Friday 4 June 2021

The design legacy of 2 Tone

Thursday 3 June 2021

The Beatles in India: ‘With their long hair and jokes, they blew our minds!’

Ballard

Glory For The Shit For Brains Mix

Tracklist: 
Death To The Users Of The World
Dedication
Glory
Slave
200 Years
Bigot
Are You Experienced?
Where Are We Going? (Live)
Glory (Live)

NO were: 
Ollie Olsen - keyboards, vocals, sampler 
Marie Hoy - keyboards, vocals, samples 
Michael Sheridan - guitar 
Kevin McMahon - bass guitar 

Death To The Users Of The World / Are You Experienced? (RMIT 1988)
New Andy Gill tribute album released

Sometimes Mix

 
Various versions of Sometimes. Written by Ollie Olsen and released by The Orchestra of Skin & Bone in 1985. Flash forward four years and Michael Hutchence is fronting Max Q and the song is resurrected. Includes mixes by Perfecto and Todd Terry. Such agreat song. 
Watch the footage of Hutchence shot for the video below as well as an interview with Ollie and Michael HERE
Another mix of Ollie's music HERE

Orchestra of Skin & Bone Max Q


Wednesday 2 June 2021

Siavash Amini - Unfold | Fluster

I just love this man's sound(s) 
BUT because of the above reason do try and find his releases. The track above is released thru Moving Furniture Check here for other labels that have released Siavash's work and please support wherever possible

Dennis Cooper Gone: Scrapbook 1980-1982 (Infinity Land Press 2021)

Martin Bladh:  The scrapbook originates from the time just after The Tenderness of Wolves came out. Did you ever have it in mind as prima materia for a specific work? I’m thinking about how it has been stitched together, the continuity with different leitmotivs that overlap each other, and it looks like you’ve gone back on some occasions and reworked the composition? 
 Dennis Cooper: As I said, it was to help me figure how I could write the novel cycle that I had been dreaming of making since I was a teenager. I started making it because I had just had a small paying job that involved helping the man who, at that time, owned the William Burroughs archive, organize the papers. In the process, I was able to really study the scrapbooks that Burroughs had made while writing his early novels, and I was very inspired and influenced by the way Burroughs had combined texts, both original and found, with magazine images and photographs in a collage-like way, and I thought that trying to work out my ideas and sense of style and structure through that kind of multi-media approach without the pressure of having to start writing the novels might help me, and it really did...


Dennis was one of the early champions of EOMS and his giving a shout out and link to this blog a month or two after I started it certainly helped get the word out initially. Anyway it turned out that there was an overlap of us both living in Amsterdam in the early to mid eighties. I probably would have come across some of his early work (or at least reference to) but one place where we DID intersect was at William Burroughs' One World Poetry reading in the city's Melkweg on 12 November 1985. My first job in Amsterdam was actually working in the bookshop in the Milkyway for Alistair, who you had to say knew the market he was catering for. It was just selling (lots of) copies of another way of deciphering the Kabbalah with me trying not to puke at the smell of patchouli. Interestingly as I googled how to spell the p-word then, this came up:
I KNOW the answer to that one but you won't like it...see also this:
Unfortunately I can't say a word about that what with me at this moment wearing my Grateful Dead jacket and not having had a haircut for over the year that we have been in and out of lockdown.
But back to that night in Amsterdam. JLP of the Gun Club at one of his first spoken word appearances had to be escorted off stage by Simon Vinkenoog after what five minutes (?) as he was as nissed as a pewt. Was he as pissed as 12-18 months before this night, when playing A Love Supreme as the last song of a Gun Club performance at The (London) Lyceum he crawled under the stage and managed to get himself stuck under the drum riser, having to be helped out by roadies as the audience stared and clapped in disbelief.  They were the last two times I saw him. Very sad actually. 
But back to Burroughs and this was the sixth time I'd seen him read and boy did he make me laugh but as he left the room where he had been reading the glass door that he had just gone through exploded with glass flying everywhere. Turns out that Dennis was right in the middle of it as he was only a couple of paces behind WSB and I was probably another 4 or 5 people back from him trying to make my way out. Turned out that Burroughs still had the power to give some people the shits and take offence even then. Such a small poetic world we live in really isn't it?
Dennis Cooper's Blog

Manic Street Preachers - Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

Sadly the writer of the song BJ Thomas died last week but this is my favourite version, which may surprise a few people. Apparently this was the only song they recorded in '95. Here's a live version
For decades, scientists have been hot-wiring viruses in hopes of preventing a pandemic, not causing one. But what if …?

Tuesday 1 June 2021

Why Porter capitulated: a defamation lawyer’s view

Black Cab - Bad Robot / Dream Baby (Gershwin Room Melbourne May 2021)

My recording on the night was the worst I have ever done and I didn't even pass it on to Andrew. Luckily the Espy has mics set up to record the performances

I do hope that this current lockdown here doesn't last too long and that the Footscray gig takes place on June 12. We will have to wait and see...

The Beginner's Guide to Nuevo Cine Mexicano

Via

Various - Modern Love (Very interesting Bowie covers)

 
Featuring an array of artists such as Jeff Parker, We Are KING, Meshell Ndegeocello, Helado Negro, Khruangbin, Matthew Tavares, Nia and more, Modern Love seeks to champion Bowie’s lesser-known connection to soul, R&B, jazz, funk, and gospel. The prominent jazz influences throughout Bowie’s final album, Blackstar, were a key inspiration for curating this collection of reimagined Bowie songs with these artists. The resulting album is an eclectic tribute featuring a group of artists who not only fit together creatively, but who, like Bowie, straddle different worlds musically, with soul and jazz at their core. 
Modern Love offers a fresh look at Bowie’s trailblazing career, aiming to highlight the often overlooked relationship between his back catalogue and musical genres traditionally pioneered by artists of color. The project was curated by music executive and DJ Drew McFadden, alongside BBE Music founder Peter Adarkwah. “I felt that the connection between Bowie and R&B, jazz, funk, gospel and all things soulful, had never really been explored before — at least not so much in covers, which tend to lean more towards rock and pop,” says McFadden. “Certainly, there’s been plenty of Bowie covers over the years, but none that have really tapped into what seems to have been a big part of his core musical style and direction.”
Modern Love is an interactive sonic map. Here, seventeen artists make their way into the varied regions of his sundry catalog and circle back with seventeen unique re-imaginings of both his cornerstone and lesser-known tracks. Some, in atmosphere, feel like a sly alternate take from original sessions (Khruangbin’s ethereal, funk infused version of “Right” from Young Americans); others nod at the source, then wink before diving into the deep waters of another musical stratosphere (Sessa’s sexy Tropicalia-drenched “Panic in Detroit” from Aladdin Sane). Still others take tunes down to the studs and then re-arrange the moody interiors: Meshell Ndegeocello’s pensive “Fantastic Voyage” from Lodger and Tavares’ clever take on “Heroes” which is restructured into a kinetic hardbop-esque backdrop, fronted by ice-cool, held-back vocals. The bullseye these artists aim for is Bowie’s fearlessness. “Fame was an incredible bluff that worked,” he once reflected. “Very flattering. I’ll do anything until I fail. And when I succeed I quit too.”
Modern Love packs us off on a journey that balances on risk’s sharp blade. Track-to-track, it explores what happens when a musician throws out notions of should and safe and stretches beyond the known. These artists use Bowie both as a guide and a prism: A way of being and seeing. Their offerings, widely divergent, explore the inheritance from an artist who freed himself from labels, genres and, consequently, pigeonholes. While he was at it, he decimated fixed notions about territory (or terra) itself; boundaries hemmed-in his creative process, but his essence remained free to roam. He may have vanished in earthly form, yet, as he also promised in the lyrics of “Modern Love,” But I never wave bye-bye . . .” This compilation assures us that his spirit swirls around us. His force is alive to all of us and, here, it is summoned with an incantation that celebrates possibility.