Thursday, 20 September 2012
Adrian Sherwood: Dub Without Borders
"If you were listening outside a reggae club the optics were shaking off the wall and you thought the building was being demolished," Sherwood says. "This was 1970, 1971. I was 12 or something."
The music that knocked him over is called dub, a mostly instrumental form of reggae that came out of Jamaica in the 1960s. It's a bassy, muted, pared-down version of its ancestor, often recorded on low-fidelity equipment. Sherwood says that dub's production techniques shaped the way he approaches his own work.
"It wasn't particularly just the dub but the techniques of it and the fact that the production was so exciting and uncluttered," he says. "So whatever I've applied my production to, whether it be funk, industrial, anything ... I've made sure they have the same space as in those great Jamaican productions."
Over a career that spans 30 years, Sherwood has fused the sounds of post-industrial music from the U.K. with Jamaican bass and rhythms. He built his name working with his idols, reggae artists like Lee "Scratch" Perry, Bim Sherman and Prince Far I. He's also produced for the industrial band Nine Inch Nails and the rock group Living Colour and remixed the electropop act Depeche Mode.
But Sherwood has put out only three albums of his own. The latest, out this year on his own label On-U Sound, is called Survival and Resistance.
Since Sherwood started On-U Sound in 1979 the label has released over 100 albums and singles, and it's where the producer brought together a family of artists that includes Dub Syndicate, New Age Steppers and African Head Charge.
"I find myself become like a brother to him," says Bonjo Iyabinghe Noah, leader of the group African Head Charge. On-U Sound put out African Head Charge's first album, My Life in a Hole in the Ground, in 1981. Noah says its not just Sherwood's skills on a mixing board that make him a favorite with musicians.
"The good thing about Adrian is that he was able to socialize especially with Jamaican people. Somehow they just like him," he says.
Noah has worked with Sherwood for most of his career. Together they've influenced another generation of British dub makers that includes Kevin Martin, who records as The Bug. Martin says he first heard a record from On-U Sound at a friend's house.
"He put on African Head Charge, who I'd never heard of before, but he also asked me to participate in a very large bong," he recalls. "I remember hearing chain saws, jet planes, voodoo chants, the most insane percussion sounds and mad dub effects. Literally, I had to run out of the guy's flat because it all seemed so out of control."
Martin returned to the album a month later to make sure he hadn't hallucinated the sounds. He hadn't.
"It's the chaos and madness that he navigated that was really interesting to me," says Martin. "His combination of taking very London-based post-punk sounds and mixing them with the heaviest dub definitely had a huge impact on me."
On the new album, Survival and Resistance, high-pitched electronic swells scatter across rumbling piles of low end. Delicately keyed piano melodies drift atop echoed dub effects. It's a little dub, a little industrial, some bossa and some blues roots. A whole lot of Sherwood. His sound is something he could pursue because owning his own label gave him complete control, and responsibility.
"You create your own destiny. You rise and fall on your own decisions," Sherwood says. "I'm very proud, although my label probably cost me a fortune over the years, it is my calling card, and that's what I'm very proud of."
Sami Yenigun @'npr'
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Starship Bahia
Truth
-W.E.B. Du Bois
Romney: 'I mean I would never do that for my brother'
Full Romney Audio Part 1(36:39)
Full Romney Audio Part 2 (31:04)
Full Transcript of the Mitt Romney Secret Video
This really has to be the most inept Presidential campaign if not of all time, then certainly of my lifetime. I am amazed that anyone could still be thinking of giving this man their vote to have him become the forty fifth President of the United States...Deepchord - Jeanneau (Free Download)
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Bonus:
IA MIX 75: Deepchord
Last July we conducted one of our most in
depth interviews with Deepchord aka Rod Modell. We discussed his past,
present and album 'Hash Bar Loops', the result of Rod's visit to
Amsterdam. A year has passed since we last spoke to Rod and he's on the
cusp of releasing his follow up album 'Sommer', a more lighter and
ethereal record released on Soma records. To celebrate the album Rod has
kindly recorded this stripped down, deeply experimental Deepchord mix
encompassing his favorite tracks of the moment.
INTERVIEW
TRACKLIST
1. Pellarin & Lenler “Gammel Strand” (Statler & Waldorf)
2. Bipolardepth “Trip To The Well” (Motorlab Records)
3. Dublicator “Spectrum I - Absorption (Complement)” (Entropy Records) 04. Pellarin & Lenler “NY Strand” (Statler & Waldorf)
5. In Hope For The Best “Q&A Air” (Elektro Music Department)
6. Fischerle “Lekkie Przebarwienie” (Entropy Records)
7. Desolate “Follow Suit” (Fauxpas Musik)
8. Pellarin “Acoustic Strumm” (Statler & Waldorf)
9. Lars Leonhard “Pacific Ocean (Convex Remix)” (Klangschleife)
10. Madutec “Tiefsee” (Entropy Records)
11. Overcast Sound “LOA” (Falk Recordings)
12. Tom Ackleberg ”Orange Mountains” (Auditory Cortex)
13. Pellarin & Lenler “Orquestra 78” (Statler & Waldorf)
14. Basicnoise “Fate” (Klangschleife)
15. Deepchord “Aquatic” (Soma)
16. Brickman “Inner” (Simphonic Silence Inside)
17. Blir “Untitled” (Raster-Noton)
18. Claudia Bonarelli “Commune” (Mitek)
19. Dub Jack “Trebol 1” (Groovear)
20. Dublicator ”Ancient Vibrations III” (Entropy Records)
21. Mark Ernestus “Meets BBC” (Honest Jon’s)
22. Ghislain Poirier “Orange Brûle” (12k)
23. Giriu Dvasios “Vanduo” (Cold Tear Records)
24. Kotai + Mo “She Bouncer” (Elektro Music Department)
25. cv313 “Unreleased Loop” (Echospace Detroit)
26. GoGooo “Petite Chose” (mOAR)
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INTERVIEW
TRACKLIST
1. Pellarin & Lenler “Gammel Strand” (Statler & Waldorf)
2. Bipolardepth “Trip To The Well” (Motorlab Records)
3. Dublicator “Spectrum I - Absorption (Complement)” (Entropy Records) 04. Pellarin & Lenler “NY Strand” (Statler & Waldorf)
5. In Hope For The Best “Q&A Air” (Elektro Music Department)
6. Fischerle “Lekkie Przebarwienie” (Entropy Records)
7. Desolate “Follow Suit” (Fauxpas Musik)
8. Pellarin “Acoustic Strumm” (Statler & Waldorf)
9. Lars Leonhard “Pacific Ocean (Convex Remix)” (Klangschleife)
10. Madutec “Tiefsee” (Entropy Records)
11. Overcast Sound “LOA” (Falk Recordings)
12. Tom Ackleberg ”Orange Mountains” (Auditory Cortex)
13. Pellarin & Lenler “Orquestra 78” (Statler & Waldorf)
14. Basicnoise “Fate” (Klangschleife)
15. Deepchord “Aquatic” (Soma)
16. Brickman “Inner” (Simphonic Silence Inside)
17. Blir “Untitled” (Raster-Noton)
18. Claudia Bonarelli “Commune” (Mitek)
19. Dub Jack “Trebol 1” (Groovear)
20. Dublicator ”Ancient Vibrations III” (Entropy Records)
21. Mark Ernestus “Meets BBC” (Honest Jon’s)
22. Ghislain Poirier “Orange Brûle” (12k)
23. Giriu Dvasios “Vanduo” (Cold Tear Records)
24. Kotai + Mo “She Bouncer” (Elektro Music Department)
25. cv313 “Unreleased Loop” (Echospace Detroit)
26. GoGooo “Petite Chose” (mOAR)
Neil Young: Waging Heavy Peace
“I can still remember how it smelled when I first pulled in here — I was driving this car,” he said, recalling the trip in 1970 when he bought the place and named it Broken Arrow, after the Buffalo Springfield song.
The author of some of the spookiest, darkest songs in the American folk canon seemed jolly on this late-August day. Even if he was accompanied by a reporter, generally not his favorite species of human, the motion soothed him. “I’ve always been better moving than I am standing still,” he said.
Young, 66, spotted this land out the window of a plane banking out of San Francisco four decades ago and now owns nearly 1,000 acres of it. His song “Old Man” is a tribute to the caretaker who first showed him the place.
“I ran out of money, so I had to sell some of it,” he said. “That’s O.K., because it was too big. Everything happens for a reason.” He kept his eyes on the narrow road through the giant redwoods.
It was hard to reconcile the affable guy motoring along on a sunny day with his past incarnations: the portentous folkie of “Ohio,” the rabid anti-commercialist who gave MTV the musical middle finger with “This Note’s For You,” the angry rocker who threatened to hit the cameramen at Woodstock with his guitar. He was happy partly because he was here.
“For whatever you’re doing, for your creative juices, your geography’s got a hell of a lot to do with it,” he said. “You really have to be in a good place, and then you have to be either on your way there or on your way from there.”
We would spend a few hours creeping along — he drove slowly but joyfully, as if the automobile were a recent invention — on our way there or on our way from there, the ranch where Young lives with his wife, Pegi, and their son, Ben. His longtime producer and friend, David Briggs, who died in 1995, hated making records here, deriding the hermetic refuge as a “velvet cage.”
In addition to the studio, where more than 20 records have been made, there is an entire building given over to model trains, another where vintage cars are stored and another piled with his master recordings. Llamas and cows roam under cartoonishly large trees. It seems like a made-up place, an open-air fortress of eccentricity meant to protect the artist who lives there. But what it has most of all is not a lot of people.
“I like people, I just don’t have to see them all the time,” he said, laughing. David Crosby, his bandmate in Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, used to describe the complicated route into his ranch as “my filtering system,” Young said.
He made a bunch of rights and lefts through the forest before getting out to unlock the gate. Others might have an electronic gate, but Young likes the mechanical experience of slipping a key into a padlock and swinging something open. He is fundamentally analog, despite the occasional electronic excesses in his music. He likes amps with knobs that go to 12 and things that click when you touch them.
I made it past the filtering system because Young was promoting his autobiography, “Waging Heavy Peace,” which comes out next week. The book is elliptical and personal, with little of the period poetics of “Just Kids,” by Patti Smith, or the scabrous detail of “Life,’’ by Keith Richards...
Continue reading
David Carr @'NY Times'
________
Released Oct 16
Neil Young & Crazy Horse: Psychedelic Pill (Review)
The Story of Ziggy Stardust: How David Bowie Created the Character that Made Him Famous
Bonus:Starman (Unreleased Promo)
Filmed by Mick Rock. Afternoon rehearsals and concert at Rainbow Theatre 19th August 1972. with Lindsay Kemp (!!!) and the Astronettes
Martina Topley-Bird & Mark Lanegan - Crystalised (The xx cover)
Last week, UK singer/Tricky collaborator Martina Topley-Bird shared this fine new cover of The xx’s “Crystalised” on her Facebook page. While details on collaborators (or the project it might be previewing) were left rather scant, it’s clear her past duet partner Mark Lanegan is taking the Oliver Sim part here. And given that the track first appeared on the SoundCloud stream of Massive Attack, whose 2010 LP featured Topley-Bird on vox, it sounds like they have that British trip-hop duo producing or performing as well.
“More to come soon,” Topley-Bird writes, so perhaps this is set for Lanegan’s forthcoming covers album or her own follow-up to Some Place Simple. Either way, it’s a great groove and their voices make a perfect frayed/silky match.
via
Wednesday, 19 September 2012
Charles Bradley - Live On KEXP (17/3/11)
Charles Bradley, backed by The Menahan Street Band, live from Mellow Johnny's Bike Shop in Austin, TX, during KEXP's broadcast at SXSW. Recorded 3/17/2011
Heartache and Pain
No Time For Dreaming
Lovin' You Baby
The World (Is Going Up In Flames)
Why Is It So Hard?
Golden Rule
Bonus:
Charles Bradley: Soul of America (trailer)
(Thanx Consuela!)
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