Books Good For You!

I am pretty old and need young friends to keep current with the latest releases. Basement editor/sound/engineer guy Jay Wolting has been my pipeline to current releases for the past year or so. Jay introduced me to The Books, a group I had heard of before, but had largely ignored.

Because things move very fast these days I tend to resist anything "new" at first. Just a sort of way of maintaining control, I guess. New releases zip by and the most of them are pretty good but the constant stream creates a predictable flow. Pleasant but not particularly exciting. I have to be taken off guard, as it were, by something new.

On a recent trip to Sub-Saharan Africa working on my film, Y Africa (still working on it...2 years and counting) I let my ITunes run on repeat as I was retiring. Many nights I fell asleep to the beautiful, dreamy Panda Bear album, other nights it was Bon Iver or even Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians or Four Tet. Then one night in Burkina Faso, I decided to let The Books' The Lemon of Pink play me off to sleep and I now want to use The Books music for the doc. A masterful use of samples and dialogue from films within a framework of truly beautiful guitar, banjo, violin, voices and found sound. Check out their website below.

http://www.thebooksmusic.com

Girlin and the snowman

Screw "It's a wonderful life", as far as I'm concerned the most poignant and affecting Christmas films of all time are "Bad Santa" by Terry Zwigoff and "The Snowman"by Raymond Briggs. They're both staples at my house during the holidays ( and yes "the Grinch..." but that goes without saying).
"The Snowman" is not your typical Christmas time viewing because while it is stunningly beautiful - it's also thoroughly depressing! It's as if "Frosty the snowman" had been directed by Vittorio de Sica...Once the snowman melts, there is no magic hat to bring him back. It's heavy. It's about loss. Not very Christmas-sy. (I mean Raymond Briggs also wrote "Where the wind blows" - a stark tale about a little old couple's experiences through a nuclear holocaust). But wow!! What a piece of art.
Anyways, here's a gorgeous song from "The Snowman" that my daughter Corrina loves. Not very uplifting either. But perfect for that post-holidaze come down.

basement music #6 now available!

Basement music #6 is live!

Playlist:

Pulp - This Is Hardcore
Stars - Ageless Beauty
Animal Collective - Summertime Clothes
Taken By Trees - To Lose Someone
Girls - Lust for Life
Jason Lytle - Ghost of My Old Dog
Dirty Projectors & David Byrne - Knotty Pine
Dirty Projectors - Stillness is the Move
Mount Eerie - Between Two Mysteries
Grizzly Bear - While You Wait For the Others
DOOM - Gazillion Ear
Bill Callahan - Too Many Birds
Big Star - Jesus Christ

My Best Albums of 2009

1.2.

3.4.

5.6.

7.8.

9.10.

11.12.

13.14.

15.16.

17.18.

19.20.

basement music #5!

In Basement Music #5, Richard returns for more punishment with Azed, Pedro and Tim for a reasonable discourse on songs and soundtracks in the movies.

How soundtracks shape movies, and how movies can in turn reshape timeless favourites, from "Singin' in the Rain" to Apocalypse Now. Wendy Carlos to Wes Anderson, Herbie Hancock to Henry Mancini, this show covers all the bases.

Plus the guys put their Lobo knowledge on the line in the latest installment of Stump Tim.

Get the podcast


The playlist:
Wendy Carlos - Suicide Scherzo
Real Estate - Beachcomber
Atlas Sound feat. Noah Lennox - Walkabout
Three Amigos - My Little Buttercup
Curtis Mayfield - Pusherman
Mark Mothersbaugh - Rachel Evans Tenenbaum (1965-2000)
Kevin Shields - City Girl
Fantomas - Experiment in Terror
Tommy Roe - Sweet Pea
Prince - Mountains
Herbie Hancock - Bringing Down the Byrds
Lobo - I'd Love You to Want Me

Three For Thursday

#1) My new favourite band; Real Estate at CMJ.

#2) My other new favourite band; Family Portrait.

#3a) The Original

#3b) The Homage

Thanks for the idea Carrie.

RP

Hocketing with the Dirty projectors

I was blown away by a video of the Brooklyn band Dirty Projectors casually playing a new song backstage. The vocal arrangement is so beautiful and complex!! Really sublime. Check it out here: LINK.

The musical trick or technique the female vocalists use in the video is called hocketing. It's where a single musical line is shared between a number of people to create an infinitely more complex and beautiful sound. You hear it everywhere from panpipe music of the Andes, to Medieval vocal Music, to the clapping patterns in flamenco. The leader of the Dirty Projectors, David Longstreth, talks about it in this video: LINK (It's a little meandering, but worth checking out).

To me, this band's insular devotion to creating new and interesting sounds gives them an air of a cult or something - in a good way! I mean, what other band would work so hard to create something so odd and beautiful? Maybe cult is the wrong word, but they do remind me of people in early 1970's who lived communally and saw their endeavors as part of a larger Utopian experiment. (There's a song on the album Bitte Orca called "Temecula Sunrise" that imagines a suburban development being taken over by an pseudo-Utopian group that lives communally). Don't they even look the part?