Still swimming in Jazz and Funk Breaks from Tru Thoughts thanks to an Amie Street blowout a week or so back. New artists to me that are great finds are Diesler, Hot 8 Brass Band, and Kinny. On the same label but more on the heavy downbeat chanteuse is Lizzy Parks, her voice could make me use Windows and like it, she's that good.
Electronic hmm? I just bought a handful of CDs of such things (the newest VNV Nation, Triarii, and In Strict Confidence.) Mind you, my electronic music interests are fairly restricted to the industrial genre. Am right now downloading Attrition and some Godspeed you! from emusic.
Currently trying to decide whether to download the latest offering from Breakbeat Paradise Recordings Work That Sucker EP - Pale The Kid
Here's some favourites from the label. It's the sort of music I like to put on when getting ready to go out, nothing too complicated, seriously funky, puts you in a good mood and gets you out the door.
Funkaholic EP - BadboE (favourite - track 2 - What You Wanna Do (Mash and Munkee Remix) )
Funky Breaks - EP - Various (particular favourite - track 3 - Strike3 - The Infamous)
Nu Skool Summer Breaks - Various (can't decide on a favourite, either track 1 or 2)
Walk Out Laughing EP - BadboE (track 1)
Street Assassin - Basement Freaks (track 3 - never fails to get me moving)
elwoodicious - love Kinny's track (2) on here and Alice Russell is back (same label), Under The Munka Moon Selection (hmm, not electronic really, but I do love her voice)
I'll have to investigate Lizzy Parks
I downloaded the continuus mix tracks from 10 Years of Finger Lickin'yesterday. It was a rec from a thread at the other place (which I can't find again at the moment), any other suggestions in a similar vein would be most welcme.
Outside of the emu, the latest comp from Tectonic Plates is great, the new album by The Field is much better than I expected - poppier than before - and I've recently discovered the Full Pupp label - Blackbelt Andersen in particular.
I'm sure there are more, I'll add them when the brain cell starts working again.
New discovery on heavy rotation: Pink and Purple by Alan Wilkis. Two tracks are free and the album is only $1.59 USD so what are you waiting for? Get your sweaty, skanky early 80's Minneapolis funk on!
martyna, Parks is dirty cheap at Amie street, you can grab both albums for less than $4 USD. (I sound like a total Street shill but man can some deals be dug there!)
And I now have the Alan Wilkis and Lizzy Parks albums in my collection. Excellent recs, and you shall be rewarded in Simon Sez.
@thirstyear - I really really want to use Songbird regularly, but on my collection it can sometimes grind to a halt. Rather frustrating. When it's acting up, I stick with foobar2000, which I also use regularly for maintaining my entire collection (I don't add all of my live recordings into the Songbird library as that would become far too cumbersome).
thom - what version of Songbird are you using? I think I remember older versions giving people similar problems to what you describe. The current version is 1.2. I discovered foobar2000 before I discovered Songbird and still use it to preview things before deciding if I'm going to keep them, but I never used it to maintain any part of my collection. I'm used to ITunes and Songbird is very similar, so it's an easy transition. I actually use Songbird to access my ITunes collection (on a FAT32 partition so I can access it from any OS) in LInux. My Itunes collection is 600G, and at least under Linux Songbird never misbehaves even with that much music. Sorry to hear it's not working for you.
Very soon my answer will be: Johnny Cash, At Folsom Prison (Legacy Edition). Fifty-one songs for 12 credits! And a 9.7 review from Pitchfork. Thank you to whoever mentioned this disc on these boards.
@thirstyear - It's been working better lately. And it's weird because I know that people with larger collections have no problem. My library is 240GB at this point, but foobar does a better job reading the live music and flac file which easily comes to over 1.5TB. I just need to stop reorganizing everything.
"Release description: The music of Will Thomas Long's and Danielle Baquet-Long's Celer is an absorbing combination of classic ambient, minimalism, and perhaps as the most distinct characteristic - overwhelming romanticism. Longing, melancholy, nostalgia, and the like seem to be recurring themes in Will and Dani's works. Engaged Touches begins with hypnotic sounds of a train clattering on its tracks. This departure seems to set the whole piece into a context of travel and distance, moving away from and towards something, someone. After a while these sounds give way to a rousing, majestic set of string loops. Similar phases of different field recordings and grandiose loops take turns throughout the whole work. This brings about a dynamics of contrasts: the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the general, the mundane and the exalted, and so on. The phases of string loops take up most of the album and evoke a yearning feeling of distance, grand and epic. The title, Engaged Touches, however, refers to quite the opposite, the close and intimate. It feels as if it is these kinds of touches that the string loops wailingly, albeit very gracefully, long for. This is exactly the kind of powerful romanticism that seems to define so much of Celer's work.- Because of the heavy presence of string loops Engaged Touches reminds me of some of Celer's earlier works. I would call it a classic Celer piece, if it weren't for the fact that their oeuvre spans only a few years back, and it would be too early to ponder the distinct phases and the internal relations in their output.- Engaged Touches is another beautiful addition to the rapidly growing body of work by Celer - an oeuvre that I already consider one of the most important in modern ambient music." Celer's blog
"This beguiling debut album has been wrecking our collective heads here in the office for some time. Pieced together from a plethora of unidentified samples, field recordings and found sounds, Kreng taps into a unique, almost indescribable corner of the musical universe that originates from, and proceeds to completely re-imagine, the world of music for film and theatre. The eleven pieces here were, indeed, originally made for a variety of theatre productions and retain that illusory quality that's so often associated with arts-based music, but without any of the site-specific pretension or impenetrability that you'd think goes hand hand in with this kind of material. There's an intensely overbearing darkness to this work, covered by a dense thicket of layered drones and fuzzy sound recordings, but as each piece progresses narrow cracks begin to emerge, letting in shards of colour and light painted through fragments of jazz and classical music re-painted in shimmering, luxurious colours. It's very hard to think of any singular points of reference, but there are elements here that remind us of Gyorgy Ligeti, Cliff Martinez, Moondog, Arvo Part, Arthur Lipsett, Deathprod, Bernard Herrmann and Dictaphone - while really sounding very little like any of them. "L'Autopsie Phenomenale De Dieu" is an incredible, utterly mesmerising collection of pieces that we have little doubt will entice, seduce and terrify you in equal measure and, needless to say, comes to you with our highest possible recommendation."
Here's something some of you may want to check out.
It's a blog run by a friend of mine (purely for his own amusement) and stuffed full of dj mixes you can download. New mixes are added as and when he's in the mood and cover breaks/house/dubstep and various things electronic.
There are some superb mixes there - I'm listening to Fuzzbox Inc ~ R.T.E Pulse Radio Mix as I write (very funky breaks), but there are many more. bass, beats & bleeps
Playing right now: Windy & Carl's "Consciousness". This is the first time in years I've listened to them. I had this album back in the day, but it got sold along with the rest during tougher times in my life. Picked it up on Amie Street today for a couple bucks.
The three albums on just previous to W&C:
Anders Parker - "Anders Parker"
Bill Frisell - "Disfarmer"
Terje Rypdal - "Skywards"
Interesting pick of The Cure, Daniel. I suppose I can hear it to some extent, but it seems like each time I've listened to the album I've heard a different influence. When I listened earlier today, I picked up some sounds that are straight out of Radiohead (of the Kid A variety).
Yeah, for some reason The XX is a band people want to associate with their influences. eMusic has a front page feature about the "Roots of The XX's Sound" or similar language. Here's a few of the acts that I've read sound like The XX:
Fugiya and Miyagi
M. Ward (the male singer's voice)
Breathless (90's shoegazer/dream pop band)
Jesus and Mary Chain (circa Darklands)
Massive Attack (circa Mezzanine)
Everything But The Girl
Chris Isaak
Belle & Sebastian
I'll have to give them another listen here in a bit. I can see where most of those could be in there, despite some strong difference amongst the artists, but I had not thought of M. Ward at all for his voice.
Hey, this place is still here? I thought Wanderer had it shut down. Still a slow year, but lately I'm listening to:
Future of the Left Spinnerette (Brody Dalle project) Obits (Are they well known? If not, they should be. Former singer of Hot Snakes, great stuff.) the new Cracker (surprisingly good) Various, Morr Music, Not Given Lightly - Think someone here mentioned this. An incredible compilation, Morr does it again. Minuit - good solid electro-pop, if not world-changing Trying out the Fol Chen on some recs, it's going to take some getting used to.
I haven't heard all of the new Obits yet, but what I've heard I like quite a bit.
Based on the recommendations for The Drums on 17dots, I've been listening to them quite a bit. Would have been great to have had it at the start of summer!
i picked up a bunch of rough guide cd's from the library - "rough guide to indian lounge" was a deflator. track 6 is worth having - all other stuff: meh - with the exception of the last track. good grief...how can anything that rips off a disney standard (ala belle in beauty in the beast) "when will it be my turn to fall in love" trot itself out as "indian lounge"...
now, the rough guide to japan is more like it.
anyone have a chance to chx out the antlers? heard one track on xm + dug it.
I snagged The Antlers a couple of weeks ago on Amie. Good mellow breakup type music. The almost atmospheric vibe runs throughout the album, so I think it's same to say that if you dug one track you'll dig them all.
I've got a 5 month working trip coming up soon, so I've been listening to all sorts in order to load up my player while travelling, something to suit all sorts of moods and occasions really:
Basic Channel, BCD & BCD2
Beat Pharmacy - Wikked Times Remixes & Steadfast
Bokoor Beats
Bottletop Presents Sound Affects, Africa
Box Of Dub - Dubstep and Future Dub
Various Bullwackies albums
Burial - Untrue & Burial
Clutchy Hopkins - Walking Backwards
Cobblestone Jazz - 23 Seconds & the newish Traffic Jam EP
Cuban Remix Project
Deadbeat - Journeymans Annual, Roots and Wire, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Deepchord - Vantage Isle Sessions
Dr L - Psyco On Da Bus & Forgotten Tracks From Da Hard Drive
Doug Wimbush - Trippy Notes For Bass
Dub Rascals Vol 1 & Vol 2
Dub Wiser - A New Millenium Of Dub, Behind The Dub & Chapter II, Tribute to Remixes
Dubmatix - Champion Sound Clash & Green and Gold
Fanga - Natural Juice
Fat Possum - various artists, lots of blues freebies from the website & T-Model Ford and R L Burnside albums, New Beats From the Delta
Fela Kuti - lots of the best afrobeat, most unavailable from emu
Groove Corporation - Sounds from the Elephant House albums
Heyoka - Whomp Gland Pineal Dub
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros - Global A Go-Go & Streetcore, plus various Clash faves.
King Britt - Presents Sister Gertrude Morgan
King Size Dub - various tracks from various in the series, only 1 available on emu though
Little Axe - Hard Grind, Champagne & Grits, The House That Wolf Built, Slow Fuse
Lulu Rouge - Bless You
Manasseh - Dub Plate Style albums, Meets the Equalizer
Manu Dibango - various tracks
Michael Rose - African Dub, African Roots, Warrior Dub
Miles Davis- various tracks
Minilogue - Elephants Parade, Jamaica, Hispaniola Remixes, Jamaica
Nigeria 70, Nigeria Disco Funk Special
Nu Afrobeat Experience
On-U Sound & Adrian Sherwood productions - various Dub Syndicate, Strange Parcels, Lee Perry etc
Orchestra Baobab - Bamba, Made In Dakar
Orlando Cachaito Lopez - Cachaito
Pitch Black - Ape To Angel, Empty Spaces Random Units, Frequencies Fall
Pulshar - Nospheratu, Babylon Fall Collection
Red Seal - Black Ops
Rhythm & Sound - See Mi Yah Remixes, The Versions, w The Artists, Showcase
Scratch Perry - various tracks from many albums
Select Cuts from Blood & Fire Vol 2 & 3
Si Para Usted, The Funky Beats of Revolutionary Cuba
Sofa Surfers - Cargo, See The Light, Constructions, doing this has just reminded me to load up some Kruder & Dorfmeister too
Super Biton De Segou
Talking Heads - various tracks
The Congos - Heart Of The Congos
The Danque!!
Tinariwen - Aman Iman Water Is Life, Ammassakoul
Tony Allen with Africa 70 - No Accommodation For Lagos, No Discrimination
Tosca - Suzuki In Dub, Souvenirs - The JAC Remixes, Fuck Dub Remixes
Trentemoller - various tracks
Twilight Circus & Twilight Dub Sound System - lots of tracks from most of their albums
Underworld - various tracks
Uzul Prod - Travelling without Moving
Vieux Farka Tore - Fondo, Remixed UFOs Over Bamako
Comments
wonder what that other place has to do to make me like it?
of course, he will never use windows. playing hard and fast with "if" + "then" happens.
Here's some favourites from the label. It's the sort of music I like to put on when getting ready to go out, nothing too complicated, seriously funky, puts you in a good mood and gets you out the door.
Funkaholic EP - BadboE (favourite - track 2 - What You Wanna Do (Mash and Munkee Remix) )
Funky Breaks - EP - Various (particular favourite - track 3 - Strike3 - The Infamous)
Nu Skool Summer Breaks - Various (can't decide on a favourite, either track 1 or 2)
Walk Out Laughing EP - BadboE (track 1)
Street Assassin - Basement Freaks (track 3 - never fails to get me moving)
Also enjoying Waldeck Ballroom Stories - sort of nu jazz/lounge
and this by Smoove & Turrell
elwoodicious - love Kinny's track (2) on here and Alice Russell is back (same label), Under The Munka Moon Selection (hmm, not electronic really, but I do love her voice)
I'll have to investigate Lizzy Parks
I downloaded the continuus mix tracks from 10 Years of Finger Lickin'yesterday. It was a rec from a thread at the other place (which I can't find again at the moment), any other suggestions in a similar vein would be most welcme.
Cooly G
Xpansul & Imek
Meanderthals (great name too!)
City Center
Dakota Suite
Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas
Moderat
this recent single on the Fenou label
Assorted releases by Bvdub from emu and elsewhere
Last year's Cottage Industries 5 compilation is one I keep intending to get, lots of interesting stuff.
Milky Disco 2 which, despite the new premium priced service eMu are selling, is still mis-catalogued as an album by Hatchback
Anything by Benjamin Brunn (with or without Move D) seems to be worth a try to me too.
Outside of the emu, the latest comp from Tectonic Plates is great, the new album by The Field is much better than I expected - poppier than before - and I've recently discovered the Full Pupp label - Blackbelt Andersen in particular.
I'm sure there are more, I'll add them when the brain cell starts working again.
martyna, Parks is dirty cheap at Amie street, you can grab both albums for less than $4 USD. (I sound like a total Street shill but man can some deals be dug there!)
And I now have the Alan Wilkis and Lizzy Parks albums in my collection. Excellent recs, and you shall be rewarded in Simon Sez.
@thirstyear - I really really want to use Songbird regularly, but on my collection it can sometimes grind to a halt. Rather frustrating. When it's acting up, I stick with foobar2000, which I also use regularly for maintaining my entire collection (I don't add all of my live recordings into the Songbird library as that would become far too cumbersome).
I'm also about to start making my way through various Tectonic singles and random Tru Thought artists over at Amie Street.
crop circle jerk 94 by megapuss.
if you hear it i think you'll agree...see K, i can recognize voices.
My new love in the Tiny Tigers EP Time For Tea, Go-Gos meets Sleater-Kinney by way of Bikini Kill. Delicious.
Bleep.com think this is exclusive to them :-)
Engaged Touches by Celer
"Release description:
The music of Will Thomas Long's and Danielle Baquet-Long's Celer is an absorbing combination of classic ambient, minimalism, and perhaps as the most distinct characteristic - overwhelming romanticism. Longing, melancholy, nostalgia, and the like seem to be recurring themes in Will and Dani's works.
Engaged Touches begins with hypnotic sounds of a train clattering on its tracks. This departure seems to set the whole piece into a context of travel and distance, moving away from and towards something, someone. After a while these sounds give way to a rousing, majestic set of string loops. Similar phases of different field recordings and grandiose loops take turns throughout the whole work. This brings about a dynamics of contrasts: the concrete and the abstract, the particular and the general, the mundane and the exalted, and so on. The phases of string loops take up most of the album and evoke a yearning feeling of distance, grand and epic. The title, Engaged Touches, however, refers to quite the opposite, the close and intimate. It feels as if it is these kinds of touches that the string loops wailingly, albeit very gracefully, long for.
This is exactly the kind of powerful romanticism that seems to define so much of Celer's work.- Because of the heavy presence of string loops Engaged Touches reminds me of some of Celer's earlier works. I would call it a classic Celer piece, if it weren't for the fact that their oeuvre spans only a few years back, and it would be too early to ponder the distinct phases and the internal relations in their output.- Engaged Touches is another beautiful addition to the rapidly growing body of work by Celer - an oeuvre that I already consider one of the most important in modern ambient music."
Celer's blog
Free Celer EP @ Rainmusic
Another one:
- A new and notable arrival from the Miasmah label. (the old Miasmah thread is dead):
Kreng - L'Autopsie Phenomenale de Dieu
- Kreng has two free EP's out at Archive.org:
Pleiades EP and Zomer EP - Both of them is a part of the Fant00m Collection
Kreng @ Myspace
- And a little bit of patriotism:
My warmest recommendations for this new arrival from a really bright young Danish talented laptop guy who makes excellent dubby ambient electronica:
Mike Sheridan - I Syv Sind
Mike is about 16 years old and has recently been working with Else Marie Pade who is just thrilled about his music.
By all means, do check this one out !
Mike Sheridan @ Myspace
It's a blog run by a friend of mine (purely for his own amusement) and stuffed full of dj mixes you can download. New mixes are added as and when he's in the mood and cover breaks/house/dubstep and various things electronic.
There are some superb mixes there - I'm listening to Fuzzbox Inc ~ R.T.E Pulse Radio Mix as I write (very funky breaks), but there are many more.
bass, beats & bleeps
enjoy!
The three albums on just previous to W&C:
Anders Parker - "Anders Parker"
Bill Frisell - "Disfarmer"
Terje Rypdal - "Skywards"
Craig
Fugiya and Miyagi
M. Ward (the male singer's voice)
Breathless (90's shoegazer/dream pop band)
Jesus and Mary Chain (circa Darklands)
Massive Attack (circa Mezzanine)
Everything But The Girl
Chris Isaak
Belle & Sebastian
Among others.
Craig
Future of the Left
Spinnerette (Brody Dalle project)
Obits (Are they well known? If not, they should be. Former singer of Hot Snakes, great stuff.)
the new Cracker (surprisingly good)
Various, Morr Music, Not Given Lightly - Think someone here mentioned this. An incredible compilation, Morr does it again.
Minuit - good solid electro-pop, if not world-changing
Trying out the Fol Chen on some recs, it's going to take some getting used to.
Based on the recommendations for The Drums on 17dots, I've been listening to them quite a bit. Would have been great to have had it at the start of summer!
Craig
now, the rough guide to japan is more like it.
anyone have a chance to chx out the antlers? heard one track on xm + dug it.
68
I highly recommend it.
Craig
Basic Channel, BCD & BCD2
Beat Pharmacy - Wikked Times Remixes & Steadfast
Bokoor Beats
Bottletop Presents Sound Affects, Africa
Box Of Dub - Dubstep and Future Dub
Various Bullwackies albums
Burial - Untrue & Burial
Clutchy Hopkins - Walking Backwards
Cobblestone Jazz - 23 Seconds & the newish Traffic Jam EP
Cuban Remix Project
Deadbeat - Journeymans Annual, Roots and Wire, Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Deepchord - Vantage Isle Sessions
Dr L - Psyco On Da Bus & Forgotten Tracks From Da Hard Drive
Doug Wimbush - Trippy Notes For Bass
Dub Rascals Vol 1 & Vol 2
Dub Wiser - A New Millenium Of Dub, Behind The Dub & Chapter II, Tribute to Remixes
Dubmatix - Champion Sound Clash & Green and Gold
Fanga - Natural Juice
Fat Possum - various artists, lots of blues freebies from the website & T-Model Ford and R L Burnside albums, New Beats From the Delta
Fela Kuti - lots of the best afrobeat, most unavailable from emu
Groove Corporation - Sounds from the Elephant House albums
Heyoka - Whomp Gland Pineal Dub
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros - Global A Go-Go & Streetcore, plus various Clash faves.
King Britt - Presents Sister Gertrude Morgan
King Size Dub - various tracks from various in the series, only 1 available on emu though
Little Axe - Hard Grind, Champagne & Grits, The House That Wolf Built, Slow Fuse
Lulu Rouge - Bless You
Manasseh - Dub Plate Style albums, Meets the Equalizer
Manu Dibango - various tracks
Michael Rose - African Dub, African Roots, Warrior Dub
Miles Davis- various tracks
Minilogue - Elephants Parade, Jamaica, Hispaniola Remixes, Jamaica
Nigeria 70, Nigeria Disco Funk Special
Nu Afrobeat Experience
On-U Sound & Adrian Sherwood productions - various Dub Syndicate, Strange Parcels, Lee Perry etc
Orchestra Baobab - Bamba, Made In Dakar
Orlando Cachaito Lopez - Cachaito
Pitch Black - Ape To Angel, Empty Spaces Random Units, Frequencies Fall
Pulshar - Nospheratu, Babylon Fall Collection
Red Seal - Black Ops
Rhythm & Sound - See Mi Yah Remixes, The Versions, w The Artists, Showcase
Scratch Perry - various tracks from many albums
Select Cuts from Blood & Fire Vol 2 & 3
Si Para Usted, The Funky Beats of Revolutionary Cuba
Sofa Surfers - Cargo, See The Light, Constructions, doing this has just reminded me to load up some Kruder & Dorfmeister too
Super Biton De Segou
Talking Heads - various tracks
The Congos - Heart Of The Congos
The Danque!!
Tinariwen - Aman Iman Water Is Life, Ammassakoul
Tony Allen with Africa 70 - No Accommodation For Lagos, No Discrimination
Tosca - Suzuki In Dub, Souvenirs - The JAC Remixes, Fuck Dub Remixes
Trentemoller - various tracks
Twilight Circus & Twilight Dub Sound System - lots of tracks from most of their albums
Underworld - various tracks
Uzul Prod - Travelling without Moving
Vieux Farka Tore - Fondo, Remixed UFOs Over Bamako
More to be added.....
Plus lots of individual tracks
Most of these are on emu
Oh, hold on, I've got it! I'ts a Simon Sez take over bid!
Lots to check out - Thanks!