Lucifer (aka Mort Garson)- Black Mass (Amazingly, this was the record I was most hoping to find.)
Tonto’s Expanding Head Band- Zero Time (Amazingly, this was the second-most-coveted record I was hoping to find.)
James Brown- Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off
Tony Williams Lifetime- Believe It
Quincy Jones- Walking in Space
Fleetwood Mac- Kiln House
Fleetwood Mac- Tusk (2LP for $1)
Bob James- BJ4 (for $1)
Alice Cooper- Killer (for $1)

Here are the LPs that I dearly wanted, but that were out of my price range or about which I didn’t know enough to risk the gamble, but looked very intriguing:

David Axelrod- Seriously Deep
Cannonball Adderley- Soul Zodiac
Goblin- Tenebre (title track sampled by Justice on "Phantom")
Julian Priester- Polarization
James Blood Ulmer- Tales of Captain Black
Gil Mellé- Tome VI
Alice Coltrane- Universal Consciousness
Alice Coltrane- World Galaxy

You find anything noteworthy?

So, if you can remember back to a week ago (I know it’s not easy), many folks were dissing Hempfest for its preponderance of mediocre reggae performed by Caucasians. Which prompted me to think of songs by white musicians that liberally borrow from reggae’s bag of tricks to achieve something that just might make you feel irie. Sometimes good things come from dilettantish dabbling. Below are some songs that I think prove that observation. Your (s)mileage may vary.

The Police- “Walking on the Moon”
(Embedding disabled.)

Finally, despite sharing many a spliff with Peter Tosh and being rich enough to buy the city of Kingston, the Rolling Stones fail to make the cut. “Cherry Oh Baby” off Black and Blue is a stiff dud, not nearly as great as the Stones’ stabs at country, funk, and disco.

Add your faves in comments.

While not nearly as essential as Musik Von Harmonia or Deluxe, T&T does possess some interesting moments. But if you're looking for the most inspired works by these guys, seek those two previous Harmonia LPs mentioned above as well as Cluster & Eno's self-titled disc and After the Heat, the last two of which Water Records recently has re-released.

Listen to "Vamos Campaneros," Tracks and Traces' best song, here.

Press release after the cut.

There's something about music from psychedelia's first flush that sounds so righteous in the summer. July in July—sometimes the obvious move is the best one to make.

The period has been placed at the end of the sentence. His art will not redeem him. He's a one-of-a-kind musical genius who went crazy, played with morphing his race and gender, slept with children, was repeatedly acquitted of child-molestation charges, and then died, alone and broke.

It's enough to make you cry.

Here's one of the many great songs off Michael's underrated Dangerous.

Throughout this album, Krush strips away extraneous elements and focuses lazer-like on the beats (which are funkily in the pocket enough to put Premier on alert), with only the barest augmentation—a few tinkling piano notes; an introverted bass line; faint, smeared horns; clanging anvil hits; languid harp strums; whoos; sighs; etc.—flitting around them, most seemingly from jazz, musique concrète, and traditional Japanese music samples.

Krush puts hiphop production on a macrobiotic diet and the result is a severe sound that hits you like shots of wheatgrass after you’ve been guzzling milkshakes your whole life. Krush certainly isn't the first producer to apply minimalism to hiphop, but unlike nearly every other work in the art form, Kakusei seems to exist in a hermetic world, a stark temple of funk. It's more science project or Ph.D dissertation than it is a compendium of club bangers, but it’s no less riveting for that.

Krush’s haunting, gaunt hiphop is not for everyone, but his Japanese perspective on it is fascinating and a testament to the genre’s ability to adapt to myriad sensibilities and still contain some connection to the culture that was born in the Bronx 30+ years ago.

Superflipping's second half is recorded live, and, not surprisingly, provides some of the most arresting parts on the record. "Sheets" starts in with a weighty, pounding two-chord progression as Dwyer yowls indecipherable lyrics heavy with distortion and delay. The drum beat is about as primal as one could produce, but the song flows seamlessly through to the end. The closer "Holy Hand-Shake" also employs the same one-two punch drum beat that backs most of the tracks, only this time with winding high-note guitar on one side and an effortless low-end chord progression pushing everything along from the other. Everything is deafeningly loud but catchy as Hell. Yikes! sound is harder than Thee Oh Sees, but more melodic than the Coachwhips, and thusly, precisely what I want sometimes.

Thee Oh Sees play the Crocodile Monday with Jay Reatard and Idle Times. Read Dave Segal's interview with Dwyer here.

Photo courtesy of Upset the Rhythm (Click to enlarge it) S.S. Marie Antoinette, R.I.P. And who are those two dudes in the front row?

Over the past decade, American critic Robert Christgau has been Eminem's most intelligent defender—he even found a way to love Encore—and in 2006, Christgau wrote the smartest thing that will ever be written about the art of Marshall Mathers for The Believer. A sample:

Part of the charm, brilliance, and power of [Marshall Mathers III]’s triune persona is the way it disintegrates. On the one hand, it’s a subtly calibrated work of psychological imagination, on the other three-card monte to sucker the thought police. Nevertheless, Eminem’s album titles—The Slim Shady LP, The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show, Encore, and finally (so far) the greatest-hits Curtain Call—do signify an aesthetic evolution, from persona to person to artist to goodbye to now-I’m-really-going. Once I rated Marshall Mathers over Slim Shady because I thought the debut thinned out toward the end and because, as a card-carrying mature person (it gets me in cheap at the movies), I appreciated the depth of “Stan,” “Kim,” and “Who Knew,” in all of which Marshall the person reflects on the surprising success of Slim the reconstructed id. Shifting and feinting, the debut’s “My Fault” and “Rock Bottom” have a lot of Marshall in them, but not like The Marshall Mathers LP, where the illing title track, for instance, suggests Marshall the real-life homophobe, etc. rather than Slim wilding—Slim gets his own space only in “The Real Slim Shady,” “Kill You,” and “I’m Back.” Some would include “Kim,” but the song’s moral is too powerful for Shady’s purposes. Held up by philistines, ideologues, and ninnies as Exhibit A in the case of The Good People v. Marshall Mathers, Eminem’s second excellent wife-murdering song exposes, complexly but unmistakably, the shameful and indeed unmanly insanity of jealous rage. Go after something dumber—Neil Young’s “Down by the River,” say.

All of which makes Christgau's diss of Relapse—a record that "disappointed, even shocked" him with its failures—all the sadder. (See subject line.)

Re: the alleged failures of Relapse: I'm still trying to figure out what it's trying to do, and only after that can i judge if and how it's failed. (But the would-be confessions about stepfather sex abuse are...something.)

Xgau illo cribbed from his Rock&Roll&... column (and full, highly searchable virtual Xgau vaults here.)

Just goes to show, you can listen to music almost 24/7 for decades and still have some glaring gaps in your knowledge.

It's hard to believe but it's been 15 years since these records, the original disco re-edits, came out.

Black Cock Records was the label organized by DJ Harvey and Gerry Rooney back in 1993. Originally a pair of rave DJs, they stumbled into the white label scene that year with these quirky records which were seminal, and rare disco hits, remixed and pressed on pirate vinyl.

The lift you got in a rave when one of the tracks on the first set of Black Cock Records, The Mystic Slot E.P., was played was incredible. On "No Way Back", a Re-Edit of The Dells original, the vocal refrain of "go out and stay out all night" was akin to having your parents tell you it was alright to freak and party all night long, just like they did 20 years earlier. Brilliant.

The records only got better and better and Harvey and Rooney became legends of the scene. Now Harvey runs the amazing night, Sarcastic Disco, in LA and looks like a degenerate hippy you'd kick as you step over him to walk into the club night, which is one of the hottest out there.

He also happily skates and surfs and owns a gallery in Hawaii, as well as runs parties for companies the likes of Volcom and Quicksilver.

Man that's the life.

Black Cock Records have recently been re-issued, and are selling fast. The going price for originals is around $500. So the new re-issues of these seminal re-edits records, at $12 a pop, are a steal.

Enjoy yourself some big Black Cock!

So, what did you find?

The repercussions from this story published in The Stranger in December continue to be felt. The outpouring of sympathy and advice from readers was heart-warming. I expected some sniping and hate, and those sorts of comments came, too. But they were outnumbered by kind, generous souls chipping in their $.02 (or more) about my tale of woe re: losing three-fourths of my music collection.

A reader named Katie emailed me recently to say that the occupants of the house on which she’s working put out on their porch a couple of boxes of records that had suffered water damage. She said I was welcome to look through said boxes and take what I wanted, no payment necessary.

So Saturday I rolled up to the dwelling (on 27th Ave E and Denny) and riffled through the stash. Most of the album covers were slightly soggy and worn and faded at the bottom. Some of the wax had mold in its grooves. The records emitted a mildewy odor. My fingertips turned a sick hue of gray as I progressed through the discarded vinyls. Oddly, nobody in the ’hood appeared to find it unusual that some stranger was foraging in boxes on a neighbor’s porch.

DJ Mozart (aka Claudio Rispoli) was a contemporary and friend of Daniele Baldelli in Italy. At Baia Degli Angeli he and Baldelli would make famous the music that would fall under the description of "cosmic".

After the original Baia was closed by the police (drugs, of course....) Baldelli moved to the new Cosmic club, while Rispoli worked at a club called Tana.

Below, straight from Pilooski's ALAINFINKIELKRAUTROCK blog comes this beautiful full-on disco mix of DJ Mozart at the Tana Club circa 1978. There's no tracklisting, sorry, but you definitely get the vibe of what it was like to swing in Italy during the late '70's. Ahhhhh. Good times, I imagine!

In 1993, Rispoli, produced a single for the Italian label Rec In Pause. The song took off like a storm all over the world.

I had just moved to Seattle in the previous year, and was starting to spend all my time with my friend Jason, at a club, Re-Bar, that was hosting a hot new night, promoted by the infamous Harler Twins called The Mocambo Lounge.

Rispoli's nam-de-disco was Jestofunk, and the massive hit was "Say It Again". In classic "cosmic" style, Rispoli took a sample of Colonel Abrams proto-house track "Trapped", and slowed it down until Abrams vocals become a yearning Barry White styled growl. Added on top were a funky stumbling beat over a synthesizer which blares to and fro with a stutter in stereo.

This song would come on and people would freak! The first time the music stops and you here Abrams yell "Hey!" was a signal for arms to explode in the air on the dance floor.

Sorry to make you all read about my memories of this long forgotten night, but sometime you hear a song and they just come washing over you....

God, I miss those times. Relive them now.

Until recently the only way I had ever heard Ofra Haza's hits "Galbi" and "Im Nin'Alu" were in their remixed versions from the album Shaday.

Of course I'd heard her voice in it's myriad of samples and background vocals for other people, but I don't think I'd ever heard her folk versions of these two songs, until I found the LP, Fifty Gates Of Wisdom in a bin at my favorite local used vinyl shop.

I'm gonna be honest here, and admit that "World Music" is my second least favorite genre next to "Modern Jazz". Genres that are used as methods of aural massage for lazy white folks.

But there is something enticing about these songs by Ms. Haza. They're distinctly middle-eastern in tonality, but mystically jewish in lyric and nature. I was surprised by the strict rules that these songs follow. For instance, each song is seperated into three parts. An opening, nashid, often of free rhythm, a center section, shira, of rhythmic singing, and an end section, hallel, primarily of rhythmic riffs meant for dancing to which trails off.

Since the Yemenite Jews live surrounded by orthodox Muslims who banned singing and musical instruments meant for praising anyone but allah (imagine that!), they resorted to banging on cans and bottles for rhythm.

The remixes I came to know as a teenager, by Mark Kamins and Pascal Gabriel from the double a-side 12" Im Nin'Alu/Galbi.

And speaking of Giving Me A Break: the use by cut and paste masters Coldcut of "Im Nin'Alu" on Eric B. and Rakim's remix single of "Paid In Full (Seven Minutes Of Madness)" was seen as a milestone in creative sample usage in Hip-Hop.

The remix of "Galbi", in particular, was a huge bomb from my teen years. It appeared on volume two of the Sire compilation series Just Say Yes! from 1988 called Just Say Yo!

I spent many days roaming the streets of Spokane, WA rocking that CD in my '67 Plymouth Barracuda....

Samples can be heard here.

First off: Wow. A music video from 1968. Crazy.

Check out that production too, when he goes into the chorus line, how it sounds like he's on the phone. Who thought to do that? And Why?

Anyways, I digress. This song was never really a hit in the U.S., but was a moderate seller in the U.K. Not really a top hit however, which makes the popularity of the song with so many other artists that much more incredible!

Irishman David McWilliams based the song around a homeless friend of his, and the original lyrics end a bit dour. We can only imagine so did his friend. McWilliams was as close to Glen Campbell as an Irish singer/songwriter could be. His country inflected songs were popular among a small set, and wildly popular in continental Europe, which helps make more sense of the first cover of the track.

Love it or hate it, you can’t deny the seminal impact Liquid Sky’s soundtrack has had on a certain strain of electronic music. The alienating dread and tonal oddness (created on the first digital synth, the Fairlight CMI) pervading Brenda Hutchinson and Clive Smith’s score rarely have been matched by its emulators. This is the dark underbelly of the cartoonish, robotic electro funk that predominated in the early ’80s. As with the Normal’s “Warm Leatherette,” it seems like an unlikely object for nostalgia (or a Grace Jones cover), but if you wait long enough, just about everything will come back in vogue.

The Detroit group Adult. pretty much owe their entire shtick to the track depicted in this infamous performance from the 1982 film [see video below].

This scene from a fashion show is also exceptional.

Davila 666: Davila 666
These dudes sound a lot like the Black Lips—a good thing in my book—only they're from Puerto Rico. The songs are catchy as Hell, and all the singing is in Spanish. Fun! Hear some of the stuff here.

A.H. Kraken: A.H. Kraken
These guys are from Metz, France. Their self-titled debut is equal parts Arab on Radar and PIL. I also hear aspects of A Frames in there. Just think an approximate amalgamation of those bands, but with a lot more distortion and weirdness. I missed their show at Funhouse a bit back, but I'll try not to next time, as the album has been on my heavy rotation list lately. It's particularly good to crank on the stereo over hear in the Web office when no one else is around.

The Helio Sequence: Keep Your Eyes Ahead
I know everyone's shitting their pants about the Fleet Foxes, but a similar Sup Pop release from last January blew me away, and I still listen to it often, even 11 months later. The title track is downright stellar. Hear it and some other songs here, but check out the whole album.

Blood on the Wall: Liferz
Also released in the first month of 2008, Liferz doesn't stray too far from previous BOTW work, and that's a good thing.

Beach House: Devotion
I came across this because my predecessor left it on the shelving that I now use to hold my crap. Score! The songwriting here is excellent, and the melodies are subdued and haunting. Good for when you're hungover and/or depressed and/or stoned. I've been told the previous album is also nice, but have yet to hear it.

The Dutchess and the Duke: She's the Dutchess and He's the Duke
My review is here.

Vivian Girls: Vivian Girls
I would write about this if everyone else hadn't wrote a million words about it already. It is good.

That's about it. I didn't hear nearly as much as I wanted to this year, largely due to the fact that I'm constantly broke, which is largely due to an inability to ever save money. Also, you may realize that this list is rather In the Red-Records heavy. I am fine with that.

OHM+ is a 3-CD/1-DVD boxed set comp with a 112-page booklet that’s like a who’s who of academic music/avant-garde/musique concrète. Think of a name in the field and he/she’s probably got a track here (although Ilhan Mimaroglu is missing and nobody from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is represented; I guess Ellipsis Arts couldn’t include everyone). The lineup includes expected heavies like Stockhausen, Schaeffer, Cage, Parmegiani, Xenakis, Oliveros, Subotnick; minimalists Young, Reich, and Riley; maverick rock/ambient figures like Holger Czukay, Brian Eno, Jon Hassell, and Klaus Schulze; and sci-fi soundtrack pioneers Louis and Bebe Barron. Olivier Messiaen, Raymond Scott, and Tod Dockstader show up, too.

OHM+ is an excellent intro to some very abstruse, but ultimately rewarding music, which has gone on to influence more popular artists like Radiohead, Matmos, practically the entire rosters of the Kranky and VHF labels, and the motherfucking Beatles.

Half Price Books is in the last day of its 20-percent off everything sale, which means you can obtain this bad boy for about 12 bucks. As of Dec. 28, there was a veritable mountain of these things sitting on top of the CD bins.

Morton Subotnick’s “Sidewinder” [excerpt from the DVD]

1. If you read the print edition of my column, you no doubt were surprised to see Girl Talk's 2008 album referred to as Girl Talk—in fact, the album is Feed the Animals. We regret the error.

2. In that same column, I parenthetically questioned if the Dead Science counted as local anymore, as I at the time seemed to recall something about them moving to Berlin for a while, but maybe that was only Implied Violence proper and not the Dead Science? We regret the error (?).

3. There was something else I regretted in this issue which I can't quite recall right now...I know it wasn't do to with talking shit about Ghostland Observatory—I mean every bilious word of that, especially, "The sooner this band are shuffled off into the dollar bin of history, the better."

4. Maybe it was not listing Lee Ciszek's (sp?) name along with Same Sex Dictator's band name for their entry in this year's list of regrets? .No, that doesn't seem like the sort of thing I'd really regret. Les Savy Fav was misspelled in this issue? I don't think that was me... Ah well, it'll come to me.

But all of that was forgotten during my lunch-hour trip to Jive Time's annex (in Atlas Clothing’s new location on 10th Ave., next to Moe Bar in Capitol Hill). There I found for 99 cents a used-vinyl copy of David Byrne’s The Catherine Wheel (1981), the Talking Heads leader’s artfully kinetic funk LP for the Twyla Tharp Dance Foundation.

Byrne was on an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime (rimshot) creative roll around this time, with the Heads' Fear of Music (1979) and Remain in Light (1980), his groundbreaking sampladelic collab with Brian Eno, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981), and The Catherine Wheel. As you probably know, the modern soundscape is lousy with David Byrne epigones not fit to dry-clean his big white suit ca. Stop Making Sense; accept no substitutes.

A buck for this? I call that a bargain, almost the best I ever had.

“My Big Hands (Fall Through the Cracks)”

“Big Blue Plymouth (Eyes Wide Open)”