Random Songs: 2020-04-28

I'm honestly doing more work on this than I'd like.  I literally could make it a full time job to just talk about the music I listen to and enjoy.  I like listening to music, I like writing about it, but it is work, unquestionably, and at this point I'm not even doing it for the exposure.  I mean that's sort of a pipe dream, actually having exposure!  No, two or three people value it, two or three people really like what I'm doing, and I'm one of those people, and that's enough reason to keep doing it.

But there are posts that are more work and posts that are less work.  I keep starting easy posts and having them turn into hard posts, and maybe I am doing that again.  I'm going to put my library on random, and I'm going to write about the songs that come up, and I'm going to do this until I decide I'm done and them I'm going to post this entry.  Because there is value in my just talking about ordinary life.

Dudley Simpson - Dover Castle: Had to check to see if I had any filters set, because I have been listening to a lot of BBC Radiophonic stuff recently, was actually thinking about making a post about the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and sound effects vs. stings vs. incidental music and the porous barriers between them.  Anyway this is more of, I don't know, a brief synthesizer fanfare written by Dudley Simpson for "The Mind of Evil".  It is pleasant and cheerful and I like it plenty.

Nic Lyon - Woody: Oh, this will be nice, I've never heard this one before.  It's from a comp called "Antipodean Anomalides" that came out in 2018 and which features Olev Muska, which I guess is how I found it.  I guess from the title Nic is from New Zealand or Australia.  Unfortunately I'm not entirely sure how to describe this.  Maybe a little like the Penguin Cafe Orchestra?  Pleasant instrumental, strings, synth patches that sound like splashing water.  Googling Nic Lyon doesn't help much - I get a Stanford poly sci grad student.  Good luck Stanford Nic Lyon, that seems like a tough field to be in right now.  Oh!  Here we are.  It's from a 1983 New Age album called "Unicorn".  We all like unicorns here, right?  Discogs has a link to his website which says that "Nicolas' recordings range in the hundreds" - unfortunately this seems to be news to Discogs, which only lists the one.  Looks like his website was last updated in 2014.

Nasenbluten - Concrete Compressor: I have no guilty pleasures, but if I did gabber would probably be one of them.  Gabber is music that, as far as I can tell, is specifically made to be as obnoxious as possible.  I don't know why it took me so long to come around to it.  It's fast, violent, filled with unpleasant noises, you can't really dance to it.  This track is the least aggressively titled on the entire release.  What's not to like?

Wormrot - False Grind Sodomy: From "Earache: The World's Shortest Album".  Well, it certainly is short.

Art Blakey & George Kawaguchi - A Night in Tunisia: I'm not familiar with the whole breadth of jazz - there's some bits I hone in on more than others.  For instance, I'm fairly fond of the standard "A Night in Tunisia" and I have a number of recordings of it.  This '81 recording has percussion to the fore (not surprising given that the leaders are two drummers) and is a fine interpretation, taken at an extremely brisk pace with the arrangement twisted around a bit in the best bebop style.  I got ten minutes to soak this one in here.  I do tend to skip around tracks a lot, particularly when I'm writing, so for this I'm giving them a shot to play through.

So Kawaguchi, I didn't much know him, but apparently he was known as "the Japanese Art Blakey".  So I guess you have two Art Blakeys on drums on this track, the Japanese one and the American one.  Google seems to believe that he has some commonalities with a drummer named Raiden Suzawa, who played for an '80s Japanese kabuki metal band named Seikima-II.  The Encyclopedia Metallum says this about them:

Lyrical themes:
    Satan, Love, Hell, Demons, Religion, Sex

So there you go, then.

Prince - instrumental 4: LOL, take a shot.  Here's the issue: I have 583 Prince tracks in my library out of a total of 87275.  Now, that means that there's only a .7% chance that any given track on random will be by Prince, but it also means that Prince tracks tend to show up on random with, shall we say, extremely regular frequency, and typically they are some weird inscrutable bootleg.

This track, for instance, is from Disc 1 of a 26 CD bootleg set of unreleased Prince studio recordings.  These recordings here are extremely basic worktapes.  He's on his keyboard here playing a very horror-movie chord progression for a minute, and that's it.

My Morning Jacket - One in the Same (demo): More home demos!  I have lots of these, honestly.  This is a Jim James home demo from the deluxe reissue of "It Still Moves".  Better quality and more fleshed out than Prince's home demos - probably did them on a 4-track or something, he multitracks his vox.  Acoustic guitar, falsetto, gobs and gobs of echo.  You know the drill.  Honestly it sounds a hell of a lot like "Behind That Locked Door".

Sanford Clark - The Fool '66: One of those things that happens sometimes - Sanford Clark remakes his earlier country hit "The Fool" in line with current standards.  In this case that means adding some wicked fuzz.  It's awkward and not entirely appropriate but it's good fuzz and a good song.

Eric Dolphy - Inner Flight II: A flute piece clearly inspired by Edgard Varese's "Density 21.5".  I think this is from some weird record of experiments of his from the early '60s, including I seem to remember something he did with some opera singer?  Anyway, it's a nice record; "third stream" jazz tends to be respected more than it's listened to, but I try to give it at least some of my time!

R.A.P. Ferreira - ABSOLUTES: One of the buzzed, trending releases of 2020.  I don't listen to nearly as much hip-hop as I'd like.  The stuff I do listen to tends to be oddball backpacker stuff like this.  I know sometimes stuff like this gets dismissed for being too "intellectual".  I figure there are worse things to be.  I figure there's room for all sorts of music in the world, including reflective and thoughtful music like this.