music - others

Dallas-area radio DJ Jeff K currently announces sports and classic rock, but previously had a career (in the late '80s/early '90s) as a John Peel-like pioneer of electronic dance music. He's gradually fleshing out a discography of his radio shows and mixes on his website. When I lived in Dallas I taped his show off and on from '93 - '95, and, working in my painting studio, re-listened to the dazzling guest mixes from the likes of DIY Crew, DJ Icey, Utah Saints (!), Gavin Hardkiss, and others. When I moved back to NYC in '95, those tapes provided me with tunes for about a year (on a portable tape player, until I got the rest of my music out of storage -- yawn, sorry).

How au courant was Jeff K back in the day? In this broadcast of Oct. 17, 1992 [.mp3] go to the 35:53 mark for the "Edge Club Techno Screamer," a regular feature. That week's Screamer was "Sea Snake," by Drexciya, who at that moment were completely new and unknown but are now regarded as giants in the field. According to Discogs they "first came into the public eye" in 1994, and here's Jeff K playing them two years before that.

Drexciya was secretive about their membership and plans from the beginning, so it's no surprise to hear Jeff K wondering aloud on the show who they were:

...in the mail this week, all the latest records from Detroit, some new Underground Resistance... and some new Shockwave. The latest from Shockwave is an EP called 'Deep Sea Dweller' by Drexciya, and Jackmaster Joe Curry is still in the studio with us and we tried to find out 'Who is Drexciya?' and he thinks, well, it's probably just the guys from Underground Resistance, could be Mad Mike, we don't know. But anyway, it's a very very fine track, we're going to hear 'Sea Snake' from the 'Deep Sea Dweller' EP, it's this week's Techno Screamer, on Edge Club 94.

"Cry Uncle" [Bandcamp]
"So Clear" [Bandcamp]

From their 2005 LP We're an American Band (wait -- wasn't that Grand Funk Railroad?)
Rich Stim's vocals and words were a high point of the late '70s "fuck you" phase of rock. (E.g., PCBs / Crushed Ice / Tidal Wave / Kid Stuff.) It's great to hear him still being bleak and funny, decades after "punk." One mistake of MX-80 Sound's two early '80s Ralph Records releases was submerging Stim's vocalisms in the mix. The earlier LP Hard Attack found a better balance of discordant guitar and cheeky lyrics.
"Cry Uncle" and "So Clear" adopt a slower pace but you won't find much better psychedelic nihilist rapping on the market these days.

Listen (2012)

Talking (2010)

Santos (2015)

Info paraphrased from Discogs:

Stefan Schwander (composer, producer)
"Harmonious Thelonious is a solo-project focusing on rough and dense beats and textures inspired by american minimalist music and african rhythm patterns."
Schwander also records as: A Rocket In Dub, Antonelli Electr., Leroy Versions, Repeat Orchestra, and Rhythm Maker

The Harmonious Thelonious website describes the work as "american minimalists vs. african drumming vs. european sequencing."

In past projects Schwander has worked with grooveboxes such as the Elektron Machinedrum, which may be what's meant by "European sequencing." As for American minimalists you can hear some Glass/Reich references but also Moondog and a hint of John Cale/Terry Riley's Church of Anthrax. Not sure where Thelonious Monk fits in; non-American influences could include Carl Orff and King Sunny Ade. In each of the 24 songs linked above, a steady multi-instrumental groove is maintained, with "tribal" sounding percussion based on samples of real drums, congas, etc, and some synthetic percussion. The main connections to Schwander's earlier work are catchy melodies based on simple overlaid figures, in this sense he is more inventive and ingratiating than say, Steve Reich. The melodies may be basic but have to sustain interest over six minutes, and these all do, through variations and "dropouts."

One odd feature of the music is samples of cheering, whistling crowd noise that can be heard in the background of several tracks. Rather than the narcissism or manipulation of a TV laugh track, these sounds add grit and texture in a musique concrète or industrial manner. [Update: On further listening, the crowd noise becomes more irritating and unnecessary. The earliest release, Talking, is the worst: the same loop of an appreciative whistle is heard repeatedly throughout the LP; by the end it's a distraction from what would otherwise be excellent melodies and percussion.]

XTC's Skylarking (1986) was an attempt by musician-producer Todd Rundgren to craft a Sgt Pepper or Pet Sounds for XTC -- a cohesive concept LP instead of just the latest group of tunes. He succeeded, it's a "tight" album, considered by many pundits to be the UK band's best.
At the time of the release XTC's Andy Partridge complained that the mix was thin.
Re-listening to the original vinyl version after several years, he's right, but it wasn't important at the time because the overall brilliance of the songs, the concept, and Rundgren's quirky, George Martin-like contributions (orchestrations, sound collage, pacing) made you not notice the lack of bass and warmth so much.
Partridge now has control of all the tapes and a few years ago discovered that an electronic error was made when the multitrack mix was mixed down to stereo, prior to vinyl mastering. The polarity was reversed, says Partridge's engineer. How or why that distorts the signal is a question for a future blog post, but, in 2014 Partridge released a re-reversed polarity version on CD that is supposedly warmer and "how the LP was meant to be heard."
Am kind of curious to hear it but not necessarily own it, since it would mean having the song "Dear God" in the tracklist. My version of the LP came out before "Dear God" became an unexpected radio hit -- all subsequent issues have included that overwrought and obvious tune.