burt Bacharach record and focussed for too long on "Raindrops Keep Falling On Your Head" and thought: Duffy, Fluffy, Nuffy, enough.

Cajun Dance Party helped in these troubles too. It's heartening that a band so of the moment can have a deft grip on the excessively jaunty but also on the teardrop aesthetic of "No Joanna", which is such a simple prospect, a boy in love with a girl who doesn't love him back. He's not the Lone Ranger there, huh? And for me it was like, well, thank God, I can recognise you, you're not 1963 and there she goes: she sits on the wall, smiling, laughing and asking for more: we've seen that, it hurts. Whereby "Colourful Life" kind of emerges from the beginning of the album as if the album existed way before any listener got to grips with it, and it jigs along amongst handclaps and useful rythmns, not as African as Vampire Weekend, not as tight as The Las, not too far from The Chills and distantly yet obviously related to both The Feelies and The Beatles.

They have been like a clock to me in these few days. Bringing me back.
Both songs are from their album "This Colourful Life.'
It's got wilted sunflowers on the cover.

cajun dance party - no joanna (expired mp3)
cajun dance party - colourful life (expired mp3)