Sam's recent post of Shelleyan Orphan had me looking through my vinyl, something I do maybe four times a year these days. I don't own either of the bands from his post, but I did stumble across an old gem from Dub Narcotic Sound System, formed in 1993 and named after the Dub Narcotic Studio, the studio of Calvin Johnson, founder of K Records. While my personal favorite "Teenage Timebomb" is not available for free download, the funky smoothness of Calvin's Pacific Northwest, baritone white boy rap on "Handclappin'" is.
C.O.C.O. play funky dance music, as does their lumberjack-soulman-boss Calvin Johnson, with an unselfconscious swagger that wears its anti-hipster lameness like a faded black t-shirt, not to mention on instruments that won't be rendered useless when the power goes out at the house party (although their propensity for dub fadeouts might get lost with the lights out). Olivia Ness and Chris Sutton are a rhythm section in no need of melodies. It's what all the Olympia kids are dancing to these days, and with any luck these rhythms will sweep the nation and set basement parties afire from coast to coast.
Observations of insects are typically rendered so clinical that you may as well be studying accounting or, on the flipside, so elementary that you're dealing with plush caterpillars whose sole purpose is to teach your child how to hug. Share this Place: Stories and Observations is, well, a creature of a different stripe. The multimedia project commissioned in 2006 by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art features music by Mirah (repeat after me: We love Mirah) and her longtime collaborators Lori Goldston and Kyle Hanson, AKA Spectratone International (also with Jane Hall and Kane Mathis), and stop-motion video by Britta Johnson. It sounds like something that could easily become child's play, and in fact the chamber pieces are indeed playful and alive — Spectratone's arrangements give a subtle bounce to Mirah's ever-airy vocals, and Johnson's stop-motion insects are made from all manner of found objects and wander around rolling dung and other fun things. But it's also serious literary entomology thanks to its source material: Jean Henri Fabre is considered the father of the study of insects and is most remembered for telling his tiny friends' tales as first-person narratives. So it is that in "Credo Cigalia" (video below) a cricket addresses us with "you've no choice but to listen to my song." And on the fantastically delicate "Community," rather than a standard lecture on the group habits of six-legged creatures, you get a lullaby so sweet and smart that you'll want to sing it to your sons and daughters all the way to MIT.
Maher Shalal Hash Baz primarily consists of Tori Kudo, a Japanese composer/musician who has been making somber dissonance for nearly two decades now. The name comes from the Book of Isaiah and roughly translates from Hebrew as "To speed to the spoil, he hasteneth the prey." As lesser preached Bible passages go, it ranks up there for me with "It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." But I digress… Kudo doesn't just make messy music—he appears to these ears to be a true inventor of improvisational balladry. "Different Daylight" sounds at first like an early rehearsal in which the instruments are all being played by Kudo at the same time. But at the center of that clash of horns, strings, guitar and other odd noises is the steady, knowing voice of Kudo himself, like a tour guide through a sandstorm. He has said of his own music, "Error in performance dominates MSHB cassette, which is like our imperfect life." Yes, but if you listen to "What's Your Business Here, Elijiah?" (sorry, Domino isn't down with the free MP3 tip) you'll find that imperfection can sound pretty close to perfect after all.
Two bands in my heavy rotation right now: Beat Happening and Lync. With our late autumn here, until the cold hit this morning, what better songs to celebrate the warmth than those of Beat Happening's "Indian Summer" (and the excellent cover of this song by Spectrum, aka Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3) and Lync's lovely album These Are Not Fall Colors, also on K Records many years ago. Plus, Calvin Johnson, indiedom's Barry White (for the baritone, not the love songs), founder of K Records, member of Beat Happening, the Halo Benders, and Dub Narcotic Sound System, is playing in town tomorrow night with Tender Forever. Sure, some of the offerings below are a crappy 56kbps, but with music this good and already this lo-fi, who cares?
While Liz Phair's spent the new century embedded in VH1's Culture Vultureplex, Mirah's been embedded in evergreen indieland (that's Olympia, Washington) making sweet and musically adventurous paeans to relationships, politics, and many of the other things that make us think about more than our cholesterol. "Jerusalem" is the only new track here, but it's worth downloading the others to see how easy it is to fall in love with a singer whose mind is as irresistible as her disarmingly delicate voice.