A highly recommendable concept album series + anti-pop rant…

People from bb.jamiroquai.com and jamirotalk.net possibly do know of me as a guy completely obsessed with three specific early-70’s records, all of them performed by the great Herbie Hancock’s sextet. An interesting fact about this sextet is that it had no name (I know of). All of the sextet’s members adopted a Swahili name. Hancock took the pseudonym/name ‘Mwandishi’, and that’s how the 1969-1972 sextet, the three albums the sextet spawned, and the ‘69-’72 era of Hancock’s career got their unofficial names. The albums are (chronologically):

1. Mwandishi; (1970. Here’s a fun fact, it was recorded on New Year’s Eve between’69 and ‘70)
2. Crossings; (1971)
3. Sextant. (1972)

I called this series a ‘concept series’ for a couple of reasons, them being:

• All of the albums had this sort of stTructure that had one long track occupy one side of the record, with two other, shorter ones on the other side.
• The albums had their side-long tracks shift sides on every album. On the first and the third one, the tracks were on side B. The second LP had the epic on side A. To put it simply – the epics and the two shorts changed their place on every next LP in a zig-zag fashion.
• Seemingly, each album ‘explored’ a certain kind of ‘enviroment’. Mwandishi was an album with an ‘underwater’ feeling. Crossings explored the limits of outer space, while Sextant seemed to be lurking around some sort of a strange surrounding – like a world within a machine.
• They are all just damn great.

Out of the three, Crossings is my favorite. Sextant is not as good as Mwandishi. It’s kinda too loud, noisy. Even Herbie himself said that he recorded the Headhunters LP because he was feeling that he went too far, made the sound noisy, and that he wanted to get back down to earth. Oh, and he was also plagued by his bad financial situation and the poor sales of Sextant, but he didn’t tell us that. ):

The band released their first two records on Warner, but then got kicked out because Crossings was selling badly, and because the two records recieved very mixed reviews. So Mr Hancock turned to Columbia, who decided to release Sextant. They all thought it was gonna be one fat, fat bitch-slap at Warner. Well, it wasn’t. Kids found out Sextant was really unbearable to listen to, and sold poorly, so the sextet disbanded(, so it really wasn’t the sort of situation that was a year later when Mike Oldfield would turn to Virgin records and Richard Branson after Tubular Bells was refused by every other label and get a huge hit from what everyone thought was shit). At the right point in time, too. Sextant’s a great album, too, no joke, but it did mark a drop in quality which could’ve killed the series if it sold well. After that, Herbie gathers a completely new band, called the Headhunters. And while M. Davis was talking to Jimi’s ghost via that Oujama (or however you call it) board, trying to recieve some heavenly advice from Jimi to find out what to do next (well, not really), the Headhunters released their self-titled debut only a year after the sextet fell apart. Instant hit. Haha. Yaey! Take that, Warner! Hancock’s popularity started spreading like a forest fire. At about the same time, Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon which turns out not to be as good as Meddle or Wish you Were Here, but was, and is still a fat seller, but that’s completely unrelated to this article, so we’ll stop here. Now for the rant:

FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU

No, wait… That’s not the rant. This is the rant:

I hate MTV. In fact, I hate all this simple and disposable music ‘performed’ (< Milli Vanilli reference there) by completely replacable artists that are according to one of themselves (will.i.am. or however that thing is called) ‘here today and gone tomorrow’. MTV and many record labels are literally showering us with unbearably bad, homogenous plastic crap many believe is ‘good’. Everything is the same these days – albums with two or three ‘hit’ singles, those other ten or nine tracks being only filler, all of them being repetitive tracks with no substance, history or feeling behind themselves, written by record label executives and computers specifically programmed for that. These days, it’s either a boy band, or some guy talking over two repetitive drums. (no rapper, just crapper, real hip-hop, just like the rest of the good music is hidden away) Should those be hitmakers? Guys with guitars and drums who don’t even know how to play their own instruments? Pop-punk princes and princesses who talk/yell/shit on top of a single chord repeated for 3 minutes and 40 seconds? Give me a break, it’s really sad to see people of my age have a spontaneous orgasm at the sheer mention of “Linkin Parkin’ Lot” or any other boy band out there who have no talent/whatever but still have suecess for they wear black clothing, nose/breast jobs or anything else alike. Music has never went anywhere without innovation, experimentation and most importantly – one’s own self. You can’t fake will and emotion, and put it into a song. You can’t possibly print a million hearts out on little pieces of paper and call it love – a symbol representative of something can’t be that something unless that very something is standing behind that symbol. What I’m asking here is where are the 27-minute epics gone? Where did we leave behind the strange time signatures and the exotic instruments? How did we let ourselves throw away our individuality in favour of masks and cliques? Why did we do that, and where are the messages we once stood for? All those things and all the answers to those questions are under a pile of dirt I today call ordinary pop. (Why people still rave around such truly awful music is beyond me…) I could talk about this for the rest of the night, but I’d just take things over the top, something I love to do, but am usually not supposed to.

My New Year’s Eve.

So, it was some 16-17 hours ago, pretty recent, no? To tell you the truth, I didn’t like it. The celebration was really, really awful, even worse than I expected. People were throwing firecrackers and all other kinds of blow-your-hand-up toys around. Plainly put, so many firecrackers went off at once, that the (official, professionally set up, and quite beautiful) firewoks were barely visible from the smoke. Just imagine. I was ready to turn away and go home as my watch was set precisely according to the GMT +1 (and every other one was either late or early), but then the fireworks started, and I just wanted to see if I could see them, so I stood and watched. Well, I could, but it was not so pleasant to close my eyes and cover my ears every single time some piece of shit goes off near me. This was probably the worst new year’s eve I’ve ever expirienced. Or not. Most of the other ones parallel it.

The song with which I entered new 2008 is Mike Oldfield’s “Amarok”. Or Prince’s “1999″. I don’t remember, but I’m pretty sure it’s the first one. So, once again, my album of the day for 1. I 2008. is… (drumroll)

Tracklist:

(Do you really think I’m that much of a  freak to post the ‘tracklist’ to an album which contains only one track that runs for an hour and two seconds and from which its ‘album’ got its name?) (Oh, by the way, the tape and LP releases cut the track in half at some 30 minutes. The LP edition is very rare, I heard. I saw one of those once in Belgrade last summer when I was on an album-shopping spree, but I didn’t buy it ’cause I didn’t have the money to do so.)

I don’t think I even need to explain why this album is so great.  It’s just got this kind of aura, and this fearlessness many works today don’t have. Sure, maybe it didn’t go into unexplored territory, but it’s still a musical adventure. Sadly, I never really find the time to listen to it start-to-end, without any interruption.

Review: The Cinematic Orchestra: “Motion” (1999)

Released in 1999, this was the Cinematic Orchestra’s debut album. The seven-track record lies in the fields of electro-jazz, trip-hop and downtempo, and of course, wide, oftenly creepy soundscapes (or in tiny claustrophobic little spaces). But while some songs may be very creepy, others are as much as welcoming. I myself don’t feel that a simple piece of text such as this one may be enough to describe an album, let alone describe it well, but I’m too weak to fight the urge to try…

The album opens with “Durian”, a 7-minute song that features some interesting vocal samples, strings, and a great pulsating bassline. Well, not exactly pulsating, but it does slowly become hypnotic. The song is relatively dark and misty (and would fit into a ‘private eye’ film easily) and dominated by keyboard effects, cymbals and horn samples. Well, at least until some five minutes in where it shifts into a funky and more upbeat passage which also works as a closer to the song. It is first led by a warm electric piano solo, to continue with a torrent of cute little trumpet squeaks and a heavily processed guitar (I think). A perfect introduction to an album.

“Ode to the Big Sea” opens with interesting percussion and some vocal samples. At some 1:20, a piano also joins the fun, and at 1:50 a trumpet occurs, too, and gives a wholly new atmosphere to the work. As I said, the drumming is good, and only gets better. At 3:40, a saxophone appears and… Well… Plays… The song ends as it started – with percussion, and leaves a great feeling behind.

End of side A (on some double LP releases, the side B itself), a 13-minute giant, “Night of the Iguana” follows, and if it isn’t as raw and rough as the other two tracks before, then bottle me. The song itself is also the first one I heard by this group, and it’s very good. The (as always, sampled) drumming is once again nice, and a sample of an alarm clock fading in and out at specific intervals makes this song a little more interesting. At 4:00, the second part of the suite begins. Led by several wind instruments played in unison, and a piano, it is no short of the genius of “Durian” and “Ode”. A little later, strings start fading in and out, and at circa 7:20, the drums and the alarm clock kick in again to continue. At 8:30, a jazzy, funky, sax solo kicks in, and plays on top of the drums and the (by now) more-than familiar alarm clock. At 11:13, the sax is replaced by a trumpet which does a solo that ends with the beginning of the coda at some 12:15-12:30. The coda obviously ends the whole song (and the LP’s side) with strings and the clock, only to leave a rather strange feeling burned into one’s mind.

The second side opens with “Channel 1 Suite”, which opens with a gentle acoustic guitar and some percussion in the back. Then the drums kick in. (by now, my genius has deducted that the whole album is drum-led) Then at some 52 seconds in, the clock pops back in. Is that meant to be some sort of joke, the clock? (Well, it might be better not to know… In fact, I’m not even gonna mention the clock from this point on.) You know, I always found the title of this song to be somewhat strange, but fitting. It might be all the packed tension in the song that gave it the title, as the words ‘Channel one’ sound as if they were ripped out from some thriller movie’s dark, creepy and evil TV station name that sends mind control beams across the globe instead of actual programme, those beams being something like advertisements, but with a slightly more sinister purpose.

Then “Bluebirds” begins with some furious drums. This song sounds strange, to say the least. Especially the saxophone. You know, I don’t have the nerves to listen to this song anymore, I’ll just say that it paralells “Bitches Brew” in dissonance, and reminds me of John Coltrane’s harmonic experimentations on “A Love Supreme”.

“And Relax!”, as track 6 is here. Just under 5 minutes, this is the shortest track on the album. It features a laid-back atmosphere, but don’t you even think that because of that it doesn’t fit the album well. In fact, it does quite well.

The album is closed by track 7, “Diabolous”. The song’s qualities aren’t short of the title – this song really is wicked. It’s stylish and wicked, a little less chilled than the previous track, but then again, better not make it too dreamy, it might just not fit into the album. In the second half of the song, female vocals are sampled. And, damn, if that voice isn’t powerful, then I don’t know what is. And then, as the ending to both the song and the album approaches, the song can only foreshadow the end. And it ends. All in all, yes, this is a good album, but I can’t say it’s an excellent one, despite that it keeps a uniformal and consistent sound through all its tracks. I’ve listened to both better and worse albums, and I have listened to both more sinister, and more bright-hearted ones, however, that doesn’t mean that this album is not above-average. If you have a lot money to spend, spend some of it on this. If you don’t… Then don’t.

Video games and albums that go together very well + OTHR STOOF

You know, I don’t like video game music a lot, it’s kind of obtrusive. That’s why I always knock down the sound and play something from my collection to them. Strangely, some albums fit very well with some games. For example, Funkadelic’s 1970 “Free Your Mind… And Your Ass Will Follow” goes well with Super Mario Bros. 3, as do good old Jimi’s “Electric Ladyland” and James Brown’s four year younger “Hell”. I don’t really know why… Must be that special kind of feeling acid rock and soul have to themselves – for acid rock, it’s that raw, tripped out sound, and a very direct one, too. …And soul is just great. Tracks 1 and 3 on “Free Your Mind…” go especially well with the game. Another Mario game, this time Super Mario World goes very well with another Funkadelic album (and a favorite of mine, too) – “Uncle Jam Wants You!” (1979). You know, the record with the iconic 15-minute dance track, “(Not Just) Knee Deep” which was later heavily sampled by hip-hop artists. Oh, and it has the only dancable guitar solo I know of, starting at 7 minutes into the classic. Then you got another Mario game, Super Mario 64, which has whole 3 albums (or maybe even more!) like ordered for it – The Beatles’ “Let it Be”, Led Zep’s “Led Zeppelin II” and Jimi’s “Are You Expirienced”. Hell, “What is and What Should Never be” even has lyrics that fit course 15 – ‘castles in the sky’ and so on…

Another game, this time not a Mario one, but a Zelda one – “The Minish Cap” or however you call it also has a musical companion, Grant Green’s magnum opus, “Idle Moments”, originally released in 1964. I don’t know why, but despite the huge ‘mood gap’ between the album and the game, they still seem to share a lot with each other. Track 2, “Jean de Fleur” fits one of the levels especially well. Oh, and while we’re talking about games and music, check this out. Might be very old news, but I find it nice and mention-worthy how they brought in one of the greatest musicians of all time to work on the music for one of the greatest games of all time. (Sadly, the Sonic franchise is today as dead as Michael Jackson’s career)

(Here begins OTHR STOOF)

Here are some great (free) games I’ve been playing in the past few days:

• Armor Picross II ;
• Nitrome’s Jack Frost, Magic Touch and Frost Bite;
• Gotmail?’s The Privacy (solved), Strawberry Tomato and Bon Voyage (sequel to “Strawberry Tomato”) .

And as a closer, here’s my personal album of the day:

Grant Green: “Street of Dreams”

It’s a great record, mainly because it’s a laid-back/chill thing and gets you into a great mood. And it fits bad weather perfectly. I not only like it, but I recommend it also. Here’s a track listing:

Side A:

1. I Wish you Love;
2. Lazy Afternoon.

Side B:

1. Street of Dreams;
2. Somewhere in the Night.

The runtime is some 33 minutes. Pretty short, but I don’t mind that.