Tomorrowland

The Spectacle of Paradox

Badd Madame at the Eighties Club Bands database.

"All I've got is a photograph" - Def Leppard, Photograph

Without a doubt, the homoerotic pageantry of late-80s "butt rock" was high paradox, a spectacle of drifting genders and mirrored shades that nowadays leaves most of us laughing at our cultural past in an eye-rolling embrace of a once-guilty pleasure.

Perhaps kitsch is where this sort of thing works best, "high" and "low" locking lips in star-crossed union, good taste (and common sense) be damned. Things just get more authentic when viewed at the local level. The burgeoning database of Eighties Club Bands demonstrates, yes, vintage rock sleaze. But you won't hear about these bands on VH1. They're unknowns, forgotten heroes of the glam revolution, curious artifacts, each one now reduced to a quaint, dusty photograph.

Chief exhibits include BareBac, Maniac, Fantasy, Ice Water Mansion, Sweet Savage, and High Risk.

I < Heart > Gwendolyn

Not to get all parental on you guys, but there's a certain children's entertainer who's captured my heart and rightfully deserves some serious Tomorrowland attention.

It's Gwendolyn. From Gwendolyn and the Good Time Gang. And she really, truly rocks.

The kids and I saw her play at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this weekend. It was an incredible set -- 45 minutes of tight, amusingly executed, energetic pop that totally captivated the audience of kids AND parents for the entire show. (They even kicked it off with my personal favorite track, Farm Animal Friends.)

In this very recent interview for hipster parent blog Offsprung, Gwendolyn name checks the Incredible String Band (!) and Syd Barrett (!!) and talks about the creative process behind her music. Turns out she and her husband Brandon (the Good Time Gang's drummer) also create the music for the brilliant Showtime program Weeds. I'm convinced that only someone who flirts with innocence to the degree that she does could be responsible for the soundtrack for such an "experienced" program as Weeds.

Mega thanks to Mark from Boing Boing for recommending Gwendolyn's music in the first place. Now go forth and rock!

Milligan College Madrigal LP, VG++

Another jewel unearthed on the streets of Brooklyn.

Discovered this weekend in the "Oddities!" bin at the Park Slope community market: one private press LP by the Milligan College Madrigal Singers from 1970. The insane thing was that my dad sang in the group, is prominently featured on the cover (3 places!), and was with me when I pulled it from the stack!

I've seen this LP a million times in my parents' den, and growing up, I thought everybody's parents sang in a choir and released the occasional LP of renaissance music. Never thought I'd see it for sale in Brooklyn. (The seller acquired it from a WFMU deejay, natch.)

Dad even autographed it for the guy. Hooray for vintage oddities!

Hallucinations, Inc.

Album cover for the self-titled 1968 release by UFO club psych-rockers Tomorrow.

“No one I think is in my tree
I mean it must be high or low
That is you know you can’t tune in but it’s alright
That is I think it’s not too bad” 

- Strawberry Fields Forever, Lennon/McCartney 

The family and I boarded the marshmallow hovercraft (a.k.a. the 6 train) and floated uptown this weekend to see “Summer of Love,” the Whitney Museum's epic psychedelic art show.

Incredibly, the show wasn’t too cheesy, narrowly avoiding the full-bore “Hard Rock Café on acid” boomerfest I anticipated. The curators certainly aimed to please, so the abundance of Janis and Stones memorabilia was to be expected. And yeah, too many Fillmore West posters. But! The oozy, primordial lightshows and Soft Machine soundtracks redeemed the exhibit’s worst transgressions.  

Successful historical reenactments from the show included: Verner Panton’s incredible “fantasy landscape” environment, which the kids and I crawled around in for awhile; the go-go techno-futurist designs from the Archigram collective; promo posters from Joe Boyd’s UFO club (AMM and Pink Floyd once played there on the SAME NIGHT, people!); and the Mati Klarwein lightbox room – literally a walk-in cube of lightboxes showcasing Klarwein’s work (he of Bitches Brew and Abraxas album cover fame).

Lots to see and touch, plus a decent audio guide that my daughter Kyra Leaf seemed to enjoy more than anyone else. (Apparently she’s a huge fan of “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” which she listened to on a loop for at least half an hour. As she said, “I would eat the tangerine trees, Daddy.”)

The visit to the Whitney effortlessly coincided with my reading of Joe Boyd's music biz memoir, White Bicycles. If you’ve ever blissed out to Nick Drake’s “River Man” or surrendered to the folk spirits of Incredible String Band’s “Mercy I Cry City,” then you know the guy’s work. That said, the book is beyond amazing, not just as a historical document but as memoir… his personal recollections are alternately hilarious and stupefying and erudite and bizarre. He gave us Nick. He gave us Fairport. And he gave us the Deliverance theme song. (Yes. The banjos.) A proper review is forthcoming; until then, just buy the book. You won’t be disappointed.

UFOs over New York! UFOs over Tomorrowland!

Cicadas, Prophets and Sub-Tropical Feedback

Extended inlay from Touch cassette release Meridians Two, 1984.

In terms of sheer minimalist beauty, not too many record labels can touch the classic designs of Britain's Touch.

Some of the Touch hallmarks: organic subjects captured with electronic tools... anthropological distance... breathtaking use of color and elemental typography... an icy, silent acknowledgement of the real. 

I found the image above on a page chronicling their history of cassette releases. Jon Wozencroft, creator and art director for the label, has always had a crystalline vision of how his label should look and sound, and he's applied it to over 20 years of releases. It lends his catalog a sort of stoic unity, a set of values or guidelines that privilege integration and harmony. The album art begins to function as a meditative counterpoint to the noisy chaos of some (not all, but some) of the Touch releases.

The music is wonderful, too. The cassette comp shown above features John Foxx, punk-funksters A Certain Ratio, and underappreciated ambient songstress Virginia Astley. Newer artists include shimmering noise pioneers Fennesz, Chris Watson and Oren Ambarchi.

For a taste, go to the TouchAudio page and listen to Watson's audio report from the Scottish Hebrides.

Rising Noise, Rising Sun

The first work I heard by Japanese musician Otomo Yoshihide was probably a remix he did from the Gastr del Sol album Upgrade and Afterlife. The track consisted of minimal beeps and drones and some weird scratchy noises, if I remember correctly. Captivating in its weirdness and sensitivity to detail. Beguiling. Intriguing.

I later heard his group Ground Zero, but they were a bit too rockist for my taste. Something better experienced live, probably.

Since Ground Zero disbanded, Yoshihide has pretty much been heralded as a master of fine-grain noisy improv, a guy who can convincingly mine the abrasive terrain of a turntable needle on cement but also create a traditional folk atmosphere for a mainstream movie soundtrack.

So on to the video. It's a decent production, likely homemade. Features interviews, live performance, even snippets from some Chinese movies he's scored. It's noisy as hell, aggro even, but in a thunderous, rattle-your-senses kind of way. A recommended peek into the solo universe of an honest, humble, focused maverick of horrible noise.

Vinyl Vortex

Album covers (from top left): Bobby Hutcherson, Art Blakey, Sam Rivers, more Art Blakey

Lovely collection of vintage jazz album covers, including (as far as I can tell) every single record from the Blue Note catalog.

The hi-res images come in thumbnail and large-scale versions, perfect for desktop and screensaver files. I must've lost at least 45 minutes poring over the hundreds of designs. Tasty!

(I know, I know... the whole Blue Note aesthetic has been celebrated a million times over. Posters, calendars, coffee mugs, kites, t-shirts, etc. But there's something so eternally classy about these images that I just can't resist. Plus, I found a ton of albums that don't make it into the usual "Blue Note retrospective" collections. So there.)

Yes We Have French Horns

Björk uploads "Earth Intruders" to an unsuspecting public on SNL.

Programmed beats, live toy piano, horn lines and zappy synths... the list goes on. Yet the Konono arrangement from the single is sadly missing. Oh well. (I love that she's barefoot for the entire performance, while a neon shoe sign blinks through a window.)

The Volta album art is equally perplexing.

Initiate Hyperlink Sequence Delta

New generative composition from the brilliant Marius Watz.

Elegantly designed Iueke sells extremely rare vinyl of the electronic and avant variety. Favorites include entries with sound samples, including Eskaton ($140!) and Phillipe Doray ($180!). Watch your wallet and dive in.

The beguiling and chronically-maligned Miranda July has a new book, No One Belongs Here More Than You. The website for the book is one of the more entertaining and kooky sites I've encountered, if only 'cause it seems to break all the rules.

Thirty-three/forty-five, an mp3 blog.

Thrift store treasures await at the Mom & Pop Culture Shop.

Must see TV: the entire first episode of Showtime's This American Life. And Lifespan, a 1974 existentialist/bondage thriller starring Klaus Kinski, scored by Terry Riley. Also, this terrifying cocktail of madness and parenthood: Anna Nicole Smith strolling through the manse, dressed as a clown. (Link discovered at the conspiratorially-minded blog The Freeman Perspective.)

More and more often I've turned to YouTube as a music-locating tool. Swirling video graphics from To Rococo Rot, puppet madness from Genesis, and crazy French movie soundtrack work by Francois de Roubaix.

Experimental guitarist/inventor Hans Reichel has a pretty weird, labyrinthine site.

Interesting article on Cory Doctorow from the Chronicle of Higher Education. No college degree, Cory? But man, sooooo many posts.

Keep tabs on the money behind conservative media at Media Transparency.

Token Web 2.0 parasite link: random images from MySpace users.

That's all, folks.

Ice Cube - "Ghetto Bird"

From Ice Cube's 1993 album Lethal Injection.

What begins as a Seussian romp ("Why, oh why must you swoop through the hood/like everybody from the hood is up to no good") quickly morphs into an explosive outcry against the mechanized surveillance of the police helicopter (aka the zoopomorphic "ghetto bird"). Ice Cube officially introduces the avian metaphor via a Saturday morning cartoon reference ("up there lookin' like Superchicken"), decoupling the "bird" from traditional associations of freedom through a strategy of rhetorical humiliation.

Declaring himself innocent, the narrator then celebrates the creative act
("I ain't got shit but the pad and pencil") as the converse to the destructive force of the police. He suggests that one's unbridled imagination is the true enemy of the state, the pen being mightier than the proverbial sword.

Yet the temptation of violence proves too strong, even for the artist. It's here that the narrator's position deconstructs, exposing his own state of cognitive dissonance ("Standing on my roof with the rocket launcher")... it seems he's armed with more than just a pad and pencil. The narrator then ironically quotes Steve Miller ("So fly like an eagle"), casting himself as antihero, daring to target America's most symbolic endangered species (with a rocket launcher, at that).

In the sprawling ghettoscape of South Central Los Angeles, Ice Cube boldly declares open season against the oppressive, omnipresent ghetto birds. And that's just the first verse, yo.

To wit:

"Why, oh why must you swoop through the hood
like everybody from the hood is up to no good.
You think all the girls around here are trickin'
up there lookin' like Superchicken
At night I see your light through my bedroom window
But I ain't got shit but the pad and pencil
I can't wait till I hear you say
"I'm going down, mayday, mayday."  I'm gonna clown
Cause everytime that the pigs have got me
y'all rub it in with the flying Nazi
military force, but we don't want ya
Standin' on my roof with the rocket launcher
"So fly like an eagle."
But don't follow us wherever we go
The shit that I'm sayin', make it heard
Motherfuck you and your punk-ass ghetto bird."

Continue reading lyrics to "Ghetto Bird"