RIP Amy Camus Yma Sumac (September 13, 1922 – November 1, 2008). Actually the claim that she was really called Amy Sumac was pretty silly, particularly when her real name was Zoila Augusta Emperatriz Chávarri del Castillo. Sumac was probably the only singer whose range was often given in Hertz rather than octaves - 123 to 2270 Hz, apparently. Some are featured here:



I prefer her campy mambo recordings to the supposedly more ethnic (but no dubt equally inauthentic) stuff (which can sometimes be a bit of a slog), but the real weird item of hers to track down is Miracles, the "rock" album she recorded with Les Baxter in 1972.

Chrome, or an incarnation of the band, caught last year playing "March of the Chrome Police" from their 1979 album Half Machine Lip Moves.

Thirty years on the music on that album and its 1978 precursor Alien Soundtracks still sounds raw and strange -- and this performance captures or at least recreates the fucked-up analog overload of the original. There was something mutated, messed up and dirty about these albums at the time I first heard them back in '79. Punk had devolved into New Wave at the time and although I still liked a lot of what was coming out everyone else seemed to like it too, so I was looking for something suitably off the map and noisy and Chrome met those requirements. Those two albums still sound like nothing else before or afterward.

I don't know much about the music Chrome produced after Half Machine Lip Moves. The follow-up got a lukewarm reception from whatever music rags I was reading at the time and I remember John Peel commenting after playing a track from it that he couldn't tell if it was any good or not. This sounds okay now but it seemed too clean and linear at the time.



Like Pere Ubu after Dub Housing (whose music headed into another direction entirely) they just didn't seem to fit in anywhere, especially when American punk made a resurgence soon after with bands like Black Flag, Minutemen and Husker Du, whose music was fast, blunt and to-the-point rather than fast, hallucinogenic and freaky. Years went by without me playing the albums or thinking about them. Maybe it was finally noticing there's a local Austin band called ST-37 who've been playing a rather familiar kind of stoner spacerock for a decade or two that reminded me...

So dad, what are you listening to lately? What have you downloaded from eMusic this month? More of that crazy Finnish stuff?

Not this month, kids. Let's see, almost all stuff I heard first on Stuart Maconie's Freak Zone:
Minotaur Shock (Amateur Dramatics and Maritime), The Chap, the Long Blondes, Champion Kickboxer and:

Kurr - Amiina (2007)
Frail Icelandic sighs, curlicues and tintinnabulation, rather like finding an antique musical box that plays the more affecting passages of Sigur Rós. Which isn't surprising as Amiina played on a couple of their albums. Possibly too lovely for words, particularly if you're the sort of sap who can be transported to strange places by the crepuscular sound of tiny bells, wordless female ululation and a musical saw.

And what are you reading?

A gripping fantasy trilogy about a swashbucking princess and a talking bear.... I kid! Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew, obviously.

He might be a crazy, shouty, paranoid loon but he's Austin's crazy, shouty, paranoid loon. Or at least one of them. And it's always good to see Michelle "Chucky" Malkin getting a taste of her own medicine even if there can be no winner in such an encounter.

Seriously, the meeting of these two "minds" should have resulted in a blue flash, the smell of sulfur and a shower of small fish over Roswell.

Currently very fond of The Chap's two singles "Fun and Interesting" and "Proper Rock", although their album tracks don't really do it for me yet. They really don't look like they sound - they have an arch, studied awkwardness that I normally steer clear of and which recalls the likes of Split Enz, Deaf School and the Cardiacs (albeit updated by Stereolab and Vampire Weekend, who I like a lot better) but they look like an ordinary jeans and t-shirt rock band. I expected robots, Victorian garb and beekeeper costumes at the least.

I do like "Daddy's Gone" by Glasvegas a lot, both as a song and as a three minute encapsulation of Scottish rock music's infatuation with classic American Rock 'n' Roll since the Jesus and Mary Chain discovered it sounded even better if you put a melody behind the feedback. I do however wonder if the lyrics would work in any other accent and if what sounds truly epic and heartbreaking would come across as mawkish and over-sentimental if the singer had a more middle-class accent. If it was Chris Martin, for example, I'd be shouting abuse at the radio....

And I also wonder about my susceptibility, seeing how this song can almost reduce me to tears whereas the couple-with-a-2-year-old-daughter I know who are presently going through a divorce simply fill me with irritation and mild dismay at best. I guess in real life we expect people to suck it up and get on with their lives whether in art, be it the novel, opera or even a rock song, we give them the leeway to really wallow and let it screw up their lives as long as they do it in rich and evocative way.

Paavpharju are a very strange Finnish band. Here they sound like first album era Faust with Kate Bush on vocals. You can also drop the names of Arial Pink into the mix if you want.

Some of their stuff sounds a lot more straightforward. Although straightforward what, I'm not sure as listening to their current album is like hearing half a dozen off-station radios in the mist. Some times things will suddenly clear up and a lilting folk melody will come through only to be drowned out by scuzzy electronics or fade to bird song or an off-key toy piano will beat it into submission with some insidious techno riff. Curious and evocative stuff.Try Es and Nau Hau too if you like it weird and Finnish.

Why yes, I have been listening to the Advisory Circle's Other Channels.

I'll be back-k-k-k-k-k-k....

Dannish rock was once very, very cool. Can't find any videos of Parson Sound or Baby Grandmothers, but here is Savage Rose during the time they went from pop to something else.

Savage Rose are still going today I think, although only the first three LPs are my idea of fun. They became deeply political and the music became totally weedy and horrible as if the Jefferson Airplane meets MC5 explosion (keep listening if the first couple of songs seem a bit tame) they threatened to become wasn't in keeping with their cause.

Not quite so taken by subsequent stuff I've heard on her myspace page but this particular track is gorgeous - for most non-corporeal values of gorgeous. The missing link between Joanna Newsom and Carla Bruni?

If you're listening to Radcliffe (without Marconie but with the very irritating Mark Ellen) on Radio 2 right now, you will have heard him read out a list of Italian prog rock bands I emailed in a few minutes earlier. Isn't that something? You can sit at work in Austin and get an email read out on British radio almost instantly. I could have made the list up of course. Maybe I did....

It could be the only time Ossana (who are still going, apparently, but I'd like to remember them as they are here) get mentioned on national radio in the UK....

You might have to close your eyes as this comes from Seventies Sartorial Hell, but it sounds remarkably good after all these years. I knew Franz Ferdinand reminded me of someone.... The Tain is a cracking album, and I'm normally allergic to all variants of celtic rock.

Current fave from the UK, although since I only listen to Maconie and Radcliffe* I could be missing the more beaty stuff the younger folk are listening to. But this is gorgeous -- spooky, sensual and Latin-tinged like some forgotten Young Marble Giants spin off project.



(It does remind me very much of something else in places, however, some nagging but uncool eighties hit that I can't quite place. And it's starting to bug me...)
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* Or vice versa.

Listening to Boxcutter's Glyphic from last year and it feels both comforting and strange to return to a style of music I stopped listening to a decade ago. It's pretty much what the kids used to call IDM but with the emphasis on the rumbling dubstep mutation of drum and bass and soulful rather than the freakish vocal samples you used to get on Plaid, Wagon Christ and u-Ziq albums. I rather lost touch with the genre when it started to get a little too silly (circa 1997's Spunk Jazz compilation), leaving the albums untouched on the shelves and moving on to old krautrock, "electric period" Miles Davis and folk instead. But it's all cyclic (so don't throw anything away kids, you'll want to hear it again in ten years time) and although it doesn't make me want to shout "wow, this is the only music I want to listen to!" this skittering, moody electronica is pleasantly exhilarating stuff. It does come dangerously close to soundtrack music for extreme skiing though.

Here's a picture of something. I like the idea of taking photographs and forgetting what they are of. The infra red filter helps, turning cloudy skies and supermarket parking lot fixtures into alien landscapes.



Also listening to tracks from the reissue of Ze's Mutant Disco from 1981. This is what the hip clubs in Leeds were playing on Saturday nights around that time, mixed in with earliest tendrils of Goth like Danse Society, UK Decay and B-Movie. It's hard to believe there could have been a time when the fishnets and hairspray crowd would happily cavort on the dancefloor to Coati Mundi's "Que Pasa/Me No Pop I" (gosh, insanely fast version on YouTube - shame the sound sucks) in between "Happy House" and "The Passenger". Very schizophrenic, you could easily break a heel switching from exuberant Latin rap to the gloomy bedsit shuffle. Or maybe I'm getting my chronology messed up. 

For some reason Tigon is rarely mentioned in the same breath as Hammer when it comes to British Horror of the late 60s and early 70s, but they produced some memorable movies such as Blood on Satan's Claw and Witchfinder General (as well as The Magnificent Seven Deadly Sins, which I've never seen but the cast list is the perfect encapsulation of British showbiz 1971 in all its splendor and horror). I haven't seen Blood on Satan's Claw (possibly NSFW) for over 35 years but that opening music still gives me the creeps in a wonderful way and takes me back to Friday nights alone watching the horror film on ITV and raiding the parental drinks cabinet. For some reason horror films set in the 17th century and involving copious female nudity seemed to produce some of the most gorgeous soundtrack music of that era and this is a particularly fine example. So it's good to find it has just become available (for the first time in any format) on CD.

Ah, this hits the spot.


And you are downloading your daily Adventure in Carols from FaLaLaLaLa.com, aren't you? Sunday's contribution from the Ovalteeners was a true delight. And there's still time to get this off eBay....

I have trouble coming up with guilty musical pleasures as I always end up thinking that what I've considered my suppressed, shameful, unutterable indulgence is really rather good and transcends the trappings of its time and I start feeling smug about my wide-ranging and undogmatic tastes.

But this... this, I think, is pure, squirm-inducing guilt, every pixel and bit dripping with feverishly overexcited, hysterical 80s wrongness. The drum sound alone is enough to make me want to surrender to the authorities.



Now where's the video for "Stop Using Sex As A Weapon"?

Mazzy Star's "Fade into You" (1993) is one of those records I don't own, never list as a favorite but that makes me crumble into a gooey mess whenever I hear it. It's such a beautiful track that it has survived over a decade of being slipped into TV shows (Alias, Gilmore Girls, etc) that need to leech its wispy, heartbreaking punctum to carry an emotive scene.

I suspect I'll feel the same way about Emma Pollock's "Paper and Glue" which has just popped up on YouTube. I was never a big fan of the Delgados or her previous solo material, but this song just pierces me deep somewhere. I'm aware that it's just this side of Coldplay mawkishness, particularly at the beginning but there is something so real and affecting the comparison soon fades.