today has been / the most perfect day / i've ever seen

Radiohead

I shared one of the songs from Radiohead's Live In The Basement session and thought I'd throw in another, Where I End And You Begin. The one above, Videotape, just consists of Thom Yorke on his own; probably one of my favourite songs, but you knew that already, having walked in on me playing it on the Steinway... (I apologize to the person that actually happened to). The good thing about this version (as distinct from the album one, or the one they usually play live) is that there's no hats (high or low) kicking in to distract from the piano.

Videotape (Live from the Basement) - Thom Yorke

Where I End And You Begin (Live from the Basement) - Radiohead

10cc

talk about album art for album art's sake, money for god's sake!

Godley and Creme were really reaching out for something with this song, I guess. As an aside, I've tried to do something with a loop of the opening part, should probably revisit that at some point. But anyway, in case you're unaware, 10cc were the art-rock band responsible for the hits Dreadlock Holiday ("I don't like cricket / oh no..."), Art for Art's Sake, and I'm Not In Love but, similar to Supertramp, they have a massive backlog of virtually unknown work, of which Headline Hustler is a standout.

Headline Hustler - 10cc

cellophane sunset...showcasing the evolution of splitscreens throughout the ages

- Eric

the click in my head / that makes me go all peaceful

J Dilla + Samples

J Dilla was a producer of prolific output, held in high esteem by artists like ?uestlove, Jay Z and Kanye West, and the catalyst for my recent resurgence of interest in him is the release of yet another of his posthumous albums, Jay Stay Paid.

Of all his work, the album Donuts is that which is the most well known; a series of short songs (all under 2 minutes apart from the 10cc-sampled Workinonit) that borrow heavily from the songs J Dilla sampled. I managed to track down somewhere where all the songs he'd sampled for this album could be found, and have included three below followed by the J Dilla songs for comparison. I can't rate them highly enough, and regardless of any view that sampling to J Dilla's extent is pure plagiarism, you have to admire his taste.

The first song wasn't sampled on the album Donuts (although one of the drum breaks resurfaces on Jay Stay Paid) but was used in the single Fuck The Police, which I haven't included purely because Rene Costy's original on its own blows away any chance of comparison.

Rene Costy - Scrabble (highly recommended)

sampled on Fuck The Police

You Just Can't Win - Gene and Jerry

sampled on Glazed

Glazed - J Dilla

Of these songs J Dilla's product in this instance is the one I'd definitely say makes a marked improvement, driving up the volume of the backing vocals, introducing a searing beat, and only marred by its brevity.

Light My Fire - Lil Brown

sampled on Light My Fire

Light My Fire - J Dilla

the most beautiful opening three seconds of a song you're ever likely to hear

Just Because I Really Love You - Jerry Butler

sampled on U-Love

U-Love - J Dilla

Rufus Wainwright (remixed by Supermayer)

rufus having a morrisey moment

I found this after reading a Pitchfork Guest List interview with Hot Chip guitarist Joe Goddard. Crisp glock and a shining escalade of harp arrangements fade into an elastic club beat, lasting for nearly quarter of an hour.

Rufus Wainwright - Tiergarten (Supermayer remix)

I'm going to go recharge my honesty batteries now, I have some thinking to do.

tell me are you single yet / my heart's as big as texas

high places, setting the eclectic tone

In this issue of Cellophane Sunset...an eclectix cornucopia consisting of Almost Live Why?, a triumvirate of Northern Soul classics from The Four Tops, Gloria Jones and The King Casuals, Hot Chip and a pathetically in-depth discussion of their new material, and much needed (and greatly contradictory) doses of El Guincho's tropicalia and Brian Eno's ambience (assonance-tastic music writing, right there). But first, Why?; Almost Live...

Why?

This is from Why?'s album Almost Live from Eli's Live Room, an album which I'd heartily recommend as highly as their 2008 studio equivalent Alopecia. Not only does this almost live album include every song from that but also several updated versions of tracks like 500 Fingernails, a personal favourite; go and download it, its hard to acquire legally. Devoted fans will note a marked improvement in percussion on these tracks in particular. A word of warning, many people don't like Why?'s hip-pop antics, perhaps because the brilliance of Yoni Wolf's lyrics is matched only by the "unique qualities" of his voice. Either way, I love it, and you should do the same. Its rare to come across music this heartfelt but still so good.

Why? - By Torpedo Or Crohn's (Almost Live)

Why? - Twenty Eight (Almost Live)

Why? - 500 Fingernails (Almost Live)

The Four Tops

this is as good as it gets

I have a vinyl rip of this from a Motown LP, but this mp3 does equal justice to one of Rolling Stone's Top 500 Songs.

The Four Tops - Standing In The Shadows Of Love

Gloria Jones

but i'm sorry / i don't pray that way

You'll never regress to the Soft Cell cover again; from now on you'll view that 1981 one-hit wonder as a pap smear on the dignity of the musical landscape (I'll turn your phrase...)

Gloria Jones - Tainted Love

Johnny Jones and the King Casuals

Hendrix played with the King Casuals before he formed the Experience, and this is a really good cover, with trumpets in all the appropriate places.

Johnny Jones and the King Casuals - Purple Haze

Hot Chip

Not the first Bugged Out! Mix I've obtained; Simian Mobile Disco had a pretty good one several years ago. The first disc is mostly club-heavy and if I was being unfair and cynical I'd say that all the songs on it were chosen to throw the new Hot Chip track, Take It In, in a better light through juxtaposition of light and crap-coloured shade. The second disc is much more well-balanced, fusing a judicious selection of Hall and Oates with classics like What A Fool Believes in a glorious yacht rock-dance nuclear fusion, unlike the first disc's fraction too much fission (I'm sick alright, these are the ravings of a diseased mind, starved of Mi Goreng). That having been said, Hot Chip's newest track is pretty solid and I'm sharing it below.

Judging by the general vibe they're projecting through the media, that they'll be next album in a hip-hop direction, they wanted to use the opportunity of the Bugged Out! Mix to get the more house-oriented aspects of their music out of their collective system. I'm not sure how their hip-hop aspirations (which can clearly be seen in the Wiley cover) stock up with an accompanying desire to make more songs like Alley Cat (really bad live version shared below, just for illustration), which they've been premiering in live shows. Hot Chip's forthcoming album is looking more and more like an example of literary Leavisite tension, with discrepancies between what is said and what is meant, and aural ambiguity. I've also thrown in a Doobie Brothers edit from Hot Chip's Bugged Out! mix.

Hot Chip - Take It In

Hot Chip - Alley Cat (live)

Doobie Brothers - What A Fool Believes (Hot Chip Bugged Out! edit)

El Guincho

a beach

Only came across this recently; El Guincho's done a lot of really interesting stuff. He came out for St Jerome's Laneway fest here in Melbourne as of late, if only I'd heard of him before then, or been overage. This is from his album Alegranza.

El Guincho - Kalise

Brian Eno

eno on his ambient throne

The opening four seconds of Eno's first ambient album Music For Airports had barely entered the air before my mum's head swivelled dangerously on its axis towards the kitchen speakers and she identified it. That shocked me, that someone could remember the opening of a 17.25 minute ambient track to such an extent, and seemed to go against my dad's condemnation of Eno's work as elevator musak. He's the one who kept Vangelis' Soil Festivities and various Phillip Glass violin concertos around the house, it's all his fault anyway. Eno was on Radio National yesterday, talking about the his brand of "organic minimalism"; a perfect term.

I just went out to the piano and played the opening chords of Radiohead's Videotape and then listened to Eno's Not Yet Remembered...and I know that there is a lot of debate in the music community not only about sampling but about the borrowing of chords and their progressions, and that there are even music lawyers who have attempted to define how much is too much when it comes to "inspiration". In particular there was that famous Joe Satriani vs. Coldplay case (which Yusuf Islam offered to mediate, in true Cat Stevens style) last year. But in this case the resemblance is there for the world to see. Bearing that in mind, Not Yet Remembered is shared below, from Eno's second ambient album The Plateaux of Mirror, done with Harold Budd.

Brian Eno - Not Yet Remembered

Hockey / Peter Bjorn & John

For anyone that's interested, one of the first bands I put on here, Hockey, did a live show in Austin recently that was recorded in really high quality and if you like them you should check it out here; its done in a track-by-track fashion rather than in annoying, Deerhunter-blog, Micromix style (they're all awesome songs on their own, gangly man, why not split them up?). Peter Bjorn & John have a new album out and what I've heard is pretty good, singles like It Don't Move Me especially.

On that series of notes and their arrangments I'm going to go sleep. I just noticed a silvery sheen in the bags underneath my sickly eyes, and that can't be good.

has the light gone out for you / because the light's gone out for me

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

I've been away for far too long. Have some music.

Jona Lewie

I heard this 1980 synth-pop gem on Gold last night towards midnight while heading towards Brunswick St. The street itself reminded me why I stay away from there on Friday and Saturday nights, but this song reminded me why its important to look back to the turn of the 80's, especially in England, when previously alternative musical influences such as reggae beats infiltrated pop music. Although this song "only" reached #16, the delivery of Lewie's lyrics (highly reminiscent of Squeeze, as in Cool for Cats) in a voice highly redolent of Ian Dury make this track highly worthwhile.

Jona Lewie - You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties

The Golden Silvers

find some time / for tea and wine

More infectious synth-pop, this time from the present decade. My vocabulary-tank is running on empty at the moment, so selling this is a little hard. Rest assured, its worth the left-click-save-as-or-download-with-bittorrent (irregular verb of the week). The refix is pretty "dope", even "ill", its taken the original and run with it like a watercolour in the rain.

Golden Silvers - True Romance

Golden Silvers - True Romance (True Romantic refix)

Gang Gang Dance

These guys first entered my consciousness when I went to see Hot Chip at Billboard at the end of January this year and saw Alexis Taylor wearing a Gang Gang Dance t-shirt. My interest well and truly piqued, a quick hype on everyone's favourite machine rendered them very listenable indeed. There are some interesting, transcendent similarities to Animal Collective's sound which I can arrogantly but falsely claim to have recognized before seeing them as a related artist on last.fm.

Gang Gang Dance - Before My Voice Fails

Simian Mobile Disco

SMD have come under fire (but the limp-wristed, bedroom blogger kind of fire) several times over the years basically because some people believe pre-Mobile Disco Simian are a lot better. Simian's songs like One Dimension and The Way I Live are certainly good, and sound a lot different by virtue of the larger group alone, but something about SMD sets them apart from most purely electronic music being produced today, for me at least. This is some of their most recent work, pre-empting a release of their new album they predicted for next year.

Simian Mobile Disco - 10,000 Horses Can't Be Wrong

The Breeders/Deerhunter

For those that are interested, both The Breeders and Deerhunter have put out new EPs, both of which are worth a check-out. I might put some of their new stuff up here on my next post, what I can promise is J Dilla's Fuck the Police.

I said I'd save the best for last; some block-rocking beats from the Chemical Brothers...

Chemical Brothers

Words cannot express the sheer musical energy that courses through your body when you play this on a twelve-inch sub from 1.25 onwards...if I were to attempt an explanation I'd compare the experience to manifold personal jesuses spreading joy in your body's every cell...

Chemical Brothers - We Are The Night

not the same since i switched my hair part / and started shaving

Kes

the multi-talented narrator / librarian / careers advisor...

I directed, wrote, plotted the lights for and ran the sound in 2009's Year Nine Play at Melbourne Grammar; the result was a half-an-hour adaptation of Barry Hines' novel A Kestrel For A Knave interwoven with edits I'd done with Acoustica Mixcraft of Out Hud, The Breeders, and one of the poignant songs New Order had written for the Control Soundtrack. I don't really want to wax hysterical about the play itself as this is ostensibly a music blog but here's my speech from after the production, just because I can (as an aside, the other "place" should be pretty obvious to those who know me well, although the Year Nines made a lot of questionable jokes as to both its nature and location...)

caught in the act of speeching...

"There are only two places where I'm truly happy, and up here is one of them, where a shy person can take revenge on the world...and its been both a challenge and a privilege to offer that to these boys, just as it was once given to me..." - Eric Gardiner

I edited all the songs for the production, especially the Breeders' track which I "drastically reworked" (this is code for "changed the tone/looped the drums") and these songs hosted below are in those shortened forms. New Order purists will realize I've cut a significant part of the introduction of Get Out, oh well.

Out Hud - Zillionth Watt

(first 39 seconds)

The Breeders - Night of Joy (Eric Gardiner edit)

(I changed this enough to warrant a bracketed name change, I think)

New Order - Get Out

(last 2.20)

The Presets

HEAR ME OUT ALRIGHT

For far too long precious indie busybodies have derided not only mainstream music but alternative music which has been successful enough to warrant popularity...there is something inherently wrong. In particular, with the Presets, a lot of seemingly intelligent people will say something along the lines of "oh I don't like the Presets but I do like My People, Talk Like That, etc...."

This is their latest single; personally, I like it because of the singer's extremely distinctive voice over the hypnotism of the downplayed percussion, who knows?

The Presets - If I Know You

In other news...

The majority of Haze (www.myspace.com/cupidswounded) are turning 18 (with the bass-player's honourable exception) in the coming month or so which opens up an untold wealth of gigs within the massy entrails of Brunswick St and its surrounding environs, and as one of their managers-at-large I really need to get onto organising such events, which I'll start doing on Wednesday arvo Cal, if you're reading this instead of measuring the length of land crocodiles...

good photo of the black cat; yesterday i was sitting on the couch in the foreground, what do you know?

Speaking of Brunswick St, I had a perfect experience there yesterday verging on Nirvana; sitting in the Black Cat drinking iced coffee while they played the Best of Joy Division over the speakers...doesn't get much better than that (AND ON A SCHOOL NIGHT!1!)

Plus, I got the role of Pirate King in Pirates of Penzance, so naturally I've made a glorious return to the wonderful world of pilates, not just for punning's sake.

Finally, I just found one of the best music blogs I've had the fortune to come across and I'll share some of its beauty next time...

love / a chink of light / between their bloody lips

Bullion

"beached as, bro!"

Came across Bullion over at Faux Pas and after a little research discovered his album Pet Sounds In The Key Of Dee which he did a few years ago; J Dilla vs the Beach Boys' album Pet Sounds. In doing so he's taken the almost preposterously deified J-Dilla (of "J Dilla changed my life!" fame) and used the sample-beat-hammer to craft an extremely effective take on one of the most famous albums of all time. Another really nice touch comes when Bullion puts in samples of what sounds like the producer's commentary ("take 18") over the top, but schyeah, excellent.

Bullion - I Just Wasn't Made For These Times

In other news...

- There's a new Yeah Yeah Yeah's album, It's Blitz. I'm not particularly liking it, lacks the driving guitar of the Is Is EP or even Cheated Hearts, but I'll give it a shot.

- Thursday night I played lead tambourine with Haze at MGGS; there's a video forthcoming, sure to enter some sort of musical hall of infamy. In the meantime check out their website www.myspace.com/cupidswounded (or as Whorian would say, "scope" it...)

- The Phantom Agents are playing a gig on April 18 (facebook site for the event) and a rudimentary stalk of their myspace comments reveals they're recording again soon.

- I bought a copy of the vinyl LP "Nancy and Lee" a few weeks back with the help of David Costar (don't ask). Black gold.

father washington you're all mixed up / collecting sinners in an old tin cup

Supertramp

There are a lot of bands that have sell-out albums and top-ten hits which "define their sound", and then quietly slip in songs which are often less popular, tending to be more reflective, sometimes but not universally with a greater acoustic emphasis, and with a strange aura of melancholy. If say Beatles, chances are you will say Hey Jude in reply, ahead of Golden Slumbers or Carry That Weight.

This divergence is very obvious in Supertramp. I say Supertramp, and you scream back Logical Song, but the song I'm sharing, A Soapbox Opera, is far-removed from that hit's massive popularity.

A tinkling piano, an introduction incorporating the frantic words of a protester against fascism, and effective string articulation: if this song was a property it would be anything but a "renovator's dream", and I can't sell it any harder than that.

Supertramp - A Soapbox Opera

Beach Boys

I say Beach Boys. You say, "pay less; pay cash!"

But these three songs are from one of their earliest albums, Smile, and are far removed from the heady extravaganza of Pet Sounds. While their trademark assembly of harmony runs all the way through, in their earlier work there is a sense of delayed grandeur, of plucked strings and of muffled drums. Enjoy.

The Beach Boys - Surf's Up

The Beach Boys - Three Blind Mice

The Beach Boys - Child is the Father of the Man


Joy Division, inter alia...

Strangely enough, people often ask me what music I listen to, and while the list I provide is often eclectic, its always "good". But what does this mean?

For a start, anything I post on here is something that I consider worthwhile. Yet there must be a further definition, some essential quality.

While thinking about this I stumbled across the touchscreens in Melbourne Grammar's Learning and Leadership Centre, and, noticing someone had figured out a way to get the internal speakers to play, looked up a live drumless version of Videotape Thom Yorke recorded. In doing so I stumbled on a quote of his which perfectly sums up what I think music and musicians should be about.

"It's a fine line between writing something with genuine emotional impact and turning into little idiots feeling sorry for ourselves and playing stadium rock." - Thom Yorke

Hear that Chris Martin? This definition works so well. The difference between good and bad music is one between a song full of hollow, meaningless lyrics that spin out a maudlin story (usually involving the proverbial "her/she") and a song in which the musicians are deeply involved, in which the singer has made an emotional investment and the others are trying their best to construct their sound around it so that it is brought to life.

Ian Curtis

But that doesn't mean you have to be depressed.

Joy Division - No Love Lost

While Radiohead and Joy Division are both great examples of this difference, you can look at a band like Of Montreal, whose costume changes match their constantly metamorphosising tempos, and get the same effect coming across. Segue into...

George and Jack from Oligarchical Machinations went to Of Montreal at the Hi-Fi Bar the other night, and while I assume they'll be writing an in-depth review sometime this long weekend, in the meanwhile here's a guest Haiku Review of the night, written by George for here:

electrorhythmic

a psychosexual zoo

sublime surrender

- George

But yeah, music.

We had an earthquake here in Melbourne last night; 4.6 on the Richter Scale, as an aside.

I came to the world unrehearsed

but I've learnt some things