Archive for the ‘Material’ Category

Great Songs By Artists I Know Very Little About

Monday, November 25th, 2013

And between the holidays, impending snowstorm, and my ongoing manic fury of getting everything done I need to get done before my big move, I don’t have time to find out more. But they’re good tunes, and I thought some of you all might enjoy them too.

Sweet
It’s It’s…The Sweet Mix
My knowledge of Sweet begins with “Ballroom Blitz” and ends with “Fox On The Run,” so I can’t tell you any of the other songs that make up this six-minute medley. It’s catchy though, and very disco-y, were they always like that? I assumed they were more a light-glam rock thing. Maybe I’ll pick up some Sweet while I’m in Japan. I don’t know why, but they strike me as the kind of act that would be big in Japan. Maybe it’s the wacky skintight outfits. In every picture of them I’ve seen they’ve always come off as a hybrid of glam rock and the Power Rangers.

Material
I’m The One (Dance Version)
Don’t Lose Control (Dance Version)
Material is one of Bill Laswell’s many side-projects. They started out as an entirely inaccessible “no wave” act (spoiler: I fucking hate “no wave” bullshit), but by 1982 they shifted their sound radically, and instead embraced a strong disco/funk sound. I assume this was around the time he started working with Herbie Hancock on the immortal “Rockit” but like I said, I’m way too busy/tired to do some proper research tonight. They sound like it though, as both of them (especially “Don’t Lose Control” have a heavy funk/electro sound to them that sounds very similar to Hancock’s stuff of that era. “Don’t Lose Control” even has superfluous vocoder! So it’s the best shit ever.

Seriously, if you like leftfield disco or early electronic music, check out One Down. It’ll blow you away. It even features a very early appearance by Whitney Houston!

Everyone have a splendid Thanksgiving (if you’re American, otherwise…um…enjoy your Thursday) and I’ll see next week with hopefully some posts of substance.

Electro > Most Other Things

Tuesday, July 2nd, 2013

Music music music music.

Mark Shreeve
Legion (Razor Mix)
Legion (Single Edit)
Legion (Satan Mix)
Legion (Space Mix)
Mark Shreeve was an early electronic musician/composer who put out a lot of stuff on Jive Electro during the 80s. He also wrote a lot of Samantha Fox’s stuff from that time period as well, which I assume made him a shitload more money than anything with his name on it.

This is a damned weird song. It’s like Afrika Bambaataa by way of Hellraiser. I don’t know if the “Call me Legion!” snippet at the beginning of the track is a sample from a film, or something that Shreeve recorded himself, but it’s creepy nonetheless, although not as creepy as the freaky-ass laugh that pops up from time to time. Seriously, this sounds like break-dancing music from hell.

You think Pinhead could do the worm? I’d pay to watch that.

Oh, and also apparently a version of this song is in the 1986 film The Jewel of The Nile, which is pretty damn random. I actually saw that move in the theaters when it came out, but I was six at the time, so I don’t remember much. Doesn’t Danny DeVito walk on hot coals or something like that? Whatever, flick was a total Indiana Jones rip-off.

These next four tracks I snagged from a vinyl copy of Disco Not Disco 2, a compilation album that features more “leftfield” dance tracks from the late-70s and early-80s. I’m only featuring these four because everything else on the album is in-print elsewhere.

Alexander Robotnick
Problems d’Amour
Alexander Robotnick (of no relation to Sonic villain Dr. Robotnick, at least I don’t think so, he was MIA for most of the early nineties…) is a godfather of 80s electro, thanks in large part to this amazing track, which is a killer combination of electro and disco. It’s great, but if you want to hear something that’ll really melt your brain out of its pure awesomeness, check out Robotnick’s “Analog Sessions” project, his collaboration with Ludus Pinksy. Just two old dudes in a cabin rocking out with a mountain of old-school analog gear. Shit is epic.

Material
Ciguri
Material is yet another side-project of mega-productive bassist Bill Laswell, who has been in more bands and produced more records than I care to count. Some of his highlights include his production work with Herbie Hancock during his electro phase of the early 80s; and Praxis, an experimental supergroup that featured him, Buckethead and Parliament’s Bernie Worrell.

Material appears to be a Laswell-centric project, with other members coming and going through the years, including Bootsy Collins, Sly & Robbie, Fred Firth, Buckethead, the Jungle Brothers, William S. Burroughs, Ginger Baker and even Whitney freaking Houston.

Material’s genre, as you can imagine, is pretty hard to pin down, but if I had to name it I would probably go with “music that James Murphy ripped off 30 years later.”

The Coach House Rhythm Section
Timewarp
According to Discogs, The Coach House Rhythm Section was an alias for Eddy “Electric Avenue” Grant. And if that’s the case, then damn, I have to give that dude some credit for range. This sounds nothing like his reggae work, and is straight-up avant-garde, new-wave inspired dance music that’s really unique still.

But it’s no “Electric Avenue.”

OY!

Connie Case

Get Down

Is “lo-fi electro/disco” a genre? Because that’s what this sounds like.

I got no clue as to who this is. So if anyone wants to help me out go for it. All I can find on her is that she worked on an album called Extra Funky that featured not one, but two versions of a song called “”Haven’t Been Funked Enough.”

I guess she never met Sylvester, he would helped her out.