Busted Loop

the vent fan above the cooktop in
the Chinese joint has a bearing going out
& sounds like a grindcore band stuck in a loop

sweet and sour, Hunan, Kung Po
I remember when I was broke
writing shitass record reviews for Hunan House
gift certificates, the date night out for
her and me

Bill Russell and Willis Reed 

feedtime - Gas (2017)

The new feedtime record is nasty.

Debussy: Pelléas et Mélisande

Greater Than

"Bad Motor Scooter" (Montrose feat. Sammy Hagar) > "(I Live For) Cars and Girls" The Dictators

Hoosier Pete Mixtape Volume One

Charles Ives: "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" (Jan DeGaetani - mezzo-soprano; Gilbert Kalish - piano)
Bukka White: "Fixin’ to Die"
Josh White: "Lord, I Want to Die Easy"
Skip James: "I’m So Glad"
Ezra Pound: "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" (excerpt)
John Fahey: "America"
Sir Richard Bishop: "Elysium Number Five"
Hot Tuna: "Sunrise Dance with the Devil" (live)
Robert Nighthawk: "Kansas City"
Lonnie Johnson: "Blues for Murder Only"
Django Reinhardt: "Beyond the Sea"

Frank O'Hara: "Ode to Joy" and "No More Dying"
John Cage: "Sonata No. I for Prepared Piano" (Maro Ajemain - prepared piano)
Morton Feldman: "For Franz Kline" (Ensemble Avantgarde);
Derek Bailey: "Georgia on My Mind / Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone"
Bach: Goldberg Variations VIII, IX, & X (Glenn Gould - piano)
Thelonious Monk: "Creepuscle With Nellie" (Thelonious Monk - piano; Al McKibbon - bass; Art Blakey - drums)
Jack Spicer: "Billie the Kid" (excerpt)
Sun City Girls: "This Is My Name"
Son House: "Preachin’ the Blues"
Blind Willie Johnson: "Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning"
Paul Wine Jones: "Rob and Steal"
Cedell Davis: "Chicken Hawk"

The Art of the Seventies Segueway: The Andrea True Connection into Teenage Jesus and the Jerks

  I grew up in the seventies and have spent many an hour reconstructing the musical legacy of my teen years. I started obsessing over music at an early age, listening almost constantly to cross-genre Top 40 radio on WOWO out of Fort Wayne, which spanned the globe with personal favorites from Lynn Anderson's C&W hit "Rose Garden", through the R&B of the Chi Lites "Have You Seen Her", to Melanie's cute little double entendre pop nugget "Brand New Key". Today it is almost unimaginable that all those songs would be played on the same commercial station, or even on the same non-commercial station in the same two hour block (barring, of course, high school radio, the last bastion of giddy mixes before adulthood stomps the creativity out of your radio soul).

  In reconstructing my golden youth, I didn't stop at just what I listened to at the time: all the less mainstream stuff I discovered as the 80's dawned and I escaped the rustbelt shackles of Auto City, IN (take yr pick, they're the same) were integrated as well. First it was mix CDs, then monstrous Spotify playlists (currently trimmed back to thirteen hours total, but I'll start building them back again soon). So, you end up having to figure out a way to have Aerosmith, Elvin Bishop, Can, Stevie Wonder, The Clash, America, Carly Simon, Tom Petty, The Ohio Players, etc., etc., etc., all peacefully coexist together side by side.  The easy way would be to group genres and sub-genres together . . . but that would be too easy. Welcome to the art of the mix.

  When I first started doing radio in the mid 80's, I usually did exactly that, trying to make my sets and shows as coherent and digestible as possible . . . that was the way it was done. So, while I always played a pretty broad variety of stuff on the air, I made sure to pack it in a way that wouldn't catch the listener off guard. After a little while, though, that got a little boring, so I tried more creative segues on a show I called "The Thrill Night Review". In a nutshell, TTNR was dedicated to taking all the disparate elements of what I liked and fitting them all into the same folder.  I tried to push it even further on a show called "The Western Lands", and continued it on Bloomington's WFHB and a show called "Melody Unasked For" from '94 to '97, when I finally left town for good.

  Applying for the slot on WFHB came with the usual somewhat tiresome programming audition hurdles that small indie radio stations throw at you; fortunately, the program director ran interference for me, and I got the slot. Without him, my programming proposal of playing "whatever I feel, whenever I feel it" probably wouldn't have flown (CONCEPTS, that's what they are looking for).

  Anyway, that's a bit heavy on the back story, but it goes to what I want to do with mixes . . . which, while far from unheard of (the art of the mixtape is part of John Cusack's intolerable mewling in the truly awful High Fidelity), is not the way things generally are done. Think of some of your favorite movie soundtracks and you start to get the idea: sometimes you ride the wave, running one song into another like some dusk to dawn EDM mix, other times you mix it up against the grain and hope you can drag your listener with you. The real trick, when you are riding against that grain, is to manage to recontextualize each piece with the piece that follows it, to hit your listener with a jolt of recognition and surprise that always accompanies any musical epiphany.

  There are a few segues I pulled off that I really still wish I had on tape*. "The Western Lands" (an Egyptian Book of the Dead by way of William Burroughs reference; it was meant to invoke the in-between) was my most aggressively experimental lab. One of the things I tried a lot was extremely long cross fades: for instance, I may play an Ayler trio cut of one of his ESP records and mix in a Greek bouzouki record for a solid four minutes, making it sound like there was a bouzouki player in Ayler's band, only to have the recognition hit when Ayler stops and the bouzouki plays on. Or you can get a couple fairly minimal orchestral pieces in the same (or complimentary) keys and run an extremely long crossfade between the two. In one extreme case, I had played Metal Machine Music in its entirety, but while playing side one I recorded it, while playing side two I played back the recording of side one at the same time and recorded that, while playing side three I mixed in the recording of sides one and two, etc. The slight sound degradation and synch issues on the tape playbacks made it sound really interesting. Another fun thing to do was try to connect two very marginally related pieces in a way that makes total sense: take a Borbetomagus cut, the longer the better, and let it rage in its full glory. As it ends in shower of burning embers and feedback ghosts, up comes the tinkling piano intro of Coleman Hawkins's "Body and Soul". The piano is audible, but almost incomprehensible in its incongruity . . . and then, with the saxophone, the first thread appears: it is, after all, the same instrument that drives Borbetomagus, albeit in a very different form. Or is it that different? The screaming rage of Borbetomagus highlights the emotional urgency of Hawkins's tenor, especially the gruff gospel-tinged overblowing later in the song, while the transcendent melodicism of his line draws out the improbably melodic moments in Borbetomagus.  In the end, everything to connect one piece to another is fair game, and the less esoteric the better . . . always rely on sound, emotions, textures, visions.

  So back to the damn seventies compilations. On disc VIII, which was done years and years ago, the middle of the program runs thusly: America "Tin Man" to Albert Hammond "It Never Rains in Southern California" to Starland Vocal Band "Afternoon Delight" to Andrea True Connection "More More More" to Teenage Jesus and the Jerks "Burning Rubber" to Richard Hell and the Voidoids "Blank Generation" to The Saints "(I'm) Stranded"**.  A quick survey of that list shows two waves being surfed out, breaking right between the Andrea True Connection and Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. Now, connecting those two is a bit, ah, esoteric. The one connection is that both of the female leads are also actresses who have appeared in sexually explicit films, but that connection is pretty tenuous: porn actress Andrea True serves up an archetypal paean to coke-fueled seventies erotica, Lunch responds with a transgressive sexuality that counters virtually everything that disco driven seventies porn asserts . . . the contrast is the connection. But that doesn't really work, does it? And lord knows there is no musical or emotional commonality between the two.

  Moral of the story: sometimes you just throw shit together whether it works or not. I still laugh whenever I play that disc and Lydia Lunch smacks me upside the head after the vacuous sex disco. I suppose there is a level of profundity in both, and if I tried hard enough I could articulate it. Truth is, I don't like either song.

_______________

*  One of my favorites I do have on tape, but I can't really take credit for it because it was so obvious: The Residents have a song called "Beyond the Valley of A Day in the Life", which starts with the big crescendo at the end of The Beatles "A Day in the Life", and then runs Beatles tape loops as the huge piano chord at the end of the song fades out very (very, very, very!) slowly (it was looped, natch). The Residents cut was about six minutes long, if memory serves. So, the obvious thing to do: play "A Day in the Life", and at the break right before the final piano chord, cut in The Residents, whose song starts with a sample of that very piano chord. And then, of course, play it off like it is an unreleased Beatles take.  I have never gotten that many phone calls while doing a radio show.
** To be clear, inclusion is not an endorsement of any given song. I will let the dear reader draw their own conclusions.

Elijah Pritchett and Bill Zink - Now, The Safety is Off (1997)

Elijah Pritchett & Bill Zink - guitar

Recorded live as part of the Rustbelt Improvisers' Series at the Sugar Doe Cafe on Story Ave sometime in late 1997

For Stéphane Mallarmé

Shadow

Mel Daniels