Just a quick mix to encapsulate the odd academic anxiety that grips me every September even though I am long out of school.
It has been a long time since I scribbled about my listening habits but that is from a lack of time and motivation. Even with the recent pricing changes at eMusic I am still swimming about in countless albums thanks my discovering Amie Street and their liberal use of credit sales to part my hard earned money from my person. That said, I am in a Funk/Soul period at the moment and am diving headlong into album that are either vintage or neo in their arrangements and execution. Below are four that are burning my ears off at the moment.
The Lee Fields album, My World, reminded me of Darondo’s Let My People Go, smoke laden and gritty in its emotionally raw masculinity. Love Comes And Goes is by far my favorite cut with shivering strings and shimmering guitar chords backed by brassy horn stabs, a jumpy bass line and a rock solid back beat. The chorus pulls me in and often I’m belting it out unabashedly regardless the company or place.
Let Me Be Your Man by Tyrone Ashley’s Funky Music Machine blew me flat with the opening chords of Come On Home. the album is deep, raw, sweet with a splash of skank to keep things in line. The cover of I Can’t Help Myself has this fantastic unpolished feel to the production that, while probably indicates the age and stress on the master copy, imparts a real sense of immediacy to the recording. The album has a taunt story behind it of loss, fire, and eventual rescue that makes it all more precious of a listen.
I have been riding Sounding Out The City for the better part of this year, savoring every bass jump, horn stab, and snap of the snare. Tracks like Behind The Blue Curtains become a private soundtrack for the minutia of my life, adding a little swing and soul to the most mundane of tasks. Slide Show sees the group taking the simplest of interplays between a jumpy bassline and an arpeggiated chord on the guitar and twists it into irresistible head-nodding hook. I just picked up their new release today and am really looking forward to spinning it up, especially after the countless listenings this album has offered.
The spin down of horns on Menahan Street Band’s Home Again! is sweetly offset by the acoustic guitar and offers a fantastic take on a upbeat Soul instrumental. Brass features prominently on Make The Road By Walking and the arrangements weave nasally saxophones and brittle trumpets into a surprisingly thick stew of sound. The group also very refreshingly draws from a variety of inspirations, in particularly a kinetic kind of Reggae anchors Montego Sunset but it still maintains a gritty industrial feel too it.
The show was muscular, sweaty, passionate, and ethereal. It was also my first concert that I brought my camera to and I now cannot imaging attending another without it. I shot over 500 pictures during the course of a hour and a half set, it worked out to around a snap every 10 seconds which means I watched the show through the lens.
Management and I had a brief discussion of what glass but decided to travel as light as possible: Canon EF 50mm f1.4, Canon EOS 350D, spare battery, spare memory card, and a cleaning cloth. The 50mm was the best choice as the lighting was tricky and most of the shots bounced around the 400-1600 ISO range but a little post work in UFRaw and Gimp help rescue some of the noisier images. The smaller aperture Canon EF-S 17-85mm f/4-5.6 would likely have been useless in that lighting and changing glass in tight quarters likely would have been a recipe for heartbreak on my part.
You can see the full set on Flickr.
If there is one thing that I miss about my pre-Internet life it would be the making of mixtapes. Before eMusic, Last.fm, iPods, and fat broadband came into my life I obsessively bounced tracks from CDs and other tapes to make the perfect soundtrack for a moment in time. July back roads, October in Greenwich Village, February in a steel shop, there was a mix for every time and place. For whatever reason, technology and life in general saw the need and time for mixtapes evaporate and the couple of times that I tried to reboot the process for a mix trading group I was a complete failure, either phoning the mix in or just not delivering.
It seems odd that I listen to music all day long, obsessively hunt for artists and albums that are completely new to my ears but don’t organize them into neat little packages to remember that place and time when they first crackled on the cheap speakers in my car on the way to work or swam out of my headphones late at night. Here’s my first crack at getting back into mixing and while it is a little disjointed and skips from Africa to Brooklyn to Jamaica it is a quick glimpse into what I have been listening to this past month.
C60 for May 2009
I’m hoping that each month I can knock out a mix of what might be dominating my ears at the moment with the goal of keeping those mixes to the reasonable constraint of a C60 tape. Enjoy!
I often get excited about new things everyday exclaiming their life changing properties but Kutiman is something different. DJ Shadow’s album Entroducing… shattered all my ill-conceived notions of art and music and clear my mind for the notion of cutting and pasting sound collages, Kutiman takes that to the next logical step by mining YouTube videos for melodies and rhythms and then stitching them together to form hilarious Funk breakdowns, grinding Drum and Bass anthems, or haunting ballads.
My favorite track (video?) by far is I’m New as the vocalists are sublime…
Someday is a close second as Sarah Amstutz has a wonderful voice.
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