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Carefusion Jazz Festival New York presents: Tortoise & Aethereal Bace with DJ Nick Hook This Week's Free Song Downloads Giuseppe Ielasi's latest, Tools (out Tuesday, June 15 on 12k), finds the Italian experimentalist moving away from his earlier widescreen, drone-based works and, similar to '09's Aix, continuing his rhythmic explorations. Here, Ielasi's percussive tracks are created from everyday household items, and while each song title reveals the source, you'd be hard-pressed to guess each piece's sound origin otherwise. As this free download of "Rubber Band" shows, Tools is all at once playful and creative, and endlessly listenable. Free download of "Let's Take a Walk," off of Robby Moncrieff's new album Who Do You Think You Aren't, out Tuesday, June 15 on Porter Records. Moncrieff, who also records as What's Up and has collaborated with the Dirty Projectors, teams up with Hella's powerhouse drummer Zach Hill, and here they serve up an adventurous take on electronic keyboard music, the duo twisting and bending '70s-inspired prog, jazz, and avant-garde music together in new and thrilling ways. This Week's Featured Downloads
Exclusive Advance Download. The band Oneida has served NYC and the surrounding areas for over a decade with a necessary sort of filter: they wear the dilettantes out in the audience down to a nub; you see these people, who probably read about them on a blog somewhere, expecting to be enlightened, and running out of the room once they learn what enlightenment actually entails. The group's horizon psychedelia, half frat rock/half stern, measured Teutonic life jams are powered by one Kid Millions, who over the past ten years has shaped himself into one of the most formidable percussionists in music today. His restless, non-stop extended assaults on the kit have earned him acclaim outside of the band as well, having served as a leader in the last two or three Boredoms 77/88/9 drummer affairs. Man Forever is Kid's most challenging effort yet. Conceived after watching a live Fireworks Ensemble performance of Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, this is a rigorous, must-hear avant-garde stomp through an obstacle course of tuned drums (arranged by Brian Chase of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs), played hard and fast, and tracked over one another so that the beats themselves become an ever-fluctuating, churning pattern of tones. Occasional electronic coloring by Sightings bassist Richard Hoffman helps to accentuate the swarming, riotous sound within. A dense and provocative work, Man Forever proves that there's still a long way to go in terms of maxing out musical theory, and elevates its creators into a higher class than most local rock hoi polloi will ever achieve. -Doug Mosurock
Joe O'Connell has toiled long and majestically among the pastoral idylls of Southern and Central Indiana, composing and performing, as Elephant Micah, some of the most memorable and affecting singer-songwriter music to be heard anywhere, from any time. His newest album, Echoer's Intent, is a departure of a kind for him, marking his first foray into a proper recording studio, and thus abandoning the incidentals of tape noise, feedback, and distortion that have accompanied his bedroom-fidelity records for nearly a decade. He no longer needs them, if he ever did, and it's a sublimely successful affair. O'Connell's voice has never sounded truer or more confident, and his songs -- meditations largely on art, artifice, and the pathetic fallacy -- have rarely hit harder. The acerbic and unsettling "Field Notes" takes a collection of imaginary -ologists (anthro-, ethno-, zoo-) to task for usurping the labors and creations of their "informant" subjects at the expense of those subjects' livingness. The songwriter, in "Loon Call," struggles to control his voice and his guitar as an uncooperative landscape and firmament ignore and obstruct him. The impossibly beautiful "Still Life Blues" considers a caged creature gifted with a paintbrush, whose life and works are simultaneously on display to unbound ignoramuses and profiteers. Elephant Micah is far and away one of the most gifted (and least affected) voices working in this medium today, and he frequently, modestly, approaches transcendence. Echoer's Intent is the sound of him inching ever closer. You're encouraged to check out Elephant Micah's recent appearance on WNYC's Spinning on Air program, archived and with the set-list available for download at: http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/spinning/2010/may/16. -Nathan Salsburg Take it from a man who owns the 10-CD boxed-set -- this 20-track collection of the best of the 13th Floor Elevators hits the mark. Going Up may not be necessary if you already own the three studio albums or have been plowing through all the excellent rarities that have been popping up of late, but if you have yet to dive into the music of Roky Erickson's amazing mid-'60s Texas psych maelstrom, this is a great place to start. Bringing together the greatest tracks from the singles and albums in their original form, this collection from Charly is an excellent primer on one of the best American rock bands of all time. -Josh Madell
"Who is Kim Fowley?" "Kim who?" "Did you say Kim...that's a guy?" These are some of the questions I've been getting over the past few months while trying to pour Fowley's genius down people's throats. Kim Fowley is everything that everyone who's ever picked up a guitar, signed a record contract, twiddled a knob in a studio, or had dreams of rock and roll stardom wants to be. There isn't a thing the guy hasn't done, whether it's eating fried chicken with Muddy Waters in pre-'65 riots Watts, producing number one hits and unforgettable oddities from artists of all stripes, penning songs for everyone from Cat Stevens to Soft Machine, the Beach Boys to Kiss, creating the Runaways or recording some of the most whacked-out, ahead of their time, proto-everything solo albums. Norton, always ahead of the curve (and usually behind the times), has released two great compilations of Fowley's early productions: One Man's Garbage (vol. 1) and Another Man's Gold (vol. 2). These records focus on the rarely heard side to Fowley's early work (he had certifiable smashes in this era with songs like "Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow" and "Alley Oop" and the Raider's first hit "Long Hair"), and contain everything from girl groups jams, teen-beat ditties, surf rock, "oldies but goodies," bizarre spoken word high school revenge narratives and doo-wop influenced early rock n' roll and California pop. Although a lot of these tracks were hastily written and recorded (some of them in a few hours!), they are important documents of an era when people weren't crafting songs to make a full-length album, but were doing it to get on the radio and to get famous! It's Hollywood, baby, and that's where you found Kim in the late '50s/early '60s. He was literally pulling some of these people off the street, auditioning them on the spot and throwing them in the studio to record. Think of him as the alternative Phil Spector, more street level, dirtier, and underground. These tracks are part of the canon of American music that hasn't survived the filter of Oldies Radio, and they are just a few of the thousands upon thousands of songs he cranked out, pressed up on small labels with names like Rubbish and Last Chance, that have vanished into obscurity. One's Man's Garbage has a great, great track called "This Is Paradise" by the Rituals that's full of banging tambourine, minimal drumming, and jangly guitar work (think the current wave of lo-fi Brooklyn bands), while side 2 is full of bangers, including oddball novelty tracks like "The Yo-Yo Song" which features a guy named Mo singing about a yo-yo over piano, drums and all kinds of out-there analog effects, the Dick Dale-ish "Inferno" by Johnny C. and the Blazes, and Fowley himself freaking out about music being the magic ("Music Is Magic")! Things start to become really unhinged when we get to "Worst Record Ever Made" by Althea and the Memories. The track features Fowley on vocals chronicling the history of rock n' roll ("have you ever heard of Roy Orbison or the Crystaaaaaals, are you gonna stop rhythm and blues?"), as Althea and the Memories scream and talk while singing "Louie Louie" in the background. Fowley has referred to them in the past as a bunch of ghetto girls he met at a hot dog stand. He recorded them in one take, they pressed 100 copies, started a record label to release the track, and in 1963, had a hit. There you have it in a nutshell -- the genius of Kim Fowley. - Christian Schaal
Now available as a download. The always-reliable Soundway label's newest release, a collection of Colombian Afro-Creole dance tunes in the "Champeta" style entitled Palenque Palenque!, has been knocking me out, bobbing my head, and moving my ass all week. During the '70s and '80s, coastal DJs in Colombian sound systems got heavily into contemporary African soukous, highlife, and Afrobeat records which they used to rock block parties and influence countless musicians across the nation. (Sound familiar? Seems like the USA's playing a heavy bit of catch-up here!) These musicians and bandleaders took those Afro-jams and infused their ingredients with the sounds of their native dance music, creating fiery hybrids that quite simply KICK. The light float of the soukous guitar sound, the skittering percussion, and the funk bounce of Afro-influence all mingle with the ritual chorus chants, tumbling congas, and the folkloric fanfare of the horns from Colombia; these tracks are so stunning, though, because beyond the pleasing collusion of styles, they are infused with modernist production techniques and a HEAVY dancefloor bounce. Some of these tracks could easily match wits with the likes of Arthur Russell or Lee "Scratch" Perry in a battle of dubby, throbbing, jazzy dance weirdos, with dub accents everywhere, and tweaked and freaked vocals chanting and strutting across the tunes with assured attitude and a total lack of self-consciousness. There are some straight-up WEIRD sounds bubbling up from the base of these tunes, from crying babies and some dude quacking like Donald Duck (Abelardo Carbona's "La Negra Kulende") to chopped and screwed choruses (La Tromba's "Calaba Calabao," which sounds like a great lost Yello track); it's totally surprising and utterly amazing, and they only add to the quality of the already strong tunes on this set. This tops my list of the best releases Soundway has issued thus far alongside their exemplary Tumbele! collection from last year, and anyone who needs more than the average jam these days will find MUCH to love here. This one will doubtless be topping my best of the year list -- it's entirely unique, entirely funky, and entirely recommended. Hot damn! -Mikey IQ Jones
Now available as a download. Another week, another compilation of Southeast Asian bands jamming your favorite British and American musical tropes. This comp is ostensibly focused on Singapore, but features groups from Indonesia and Malaysia as well -- countries globally embracing enough to be infected by the British invasion and its imported records. Many of the tracks here are in a very Cliff Richard / Shadows style (not dissimilar to the Shadow Music of Thailand collection released by Sublime Frequencies), and there are also lots of cute mod/go-go type tracks for your next wig-themed party. You'll find more than one Nancy Sinatra cover here, as well as a truly kitschy instrumental version of "Wooly Bully" by Charlie and his Go-Go Boys, not to mention a tense-confused "Then I Kiss Her" by Lotus Liew. The more successful tracks on the comp lean into slightly more Asian territory (if you can imagine anything "slightly more Asian" than a band called Charlie and his Go-Go Boys), such as "The Second Spring" by Hai Fei, a groovy cut accented by pentatonic lick trading on a flute and heavy tremolo guitar. Some of the songs could even pass for lost British mod sides; "Just Because" by the Dee-Tees in particular is just a sublime slice of scorned-love garage pop. M. Ishak Dengan Five-55''s "Oh! Salina" may be the highlight of the record, with its otherworldly Theremin-ized organ, clippy rock guitar and crooning vocals streaming in from the back seat. There are at least two separate records on this comp -- one is a great playlist for your Palm Springs vintage hat and furniture emporium, and the other is soundtrack fodder your film student period piece about rainy nights in Asian motels with rice whiskey and reflected neon. It's not high art, but it is a lot of fun. -Simon Gabriel |
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Next Wednesday, June 23rd, Chicago post-rock luminaries 
