Dear readers,
At the moment I have nothing meaningful to say on the musical subjects, but want to say I appreciate having readers whether you leave comments or not, and doubly appreciate the comments with suggestions, astute culturological analysis, or shares. Below is some of the excellent stuff posted lately throughout the blog in comments:

The Wrigglers: Sing Calypso at the Arawak (1958) with the great Ernest Ranglin on guitar at the Easy Jams blog (original vinyl rips and great commentary)

Yuko Ikoma - Moisture with Music Box (2008) - Eric Satie on a music box, very surprising and effective readings of his music, on Hypnagogic Travels

Olivier Messian - Les Corps Glorieux (Organ Works III) - "kinda cosmic stuff, very deep and unusual" - in FLAC, thanks to Symbolkid!

In the "insane far out crazy sh*t" category.

Paul Hindemith

The reason I wasn't writing here much in the past year is that my musical interests have shifted once again, going rather beyond the scope of this website. I still want some place to write down my little musical observations, so I guess the scope of this website will have to expand, as well.

I am generally more interested in what in jazz is called a combo and in the classical lingo chamber music. So in my recent explorations of classical I came across the Hindemith's sonatas for piano-and-every-orchestral-instrument-there-is; many of them staples of educational repertoire.
So I spent about a week trying to get my head around his music - specifically, the trumpet and piano sonata of 1939, and the horn sonatas. The first few times had me rather baffled. Last night I listened to it again with scores in my hands and finally found a point of reference I could grab onto. He sounds to me a lot like Ornette Coleman. Incidentally, it looks like I might be the first person ever to use the names of Ornette Coleman and Paul Hindemith in one sentence.
I think there are two main points of similarity, the very ones that made Ornette's music so distinctive and controversial. Firstly, it's the rhythm. Both Coleman and Hindemith are melodists, with their compositions hung on melodic lines that run through the pieces, giving them inner logic and consistency. However, the melodies conform neither to the 4-bar/8-bar length, nor even to a steady time signature. By ear, it sounds like a player is adding or subtracting beats at will to underscore or enhance a certain melodic point, to make it more expressive. On paper, these jumps and skips have to be notated by shifting from 4/4 to 3/2 to 12/8 and back. Ornette's themes are built on the very same logic. Strictly speaking, that approach is nothing new and is used by solo performers from just about any folk tradition - most visibly to an american listener, by Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson, or a tune like King Bee. Coleman was controversial not for inventing it, but for placing it into the context of a jazz combo.
Secondly, it's the harmony - the pliable, fluid harmonic development that follows not the conventional rules, but the melodic line. A lot of times piano accompaniment in the sonatas is primarily textural, not so much harmonic - a feature Ornette would've appreciated.

As before, it is worth noting that these are the case of the opposites converging. Hindemith is a highly schooled composer from the Western classical tradition who chose to speak through the medium of written music. Ornette Coleman comes from the aural/oral African-American folk tradition and to my knowledge he was musically illiterate. I guess the biologists would call it convergent evolution.

Here are some sounds to sample:
Sonata for Trumpet and Piano played by Thomas Stevens, on mediafire
It seems that classical music is best perceived in small amounts - preferably, is chunks intended by the composer. The CD this came from contains more stuff, none of it relevant to today's post and thus omitted.

Nonetheless, the completists might be interested in the Complete Works for Brass as performed by the Summit Brass and available on megaupload, 192mb, high VBR

Outside link:
Horn and Piano Sonatas at the most excellent Closet of Curiosities

JDT + Bud Melvin

WFMU is linking here, which is the music blog's equivalent of Time cover. I think I should put the exposure to good use by passing it on to the more deserving folks.

One of the greatest pleasures of running a music blog is meeting interesting people, albeit only virtually. Among the people who left a comment here are The Hound, Monty Stark of Stark Reality, DJ Kalil, Mikey IQ of Brown Wing Overdrive and really many more than I can think of right now. So I will use the opportunity to highlight the projects of two of my readers.


Justin David Thomas - Music From My Bedroom
Listen or download
Pop-musique concrete: JDT creates minimalistic, melodic instrumental music from everyday noises, along with more conventional instrumentation of basses, keyboards in various states of disrepair, guitars etc.etc. Some of the track titles are directly descriptive: Music For Record Player and Found Objects, Music for Piano and Bathtub. The workings of a singular musical mind are showing through the rough seams on these tunes. Recommended!


Bud Melvin - Popular Music
Listen or download
They say politics makes strange bedfellows, but nothing is more improbable than two fellows found in this bed. The albuquerquean Bud Melvin is combining 8bit/chiptune music with bluegrass on his latest release Popular Music. His banjo and steel playing blends surprizingly well with his programming into a single choppy, flickering, pulsing fountain of sound, reminding us that everything new is old again... and new again... and old again...

While you're at it, check out The GREEN ALbum, too.

Arthur Doyle

My son tipped over one of my CD racks the other day. As I was cleaning up the mess, in the pile of "downtown" stuff along with the obligatory Zorn, Ribot, numerous Laswell projects, etc. I found two CDs with Arthur Doyle and Rudolph Grey. I remember buying them on eBay some eight years ago, but why?
Next day I was surfing the 'nets, and accidentally bumped into an album that features early Doyle playing:
For unrelenting screaming banshee saxophone, the septet includes tenor player Arthur Doyle. As the original album's liner notes have it, in words that can't be bettered, Doyle is "propelled throughout by an almost incoherent rage, a chaotic and murderous sound." This is written about Noah Howard's Black Ark, available at The Changing Same; great album, great blog, BTW.
So I figured the coincidence is an indication that I should share these.

These two LPs by Doyle are the missing link between the late 60's free jazz and NYC's No Wave scene of the late 70's (I never knew there was a link, let alone that it was missing). His collaborator on both of these releases, guitarist Rudolph Grey, is the person who introduced him to rock audience and booked their shows on the same bill as Glenn Branca, DNA, Mars, and other skronk-mongerers.

Arthur Doyle bio from AMG


Arthur Doyle Quartet - Live at the Cooler
VBR, 60mb on rapidshare, zshare, badongo, megaupload, depositfiles
1. Spiritual Healing
2. Flue Song
3. Noah Black Ark


AMG on the Blue Humans: The Blue Humans is the unit name given to any performance led by improvisational guitarist Rudolph Grey. (Members have included reedsman Arthur Doyle, guitarist Alan Licht, drummers Beaver Harris and Tom Surgal, and tenor saxophonist Jim Sauter.) Bridging the gap between free jazz and downtown art noise (and with records as likely to be released on a punk label as on a jazz imprint), Grey is far more interested in textures and sound patterns than conventional notes, chords, and melodies, but his improvisatory performances have a structural logic and grace to them that makes them more interesting than some of the aimless Strat splat that gets passed off as experimentation.
The famously taciturn Grey basically refuses to answer any questions about his past and admits to no influences. Grey first appeared on the post-punk New York art scene in the late '70s, forming the short-lived Red Transistor with maniac guitar terrorist Von LMO. Although the duo lasted barely a year, they were an important formative influence on the nascent no wave scene percolating in the East Village. (Grey participated in that short-lived scene by playing briefly in Mars, one of its most extreme practitioners.) Grey then formed the Blue Humans in 1980, initially with Harris, a veteran free jazz drummer, and Doyle. (This lineup was finally documented on disc with 1995's Live NY 1980.) A Blue Humans performance can be anything from a duo to a four-piece, but Grey seems to prefer the trio format above others. The Blue Humans' albums and EPs are primarily live recordings of single extended improvisations such as 1988's Incandescense (recorded during an opening set for Sonic Youth at CBGB) and 1990's To Higher Time, but there's also a studio album produced by Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, 1993's Clear to Higher Time.

AMG review: This album is the earliest recording of the explosive free improvisation group led by guitarist Rudolph Grey, recorded live in New York with a lineup that featured the power of legendary free jazz drummer Beaver Harris behind Grey's corrosive feedback guitar. Free jazz saxophonist Arthur Doyle also appears through the smoke of guitar feedback, and speaker destruction is provided by Rudolph Grey, whose style is like a more aggressive and abrasive Sonny Sharrock. No wonder this post-punk free improvisation had a profound influence on Sonic Youth and later incarnations of the Blue Humans featured Thurston Moore on second guitar. Live NY 1980 is a quintessential recording of the no wave scene that abridged punk, free jazz, and noise music.



The Blue Humans - Live 1980
VBR, 104mb on depositfiles, badongo, megaupload, zshare, rapidshare
Four untitled tracks

City of Glass: Stan Kenton plays Bob Graettinger

As I was searching for Muhal Richard Abrams' Blu Blu Blu, I came across an interesting discussion of "heavily psychedelic big band jazz albums", whatever that means. Several of their suggestions appeared here before - Ghania with Pharoah Sanders, RRKirk's 3-sided Dream, just recently I posted Electric Bath, so I thought that other suggestions might be worth looking into. So, here's an interesting find: Bob Graettinger, a composer, arranger and sax player, and a bona fide mad genius if there ever was one. They call him the most radical arranger to ever work in jazz @.

An article about Bob Graettinger, Above the Timberline, worth reading in its entirety; and bio at AMG.

AMG review of This Modern World 10" LP:
The tragically short-lived, self-destructive Bob Graettinger could have been a matinee idol had he cared; some people who saw him on a Los Angeles bus one day mistook him for Elvis Presley. Instead, he devoted his last years to writing the most complex, atonal, uncompromising, potentially alienating music that even the iconoclastic Stan Kenton band ever played. This Modern World is Graettinger's reaction to the cold, driven, alien planet on which he lived, a natural sequel to the more famous City of Glass yet even more difficult and inward in expression. Comprised of six movements ("A Horn, Some Saxophones," "A Cello," "A Thought," "A Trumpet," and "An Orchestra"), This Modern World moves even further away from jazz into abstract contemporary classical music; undoubtedly, Mingus must have heard this music but it's almost impossible to name anything from which it derives. A jazz pulse occasionally surfaces but more often instruments drift in atonal clusters past each other in differing meters or blast dissonant fanfares, creating a feeling of unease as they converse quizzically. In our time, British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage's Blood on the Floor has picked up the torch where Graettinger left it upon his death in 1957, but it took 40 years, and it makes Kenton's decision to sponsor Graettinger's work seem all the more gutsy and courageous. The individual movements on this 10" LP can now be found on the City of Glass CD, along with the rest of Graettinger's small output.

On his personal life @ CRUD CRUD:
Born in Southern California, Graettinger played music for a while, before giving it up to write. He was in his early 20s when he gave Kenton some songs. Kenton didn't know if they were brilliant or bullshit, but he recorded them anyway... and then took Graettinger on as staff. Graettinger rarely spoke to anyone besides Kenton. Even when Kenton took him on the road, he sat by himself. His diet consisted of scrambled eggs, vitamin pills, cigarettes, and booze. He hated to sleep, saying he'd have enough time to do that in the grave. He lived by himself in a filthy apartment above a garage, which he rarely left. He was tall and skinny, had caved-in cheeks and was very very very pale. Many described him as "looking like death". He died of cancer at age 34. And he wrote some fascinatingly fucked up music.

More weird details about his life in this Bud Shank interview.

This CD collects his works that Stan Kenton Big Band recorded: suite This Modern World, City of Glass, and shorter pieces. This is from Kenton's period of flirtation with avant-garde, which Mort Sahl summed up with a joke: "A waiter accidentally dropped a tray and three couples got up to dance." @


City of Glass: Stan Kenton plays Bob Graettinger
256kbps, 117mb on 4shared

Thermopylae

Everything Happens to Me

Incident in Jazz

House of Strings

This Modern World, 1st mvt., A Horn

City of Glass, 1st mvt., part 1, Entrance into the City

City of Glass, 1st mvt., part 2, The Structures

City of Glass, 2nd mvt., Dance Before the Mirror

City of Glass, 3rd mvt., Reflections

Modern Opus

This Modern World, 3rd mvt., A Cello

You Go to My Head

This Modern World, 5th mvt., A Trumpet

This Modern World, 6th mvt., An Orchestra

This Modern World, 4th mvt., A Thought

This Modern World, 2nd mvt., Some Saxophones

After Kenton's death, more Graettinger scores were found in the archive; in the 90's a jazz/modern classical big band under Gunther Schuller's guidance named Ebony Band recorded two CDs worth of this material.

And by the way, I never found any Muhal Richard Abrams' recordings, so if anyone is willing to share, I'd appreciate!

Don Ellis Orchestra - Electric Bath

An album that made headlines in its day and is virtually forgotten now. It came out in 1967, and truly stood out, even among the torrent of new, exciting, far-out music that was gushing forth in the late 60s. It earned top marks from many critics, a Grammy, and an "Album of the Year" from Down Beat magazine. It won fans both among the older jazzhead hipsters and the young rock crowd; many Amazon reviews start out with "I was fifteen in 1967, when I first heard this album".
Liner notes: Conceive, if you can, an aural collage created by the Beatles, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Ravi Shankar and Leonard Feather's Encyclopedia of Jazz. And then, imagine that creation churning through the high-powered talents of twenty-one young musicians, like a rumble before you open the door of a blast furnace.
The description may seem bloated, but is, in fact, quite true: the album combines many interests of the leader, trumpeter Don Ellis - free improv, indian music, odd time signatures, electronic effects, unusual instrumentation (like, for instance, three bass players and an array of percussion), and high-energy arena-rock-sized playing. All of these elements are fused into a coherent whole and applied to a set of tunes that, despite the avantgarde leanings and all the cerebrailty, retain enough pop edge for the radio. It's got something for everyone. The reviewers uniformly pronounce this album to be the music of the future. Now that the future is here, why is it so obscure? I don't understand.


Don Ellis Orchestra - Electric Bath
192kbps, 70mb on zippyshare or uloz.to
1. Indian Lady
2. Alone
3. Turkish Bath
4. Open Beauty
5. New Horizons
6. Turkish Bath (Single)
7. Indian Lady (Single)

Rhys Chatham retrospective

From An Angel Moves Too Fast To See

Pitchfork review.
Links in comments.

Les Troubadours Du Roi Baudouin - Missa Luba

Who would've thought there are so many different catholic masses; it just gets weirder and weirder. Here's one I read about in "Can't Find My Way Home" by Martin Torgoff, a book on the history of drugs in America. Timothy Leary speaks: "This is around the time we first started calling it acid. I remember lying flat on our backs for hours. We'd listen to Ravi Shankar and Missa Louba, from Zaire, which is the mass, partly in Latin, done entirely with drums and African chanting. That was one of our favorites, along with the late quartets of Beethoven." I mean, how much more of a recommendation do you need?
A Belgian missionary, father Guido Haazen, came to Congo in the 1950s to preach and teach. He formed a catholic school for boys, and with it a choir of about 45 kids, with percussion section - "The Troubadours of King Baudouin". The present recording is an attempt to reinvent the lithurgy using native music as a basis. Many sections of the mass are latin texts adapted to the folk melodies.
I included liner notes and a couple of articles in the archive, so I'll keep it brief. A reissue LP (1969?) had the mass on one side and some of the original folk songs on the other. The original LP (1963) also had a few more tracks ("children's songs from Baluba") that were omitted from the subsequent reissues, not sure why. I located and included three of these as a bonus; the quality is lower than the rest.


Les Troubadours Du Roi Baudouin - Missa Luba, 1963
320kbps, 76mb on depositfiles
1. Dibwe Diambula Kabanda (Marriage Song)
2. Lutuku & A Bene Kanyoka (Emergence From Grief)
3. Ebu Ewale Kemai (Marriage Ballad)
4. Katunbu [Katumbo] (Dance)
5. Seya Ya Mama Ndalamba (Marital Celebration)
6. Banaha (Soldiers Song)
7. Twai Tshinaminai (Work Song)
8. Missa Luba: Kyrie
9. Missa Luba: Gloria
10. Missa Luba: Credo
11. Missa Luba: Sanctus
12. Missa Luba: Benedictus
13. Missa Luba: Agnus Dei
BONUS:
14. Kamiole [Children's songs from Baluba]
15. Kamuyambi [Children's songs from Baluba]
16. Katende [Children's songs from Baluba]

Alternative artwork

Rahsaan Roland Kirk - The Case of the Three-Sided Dream in Audio Color [1975]

Jazz musicians count a lot of freaks in their ranks. The most eccentric of them all might be Roland Kirk, and this could be his most far-out recording.
Three-Sided Dream is a concept album, the only true jazz concept album. In jazz, there were many album-length suites (eg. Duke's late 50's LPs) and thematic song collections (eg. Sinatra's "Songs for Swingin' Lovers"), but this is a concept album in a rock sense - united on many different levels, from the artwork and album presentation to the aural snippets joining the songs.
It is well-known that Kirk was very receptive to ideas that came to him in dreams; the most famous one is his trademark ability to play three horns at once. This LP is Kirk's tribute to his source of inspiration - his dreams. There are attempts to represent his dreams "in audio color", as the title would have it - surrealistic conversation bits, musique concrete snippets etc.
The physical presentation of the album is also a part of the concept: Three-Sided Dream is a double LP, but only three sides have music on them, the fourth is a blank 12-minute track with ~30 seconds of conversation at the very end. Each of the three sides is bookended with "Dreams". Unfortunately, digital presentation does not preserve these things.
There are two different versions for each of the tunes, The Entertainer even bearing it in the title ("done in the style of..."). I guess this is an attempt to represent transformations of the familiar pieces in dreams. BTW, Freaks For The Festival is a reworking of Kirk's signature piece "Three for the Festival", named so for the three-horns-at-once theme.
Many of the things Kirk does here would be considered gimmicks by the "real jazzmen" - like tampering with the physical format of the record. So, the aesthetic sensibility is more rock than jazz. But the music itself is pure jazz - electrified and funky, but still real jazz, not fusion or 70s-Miles-style avantgarde.
Highly recommended!


Rahsaan Roland Kirk - The Case of the Three-Sided Dream in Audio Color, 1975
95mb on megaupload or badongo
1. Conversation
2. Bye Bye Blackbird
3. Horses
4. High Heel Sneakers
5. Dream
6. Echoes Of Primitive Ohio And Chili Dogs
7. The Entertainer (Done In The Style Of The Blues)
8. Freaks For The Festival
9. Dream
10. Portrait Of Those Beautiful Ladies
11. Dream
12. The Entertainer
13. Dream
14. Dream
15. Portrait Of Those Beautiful Ladies
16. Dream
17. Freaks For The Festival
18. sesroH
19. Bye Bye Blackbird
20. Conversation

The Carl Stalling Project, Vol.1+2: Music from Warner Bros. Cartoons 1936-1958

The Carl Stalling Project, Vol.1: Music from Warner Bros. Cartoons 1936-1958

Amazon review: For fans of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, et al., this is the essential cartoon soundtrack as well as a monument to surrealism. During his 22 years as a composer for Warner Bros. animated shorts, Stalling invented the musical vocabulary of cartoons. Producer Hal Willner has lovingly assembled a sonic collage that showcases Stalling's compositional genius and uncanny ability to borrow a tune. It's a whirling collection of random moments, chock full of music you never knew you knew, from Bugs Bunny's theme from "Rabbit Fire" to Raymond Scott's "Powerhouse" to Stalling's own "Woo! Woo!" Also included in the mix: outtakes from recording sessions, and several complete scores.

AMG review: The first volume in The Carl Stalling Project series is a revelation; more than just an essential part of a Warner Bros. staff that generated some of the finest and most inspired productions in the history of animation, Stalling was a visionary whose work deserves consideration among the finest American avant-garde music ever recorded. As these 15 selections from WB cartoons dating between 1936 and 1958 attest, his cut and paste style — a singular collision between jazz, classical, pop, and virtually everything else in between — was unprecedented in its utter disregard for notions of time, rhythm, and compositional development; Stalling didn't just break the rules, he made them irrelevant. That in the process he created music beloved by succeeding generations of children is more impressive still — perhaps even unwittingly, Stalling introduced the avant-garde into the mainstream, and as popular music continues to diversify and hybridize, his stature as a pioneer rightfully continues to grow.

Mediafire:
Vol.1 - 192kbps, 107mb
Vol.2 - 320kbps, 174mb

Pierre Henri and Spooky Tooth - Ceremony: An Electronic Mass

Yet another, possibly the weirdest entry in the list of Catholic-Mass-as-pop albums. This is a brainchild of the french composer Pierre Henri, the XXth century classical/avantgarde artist, known for his experimental electronic music and musique concrete works. He enlisted a british blues-rock band Spooky Tooth as studio musicians. The end product sounds kinda like Hawkwind with Stockhausen instead of Dik Mik manning the electronics. The resulting LP was marketed as a Spooky Tooth album.

I got it at the wonderful Closet of Curiosities blog, but it is also available at the Mutant Sounds and Zappadalata.
Also, a review.


Pierre Henri and Spooky Tooth - Ceremony: An Electronic Mass on 4shared
1. Confession
2. Have Mercy
3. Credo
4. Offering
5. Hosanna
6. Prayer

PS I added a tag mass

Kazutoki Umezu - Pandora's Cocktail

A friend of mine shared this some time ago. Three of the four sharebee links expired for the lack of attention, which is a shame. Umezu and Ribot - what more can you ask for?


Kazutoki Umezu - Pandora's Cocktail
256kbps, 93mb on megaupload
1. Wow Wow
2. Shou-Chiku-Bai
3. A Reverend Utterance
4. Chimtchack Salghum
5. They Craved the Miracles
6. Soul Makkori
7. Interlude
8. Wonbat Walk
9. Mercurial Gulf
10. Bizarre
11. Kumamoto

Kazutoki Umezu - Clarinet, Sax (Alto), Sax (Soprano)

Kenny Wollesen - Percussion, Drums

Brad Jones - Bass

Marc Ribot - Guitar

I shared Umezu's Eclecticism here before.
Also check out Kazutoki Umezu & Tom Cora - Abandon, an all-improvized live set recorded at Roulette in New York in October 1987, and available at the wonderful WFMU blog

Drummers of the Societe Absolument Guinin - Voodoo Drums

Here's one that falls more in the category of weird shit than in the category of timeless music to stay with you forever.
The label says the following: "This release features the Voodoo Drums of Haiti and was recorded by Soul Jazz Records in Port-au-Prince, Haiti."
Review from allaboutjazz.com


Drummers of the Societe Absolument Guinin - Voodoo Drums
REUP: 320kbps, 97mb on depositfiles

Silver Apples - Silver Apples + Contact

AMG says: Decades after their brief yet influential career first ground to a sudden and mysterious halt, the Silver Apples remain one of pop music's true enigmas: a surreal, almost unprecedented duo, their music explored interstellar drones and hums, pulsing rhythms and electronically-generated melodies years before similar ideas were adopted in the work of acolytes ranging from Suicide to Spacemen 3 to Laika. The Silver Apples formed in New York in 1967 and comprised percussionist Danny Taylor and lead vocalist Simeon, a bizarre figure who played an instrument also dubbed the Simeon, which (according to notes on the duo's self-titled 1968 debut LP) consisted of "nine audio oscillators and eighty-six manual manual controls...The lead and rhythm oscillators are played with the hands, elbows and knees and the bass oscillators are played with the feet." Although the utterly uncommercial record — an ingenious cacophony of beeps, buzzes and beats — sold poorly, the Silver Apples resurfaced a year later with their sophomore effort, Contact, another far-flung outing which fared no better than its predecessor. After the record's release, the duo seemingly vanished into thin air, perhaps returning to the alien world from whence they purportedly came.


Silver Apples - Silver Apples
AMG review
256kbps, 60mb on sharebee
1. Oscillations
2. Seagreen Serenades
3. Lovefingers
4. Program
5. Velvet Cave
6. Whirly-Bird
7. Dust
8. Dancing Gods
9. Misty Mountain


Silver Apples - Contact
AMG review
256kbps, 75mb on sharebee LINK REMOVED
1. You And I
2. Water
3. Ruby
4. Gypsy Love
5. You're Not Foolin' Me
6. I Have Known Love
7. A Pox On You
8. Confusion
9. Fantasies

Oskar Sala - My Fascinating Instrument

In 1930, Dr. Friedrich Trautwein invented the Trautonium, the only instrument in the world capable of producing subharmonics, which are the mirror opposite of harmonics, or 'ghost' note like playing a string on a violin only half held down. Oscar Sala, a young student of Trautwein's, pioneered the development of the instrument and made the Mixtur-Trautonium, an improved polyphonic instrument which was used in the soundtrack of Alfred Hitchcock's film The Birds, as the instrument sounded more ominous than the sound of real birds. The Trautonium has advantages over a synthesizer giving freedom of intonation like a fretless string instrument to play microtones and continuous, unrestricted variations of pitch, tone and volume. The player makes contact with a wire stretched over a metal strip to create a circuit. It was a forerunner to the modular synthesizers of the 1960s. Nearly all knowledge of the performance and workings of the Trautonium has died with Oscar Sala in 2002, but the album My Fascinating Instrument, which is available today, is testament to Sala's musical genius. @

A lengthy article on the composer and the instrument, and a shorter one; по русски.


Oskar Sala - My Fascinating Instrument
REUP:320kbps, 143mb on mediafire
1. Fantasy In Three Parts For Mixturtrautonium Solo
- Demonstration
- Skala Nuova
- Farbmelodie
2. "Speech Of The Dead Christ From The Universe Saying There Is No God"
3. Largo
4. Fanfare
5. Impression Electronique
6. Electronic Dance Suite For Mixturtrautonium Solo And Mixturorchestra (Tape) in five parts
- Concertando rubato
- Espressivo
- Giocoso
- Strepitoso
- Furioso

Jody Harris and Robert Quine - Escape

Robert Quine playing with Jody Harris, who appeared on this blog before as a guitar player on James White and the Blacks' LP. Harris been with James White/Chance from the beginning, appearing on other Contortions records, including the notorious No New York LP; he also played with other "downtown" bands and personalities - Golden Palominos, John Zorn, Lydia Lunch, and his own instrumental band the Raybeats.
This one, Escape, is quite experimental - it's more of two guys fooling around in the studio while the tape is rolling kind of record, somewhat like Fripp's No Pussyfooting stuff. Quine himself called the first track, 13-minute-long Flagpole Jitters, "intentionally abrasive" or some such. It sounds like something a college-radio DJ would put on to broadcast his coolness credentials while he's out with a reefer.


Jody Harris and Robert Quine - Escape
66 mb on sharebee
1. Flagpole Jitters
2. Don't Throw That Knife
3. Up in Daisy's Penthouse
4. Termites of 1938
5. Pardon My Clutch

James White and the Blacks - Off White

An album by James Chance AKA James White, the ultimate funk-noise purveyor. One of the many projects to which Robert Quine lent his guitar skills after the dissolution of the Voidoids. Quine only plays on Almost Black Pts. 1+2 and Off Black, it's Jody Harris on the rest of the album.
This is an expanded edition, including an alternate mix of Contort Yourself, three live tracks from Soul Exorcism bootleg, and a rare "Chance-murders-christmas" recording. I can't help but brag that I have this on vinyl.


James White and the Blacks - Off White
Personnel and song details
1. Contort Yourself (August Darnell Remix)
2. Contort Yourself
3. Stained Sheets
4. (Tropical) Heat Wave
5. Almost Black Part 1
6. White Savages
7. Off Black
8. Almost Black Part 2
9. White Devil
10. Bleached Black
11. Christmas With Satan
12. Disposable You (Live)
13. Don't Stop Till You Get Enough (Live)
14. Exorcise The Funk (Live)


Get it as a part of Irresistible Impulse box set: CDs 1 and 2 (Buy The Contortions / Theme from Grutzi Elvis / Off White / selections from Soul Exorcism), CDs 3 and 4 (Sax Maniac / selections from Melt Yourself Down / Flaming Demonics / The Judy Taylor Sessions).

The Dream World of Dion McGregor + Shut Up, Little Man!

Two Three! artefacts of the audio verite craze. I uploaded them some half a year ago, but could not get around to writing the annotation.

Dion McGregor was a homeless gay bohemian from NY. He wanted to be a songwriter for Broadway musicals, and while waiting for his big break in show business, he couch-surfed with his friends, lovers, and acquaintances. One of his hosts was fascinated with Dion's habit of talking in his sleep and attempted to document it. This LP compiles several recordings of Dion McGregor narrating his dreams. This isn't just mumblemumble, though - these are clearly articulated stories with dialog and all. A few of them border on nightmares and often end with the speaker waking up with a muffled scream. You can hear New York street noises in the background, as he slept by an open window.
This record came out in 1964, and was accompanied by a book of transcriptions with illustrations by Edward Gorey (who also did the cover art for the record). Two more recordings came out recently, containing the stories which were deemed inappropriate for publication in 1960s.

The Dream World of Dion McGregor (He Talks In His Sleep) Also, more material on a Tzadik release Dion McGregor Dreams Again
REUP 2/19/14: both albums together on zippyshare
A nice article on him, here.


Shut Up, Little Man! is a collection of recordings made in the late 80s by Eddie Lee and Mitchell - two guys living in a cheap apartment in SF. Their next-door neighbours were Peter and Raymond - a pair of violent psychotics, who spent their time either passed out in drunken stupor, or verbally (and sometimes physically) abusing each other. After receiving a death threat from Raymond, Eddie Lee and Mitchell decided they have to record their neighbours' conversations - just in case. Gradually, they became fascinated with Peter and Raymond's drunken rants; the tapes were passed around among their friends as an audio joke. The recordings grew in popularity and were commercially released on CD in 1992; after that, they became a true underground in-joke, with a comic book, a theater production, and a short movie based on them; the lines like "Shut your fuckin' mouth!" or "I want to kill!" were extensively sampled on many musical recordings.

Peter and Raymond - Shut Up, Little Man!
REUP: On mediafire

Art Ensemble Of Chicago with Brigitte Fontaine - Comme à la Radio

Avant-chanteuse collaborates with a famous free-jazz group on a set of pop songs from another planet. Very unusual listen.


Art Ensemble Of Chicago with Brigitte Fontaine - Comme à la Radio
REUP: 70 mb on depositfiles
1. Comme à la radio
2. Tanka 2
3. Le brouillard
4. J'ai 26 ans
5. L'été l'été
6. Encore
7. Leo
8. Les petits chevaux
9. Tanka 1
10. Lettre à Monsieur le chef de gare de La Tour De Carol
11. Le Goudron
12. Le Noir C'est Mieux Choi

I'll toss in two more avant-vocal albums:
NEW LINKS 2/05/2014
Jeanne Lee and Ran Blake - The Newest Sound Around (1961), 91mb on 4shared
Reviews: allaboutjazz, allmusic

Patty Waters - College Tour (1966), 71 mb on depositfiles
Review: examiner