Archive for the ‘Can’ Category

Wally Badarou

Sunday, October 14th, 2012

Listen: Theme From Countryman / Wally Badarou
Theme

This single sits front of the 7″ soundtrack section in a wall shelf that I pass everyday of my life, when I’m in town that is. Suddenly it occurred to me, I had no idea what it sounded like. Well that’s all changed. If ‘Theme From Countryman’ had lyrics, I could sing you every last one at this point, that’s how many times it’s been on repeat. One of many lessons learned: never dump a record, you just can not predict know when it may become a cornerstone in your collection.

As an unofficial member of Level 42, Wally Badarou held little interest to me, and his endless studio involvements somehow the same. Boy, was I stupid.

Firstly, his accomplishments are an eye opener: a member of The Compass Point All Stars with Sly & Robbie, Barry Reynolds, Mikey Chung and Sticky Thompson, the in-house recording team of Compass Point Studios responsible for a long series of albums by Grace Jones, Joe Cocker, Black Uhuru, Gwen Guthrie, Jimmy Cliff, Gregory Isaacs, Robert Palmer, Marianne Faithfull, Herbie Hancock, M, Talking Heads, Melissa Etheridge, Manu Dibango and Miriam Makeba. Yeah, gasp.

Secondly, a gifted composer of incidental film music, possibly even harder to do well than calculating a Top 40 hit.

The single lead me to pull out the full length COUNTRYMAN double album soundtrack, thereby discovering, upon a typical credit scour, that Kwaku Baah played a big part in the musician lineup. Currently obsessed with his annoyingly under appreciated and extremely scarce TRANCE album from ’77, credited to Kwaku Baah & Ganoua, I rabidly advise finding a copy. And while you’re at it, both the COUNTRYMAN soundtrack and it’s accompanying 7″.

Amon Duul II

Friday, April 20th, 2012

Listen: Pigman / Amon Duul II
Pigman

Back when Rich Fazekas oversaw the college promotion department at United Artists Records with Marty Cerf, the label was pretty much my favorite. I was nuts about Family and anything Roy Wood had involvement with. That meant The Move, The Electric Light Orchestra and Roy Wood’s Wizzard, all on the roster. Then there was Hawkwind, Brinsley Schwarz and their distributed labels too, especially Blue Note, with Bobbi Humphrey and Marlena Shaw. He and I were on the phone daily, literally daily. Rich at the label’s Sunset Blvd office in Los Angeles, me at my college radio station’s pathetic office in Rochester New York, fairly desperate for a way to trade up, out and to a label job located in a real city.

Rich meanwhile, always tried to convince me about some of the German acts they had too. Occasionally he’d slip one of the UK pressings he’d been serviced with by bands like Neu or Can, and often pounded me on the US released albums from Amon Duul II. I was clearly more in pocket with the pop singles by Roy Wood’s projects or even Family 7′s, as opposed to six or eight minute meandering album tracks.

Then one afternoon, Rich called to say he’d just overnighted me a new Amon Duul II release, but this time it was a 7″. Well alright, a single by any prog rock act, usually sliced into three minutes from something much longer, had always been a form of collectibility. I never needed much justification to horde a 7″, and still don’t.

When ‘Pigman’ arrived the next day, the title alone had me interested. After all, it put everyone else at the station off immediately, a good initial sign. Although not what I was expecting, having aligned them more with Kraftwerk or Faust, I still wanted to like this, the label copy looked great. The band’s name being one I’d never seen on a 7″. These things excited me.

Those ahead of the curve college radio programmers never gave their albums much of a break with airtime, and ‘Pigman’, the band’s first and only US single, didn’t change the shut out. And I don’t understand it any more clearly now than then, given the record had tongue in cheek country verses with hard rock chorus riffs. Seems it should’ve been eaten up.

Oh well, a nice 7″ pressing to have. I never see it around much these days either.

Power Pill

Monday, February 27th, 2012

Listen: Pac Man (Mickey Finn’s Yum Yum Edit) / Power Pill
Pac Man (Mickey Finn's Yum Yum Edit) / Power Pill

How strange was that Grammy award acceptance speech from Dave Grohl a few weeks back? Dear me, he doesn’t at all seem comfortable that his Foo Fighters rock music possibly needs a fresh breath to creatively compete with newer genres, much more reflecting the sound of technology and instincts of a younger generation. This either minutes before or after an embarrassing attempt to musically collaborate with Deadmau5.

Yes, he proclaimed some rather curious mentions about singing into a microphone, learning to play your instrument, implying as long as that instrument isn’t a computer, one’s heart, imperfections and all, will prevail with better music resulting.

Huh? I guess to him, his band’s processed and polished output, to these ears at least, all apparently now recorded in his garage then tweaked to old school sonic perfection in a most high end mastering facility, is the real deal. Rock’s new soul. To each his own I suppose.

Point being, soulful music can be made on machines just as with traditional instruments if the creator has the heart he was mentioning, and the talent. His comments were not unlike Mitch Miller dismissing Bob Dylan and The Rolling Stones in the early 60′s. Quite disappointing from a guy known to be supportive, friendly and a comrade.

Case in point, Power Pill. This one-off side track from Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin, has more relevance today than many of the current metal posing as punk tunes being force fed down the pike by totally tuckered guitar playing 40 somethings. Check the timeline, the ‘Pac Man’ single is twenty years old.

The early 90′s, even the late 80′s, were indeed the formative periods for electronic music’s stronghold beginnings, finally surfacing in the DNA of a generation whose parents opened their ears and record shelves to Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Faust, Neu, Can, Henry Cow and many more.

Released by Roger Ames’ brilliant FFRR label, you need both the 12″ and the desperately hard to find 7″ of this one. My favorite version, Mickey Finn’s Yum Yum mix, miraculously made it to the 7′s B side in edited form.

I first heard ‘Pac Man’ on a BBC Radio 1 John Peel evening session program, driving around in Gary Crowley’s car after a rather late night at Jake’s. Never mind. I made it to the Oxford Street HMV that very next morning to scarf one of the five copies in their rack. I know, very short sighted leaving the other four behind.

Tomita

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

TomitaUSA, Tomita, RCA, Snowflakes Are Dancing

Tomita, Tomita, RCA, Snowflakes Are Dancing

Listen: Arabesque No. 1 / Tomita TomitaArabesque.mp3

Born in 1932 and still active today, Isao Tomita began composing for film and television as early as ’55. By the late 60′s, he turned his attention to electronic pieces after hearing Walter Carlos, whereby he performed classical music on the Moog synthesizer. Isao acquired a Moog III and began building a home studio. He started arranging Claude Debussy’s pieces for synthesizer and, in ’74, transformed those works into SNOWFLAKES ARE DANCING. When the album was released; it became a worldwide success, even in the US.

Corinne and I worked at Discount Records on the Syracuse University campus then. She ended up overseeing the classical department. This was in the day when record stores, particularly Discount, stocked very deep catalog titles. Classical music collectors are as eccentric as we pop hoarders. They would come in daily, she had a real following, almost groupie-like. I was never intimidated though. Talk about nut jobs – one guy was even a priest and super hysterical. With a sense of humor like no other, he made constant fun of the nuns, and had us round the parish a few times for some home cooked dinners. We scraped by in those days, preferring to spend cash on drinks and of course records. Those invites were God-sends, so to speak. It was a real blast of a summer though.

During that period, Tomita’s album started to gain traction. There was always a diverse in-store playlist variety going on. Everyone employed was a record crazy of some sort – all with extreme and bizarre musical tastes, yours truly included.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when the RCA salesman came in and handed me a bunch of Tomita 7′s, on red vinyl, a real anomaly in those days. All those sales guys gave me their promo singles, NO ONE else wanted singles. It was heaven.

TomitaSnowflakes, Tomita, RCA, Snowflakes Are Dancing

Listen: Snowflakes Are Dancing / Tomita TomitaSnowflakesAreDancing.mp3

She started spinning SNOWFLAKES ARE DANCING, and that baby would fly out of the shop as a result. A bunch of us were into Tangerine Dream and Faust, Amon Duul II, Can and of course Kraftwerk.

Think about it, ‘Autobahn’ was a hit single then. Would that happen on crap US radio now? And we thought it was bad then…anyways, Tomita fit right in. Everyone was content, which many times wasn’t the case, particularly as the night hours wore on and we all started getting buzzed.

This guy was, well still is, amazing. In 1984, he released CANON OF THE THREE STARS, featuring classical pieces renamed for astronomical objects. Rightly so, he credits himself with inventing The Plasma Symphony Orchestra, a computer synthesizer process using the wave forms of electromagnetic emanations from various stars and constellations for the sonics of that album.

Tomita has performed a number of outdoor Sound Cloud concerts, with speakers surrounding the audience in what else, a ‘cloud of sound’. He did a serious ass concert in ’84 at the annual Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria called Mind Of The Universe, get this: mixing tracks live in a glass pyramid suspended over an audience of 80,000 people.

He performed another concert in New York two years later to celebrate the Statue Of Liberty centennial (Back To The Earth) as well as one in Sydney for the ’88 Australian Bicentennial. That performance was part of a $7 million gift from Japan to New South Wales, which included the largest ever fireworks display at that time, six fixed sound and lighting systems — one of those on a moored barge in the centre of a bay, the other flown in by Chinook helicopter — for the relevant parts of the show. A fleet of barges with Japanese cultural performances, including kabuki fire drumming, passed by at various times.

His most recent Sound Cloud event was in Nagoya, Japan in ’97 featuring guest performances by Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, and Rick Wakeman.

Of course we knew nothing of any Tomita history back in ’74. We just loved SNOWFLAKES ARE DANCING. Hopefully he’ll come back to New York one more time. We will not miss it.

Ultravox

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

 Dangerous Rhythm / Ultravox UK

 Dangerous Rhythm / Ultravox UK

Listen: Dangerous Rhythm / Ultravox UltravoxDangerousRhythm.mp3

It was March ’77, Corinne and I had perfectly timed, as it turns out, our first trip to London. As chronicled in previous posts, Howard jammed what seemed like a year’s worth of record shopping and live shows into a fourteen day window. It was only a month prior that he’d sent the debut 7″ from Ultravox ‘Dangerous Rhythm’ pictured above, release date sticker still intact. We were ready.

They were playing The Nashville, we’re there. Visually a mix of New York, London punk and Berlin. Sonically jagged, metallic, white noise in parts yet cold and stark all at once. That early Ultravox lineup, their first album and a bunch of the singles following are never spoken of enough. In fact the whole John Foxx era is under appreciated. They were a great live band and a catalyst towards my appreciation of Neu, Can and many things German that I had previously overlooked.