Street Sounds Crucial Electro - Various Artists

This is a really classy collection of hot electro-funk tunes from 1984. Should bring back some sweet memories for all you folks old enough to remember Afrika Bambaataa, polyester tracksuits and body popping.

This music sounds so fresh, futuristic and progressive its easy to forget that these tracks were produced in some of America's most impoverished ghettos - the Bronx, Detroit, Washington D.C. - at a time when the Reagan's brutal individualism and predatory capitalism were deepening the divisions between communities and between the haves and have-nots. Fortunately, people find ways to express themselves even in the most desperate of times and this music is a testament to that; as Twilight 22 put it:

Huh, deep in the city people live in the streets
You got to be careful of everyone you meet
There’s lootin and shootin’, people stabbin’ and grabbin’
The innocent bystander the police are grabbin’

Ain’t it a pity ‘cause you hate the city
But the way you feel ain’t no big deal
You’ve got to survive and that the real nitty gritty
You go uptown, downtown, you’ve got to turn your life around (Huh)

Back in the jungle a man is free
Free from the street, from captivity
Break out, break in, it doesn’t matter where you’ve been
Snake pit, lion’s den, you need someone to be your friend

My first exposure to this stuff came when I was a schoolboy in 1984 when Channel 4 (I think) showed this fabulous documentary:



Tracklist:

01 Tyrone - Brunson The Smurf
02 Warp 9 - Light Years Away
03 Warp 9 - Nunk (New Wave Funk)
04 Man Parrish - Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don't Stop)
05 Herbie Hancock - Rockit
06 Twilight 22 - Electric Kingdom
07 Cybotron - Clear
08 Hashim - Al-Naafiysh (The Soul)
09 Captain Rock - Return Of Captain Rock
10 Time Zone - Wild Style

Get it HERE.

Bongwater - Too Much Sleep (1989)

Deeply surreal, in the truest sense of the word, intensely psychedelic, in a way that avoids all the possible cliches, hugely entertaining from start to finish, and totally essential.

Enjoy:



Tracklist:

01 The Living End
02 The Drum
03 Mr. & Mrs. Hell
04 Too Much Sleep
05 Talent Is A Vampire
06 Psychedelic Sewing Room
07 Splash 1
08 He Loved The Weather
09 Teena Stays The Same
10 One Hand On The Road
11 Khomeini Died Tonight
12 One So Black
13 No Trespassing

Get it HERE.

El Barrio Dream - Various Artists (1996)

Excellent Japanese compilation of Latin sounds from New York. There's a great mix of stuff here, from straight up boogaloo to more soulful songs like 'Cowboys to Girls', or fuzz guitar madness on tracks like 'My Daddy's Farm', and all the big names (Tito Puente, Willie Colon, Joe Bataan) are represented alongside some more obscure groups like the TNT Band or Orchestra Harlow. Enjoy.

Tracklist:

01 Reminiscences
02 Que Paso (Wa Happens)
03 Got Myself Together
04 Bridges
05 Searching For Love
06 My Daddy's Farm
07 Chin Chow
08 Chinito Boogaloo
09 Subway
10 Slow Down
11 Cowboys To Girls
12 Michelle
13 Coquero
14 Grazin' In The Grass
15 At The Hamburgea Shop
16 Safari
17 Willie's Whopper
18 ME__
19 Bridges
20 De Que Te Quejas
21 Las Quisquellanas
22 Reminiscences
23 At Last

Get it HERE.

Rap Tracks - Various Artists (1982)

I've seen this compilation a few times in various boot sales and charity shops over the years, but this morning it was going particularly cheap so I thought I'd better give it a try. I'm so glad I did because every track (nearly) is a winner! I'm particularly loving the spaced-out slippy disco sounds of the Funk Fusion Band, this one really hots up after a minute or so of jazz-fusion noodling:


Also loving Count Coolout's fabulous bassline:


Anyone who enjoyed the Genius of Rap that was posted a while back should consider giving this a listen.

Tracklist:

01 Frankie Smith - Double Dutch Bus
02 Funk Fusion Band - Can You Feel It (Progressive Version)
03 Captain Sky - Station Brake
04 Count Coolout - Here To Stay (Me And My Double R.R.)
05 Doctor Ice - Calling Doctor Ice
06 Midnight Blue - Enjoy With Me
07 Treacherous Three - Put The Boogie In Your Body
08 Disco Four - Do It, Do It

Get it HERE.

Lou Reed - Street Hassle (1978)

A friend of mine had a battered old cassette version of this album and we used to sit around and listen to it a lot when I was in my mid to late teens, it's the only Lou Reed solo record that ever really meant anything to me. The album kicks off with a live version of Gimmie Some Good Times, sarcastic and bored he sounds like he's lost the ability to distinguish between the good times and bad, it sets the tone perfectly. The raw, minimal punk sound of much of the album suits Lou's dark heart and cynical sensibilities, but on the beautiful, moving title song the album really transcends...this is a sordid New York story, brutal and tragic, shot through with passion and honesty and understanding of human weakness. Listening to the album is like eavesdropping on a conversation between partners in an abusive relationship, the partners being Lou and New York City...he knows the place is bad for him, but he just can't bring himself to leave.

Track list:

01. Gimmie Some Good Times
02. Dirt
03. Street Hassle
--a. Waltzing Matilda
--b. Street Hassle
--c. Slipaway
04. I Wanna Be Black
05. Real Good Time Together
06. Shooting Star
07. Leave Me Alone
08. Wait

Get it HERE.

Animal Records - Various Artists (Animal 1982)

Lovely compilation of stuff from Chris Stein of Blondie's Animal Records label. Great tracks from The Gun Club, Tav Falco's Panther Burns, Iggy Pop and James White and the Blacks. Snuky Tate was new to me, and I Don't Know Samba is a pretty messed up percussion thing, while Babylon Under Pressure is weird no wave dub. Not sure about Walter Steding though.

Here's some little tasters for you. First up, some of that lowdown swamp rock fromTav Falco, playing live on some late night poker show in 1999:


This is the Gun Club preaching the voodoo blues at the Hacienda in 1983:


Here' s a clip from Downtown 81. This film was shot in the '80s, starred Jean-Michel Basquiat and featured a host of New York musicians and artists including Fab Five Freddy, James Chance, Debbie Harry and DNA. This clip features James White and the Blacks and Walter Steding in the Mudd Club:


Tracklist:

01 The Gun Club - Run Through the Jungle
02 Walter Steding - Dancing in Heaven
03 Panther Burns - Panther Man
04 Iggy Pop - The Horse Song
05 The Gun Club - Like Calling Up Thunder
06 Panther Burns - I'm On This Rocket
07 Iggy Pop - The Villagers
08 Walter Steding - All the Way
09 Snuky Tate - I Don't Know Samba
10 James White & The Blacks - The Twitch
11 Snuky Tate - Babylon Under Pressure
12 James White & The Blacks - Irresistable Impulse

Get it HERE.

The Fugs - Golden Filth (Live at the Fillmore East 1968)

The Fugs (like those other East Village outlaws, the amazing Holy Modal Rounders) played a big part in the birth of New York's '60s counterculture. Formed in 1965, they provided a riotous folk accompaniment to the anti-Vietnam movement, playing in the clubs and cafes. By the time this album was recorded, they'd developed a fried psychedelic punk sound to accompany the goofball humour. Here's what Ed Sanders has to say about this electric period in Fugs history:

Exorcising the Pentagon
October, 1967
All through the history of the Fugs in the '60s, the war in Vietnam throbbed like an ever-seething soul sore. However much we partied, shouted our poetry and strutted around like images of Bacchus, we could never quite get it out of our mind. It was like that Dada poetry reading that Tristan Tzara gave in 1922 in Paris, with an alarm clock constantly ringing during the reading. The war was THE alarm clock of the late '60s.
It seemed as if the war might become permanent, so there were big demonstrations planned for October of 1967 to surround the nerve center of the war-- the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Somebody came up with the idea of holding an Exorcism of this mystic pentagonal citadel of napalm and incineration.
I agreed to write and create the actual Exorcism. Tuli and I rented a flat bed truck and a sound system. The Fugs and a group of San Francisco Diggers climbed aboard and joined the protest march across the bridge from D.C. to the Pentagon. We positioned ourselves on the edge of a parking lot a few hundred feet from our target, while tens of thousands of marchers walked past, and I intoned a sing-song litany of exorcism after which we all began to chant "Out, Demons, Out!" over and over for about fifteen minutes. Filmmakers Barbara Rubin and Shirley Clarke filmed the chanting, while magician/ filmmaker Kenneth Anger positioned himself beneath the truck and performed his own ritual of exorcism. It was quite an afternoon.
When we had finished the exorcism, we walked onto the lawn in front of the Pentagon where lines of armed soldiers with rifles thrust forward stood guarding the entranceway. We were carrying dozens of yellow daisies. We paused in front of the young and obviously nervous soldiers and gently shoved some stems into some rifle barrels, then glanced back over our shoulders as we walked away, marveling at the vision of white petal jutting from dark metal.
It was a famous thing we did, and people praised us for our audacity, yet the Vietnam War went on for another seven years. So much for "Out, Demons, Out!" You can learn more about the big demonstration at the Pentagon in Norman Mailer's Armies of the Night.
After the exorcism, The Fugs began their final series of performances at The Players Theater in Greenwich Village. Personnel had changed. We had assembled a very talented musical line-up: Charles Larkey on bass, Ken Pine on guitar, Dan Kootch on guitar and violin, and Ken Weaver on Drums. Richard Alderson recorded some of these final shows of 1967, which closed on New Year's eve at the Players Theater.

1968
I took part in a panel discussion on the New Journalism at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in late '67. On hand to discuss the new techniques of presenting information were Jack Newfield, Richard Goldstein, Ellen Willis, Robert Christgau and Paul Krassner. I told Newfield that the Fugs were going to give a concert in a few weeks in Appleton, Wisconsin, the hometown of Senator Joseph McCarthy, the famous right wing redbaiting politician who had wrecked careers through falsehoods. He was buried there. Jack Newfield suggested that we exorcise McCarthy's grave. We thought it was a great idea and made preparations. Our friend Allen Ginsberg was also going to perform in Appleton and he agreed to help in the Exorcism.
So, on February 19, 1968 we performed at the Cindarella (sic) Ballroom in Appleton, and the next morning the Fugs, Allen Ginsberg and about 75 friends gathered at McCarthy's headstone and performed a witty ceremony, which we have included for your listening pleasure.
We asked those present at the Exorcism to place a gift on Mr. McCarthy's stone. I looked back as we left and saw a very interesting visual gestalt atop the granite: a bottle of Midol, a ticket to the movie The War Game, a Spring Mobilization Against the War leaflet, a stick of English Leather cologne, one stuffed parrot, one candy bar, a chap stick, one dozen red roses, one dozen white geraniums, one dozen yellow geraniums, one "Get Fugged" button, some coins, sugar wafers, coat buttons and two seeds of marijuana. "So long, Joe," Tuli said as we walked down the hill.
This was the mode of defiance in which the Fugs began 1968. Yet, in some ways '68 was an American Nightmare. The My Lai massacre happened in February; President Johnson abdicated under strange circumstances in late March; Martin Luther King was assassinated a few days later, and the next likely president, Robert Kennedy, was killed next to an ice machine in a hotel in early June. August saw the Chicago riots at the Democratic Convention and November ushered in the years of Richard Nixon. Behind it all, the war wailed onward.
Ai-yi-yi. Nevertheless, the Fugs partied forth. There were dashes of hope-- most notably the student rebellions in Paris and the takeover of Columbia University in New York City. That spring, The Fugs toured Scandinavia with Peter Green and Fleetwood Mac and Ten Years After. One tune from this tour, "The Swedish Nada," from our concert in Lund, Sweden on May 13, is included on Fugs Live from the '60s.
In June, we performed with Moby Grape at the newly opened Fillmore West on Second Avenue in NYC. From that weekend of concerts, which we recorded live, came our album, Golden Filth.
Tuli and I took part in the demonstrations in Chicago in August. We were there with the thousands chanting "The Whole World is Watching" while the police bashed their clubs on undeserving heads. I was a supporter, at the time, of the notorious Yippies, and could not resist including the demo tape of "Yodeling Yippie" in this sequence of live takes.

And this is a Swedish Fugs TV special!

If you're still interested after all that :

Golden Filth Tracklist:

01 Slum Goddess
02 Coca Cola Douche
03 How Sweet I Roamed
04 I Couldn't Get High
05 Saran Wrap
06 I Want to Know
07 Homemade
08 Nothing
09 Supergirl

Its over here.

The Last Poets - Chastisment (1972)

A couple of weeks ago I was chatting with a friend and we got to complaining about the state of the current music scene, like a pair of old men or something. Maybe its just me, and maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but it seems that we're missing some radicalism in the contemporary music scene. Where is the revolutionary fire that has informed much of the best modern musics from the Fugs to Public Enemy, from Crass to Throbbing Gristle, Black Flag to The Minutemen. Are contemporary radicals just a bit more subtle with their messages, or does today's music reflect a wider apathy or confusion? I don't know. Like I said, I might be missing some hugely important and politically scandalous underground musical movement, one that purposefully shuns the attention of has beens like myself...

Todays album is from 1972, a radical message from a group of proto-rappers from the ravaged Harlem ghetto:
All Music Guide has this to say about this fantastic group:

...with their politically charged raps, taut rhythms and dedication to raising African American consciousness, The Last Poets almost single handedly laid the groundwork for the emergence of hip hop. The group arose out of the prison experiences of Jalal Mansur Nuriddin, a US Army paratrooper who chose jail as an alternative to fighting in Vietnam; while incarcerated he converted to Islam, learnt to 'spiel' (an early form of rapping), and befriended fellow inmates Omar Ben Hassan and Abiodun Oyewoie.

The group's uncompromising stance and hardcore black nationalism landed them under CIA counter intelligence surveillance. And for all of this, Chastisment still sounds hugely funky and is well worth hearing.

Tracklist:

• 1.Tribute to Obabi (Ogun)
• 2.Jazzoetry
• 3.Black Soldier
• 4.E Pluribus Unum
• 5.Hands Off
• 6.Before the White Man Came
• 7.Bird's Word

The zip is available over here.

Glenn Branca - Symphony Number 3 (Gloria) 1983

This is Glenn Branca's Symphony Number 3 (Gloria) Music for the First 127 Intervals of the Harmonic Series. Its an extract from a 1983 live performance by one of Branca's early guitar orchestras. This is a relatively small group compared to the ones he was composing for by the early '90s, some of which used up to a hundred guitarists. This particular performance featured a number of musicians who went on to become famous/notorious on the New York no wave/noise scene, including Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth) and Michael Gira (of Swans/Skin). The first 20 minutes of this are pretty beautiful, kind of shimmering modern classical sounds, and quite slow moving and stately. Then the drums kick in and it all gets heavy heavy (but in a good way). If you like this then it might be worth checking out Kick to Kill's blog where you can find uploads of the Rhys Chatham box set (which is also very good).

I've posted this as one long mp3 rather cos it works better that way, and you can get it here.