TUNING

Doug Ashdown- The Saddest Song of All

The mediated zeitgeist of the sixties was such that the vibes didn't really die out until 1975, in Australia , even more so.
It seems that starting in 1968, if you were a second tier folkie on a major label (in this case CBS) it was mandatory that you had to have a song about the sadness of John Q Salesman and his inability to laugh or hear the children playing.
You also got double bonus points if your album cover had you posing on a park bench wearing a fleece lined courderoy jacket, your battered guitar case sitting next to you.
Triple bonus points if you were also eating corned beef on rye.
This last bit occured more often than you would guess.
Doug Ashdown fits all the criterea. Watch for Doug's "Fuck , this wasn't a good idea but I need the exposure" smile/grimace as the orchestrated bit comes in full force.
Even though this song is maudlin as fuck, it's a grower-so here's the mp3 to shove in yer pod and whatnot, a fine addition to any playlist:
Doug Ashdown The Saddest Song of All mp3
Official Site
Doug on EBay

YJM= Hubba X 2

Joni Mitchell sings "Me and My Uncle." on "Let's Sing Out in Canada" hosted by Oscar Brandt.

Why Is The New Robot Uprising Strangely Familiar With 18th Century Church Architecture?

Free Audiobook site Books Should Be Free seemed like a good idea at the time.
As far as I'm concerned it still is, but it brings to light something I was unaware of in the field of audio books.
Get this, some books are read by robots .
I appreciate that these books are free .but even Asimov's Robot Trilogy shouldn't be read by automatons. It would seem that it takes just as much time to prep a book to be read by Rossum's finest as it would to have a meat puppet read the thing.
Friedrich Nietzsches' Thus Spake Zarathustra comes round to actually being appropriate to this method, but for sheer whatthehell? you simply must try  Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3"Brescia" to "Bulgaria" .
Even if the damn thing was read by Sir Anthony Hopkins instead of a disembodied machine, it doesn't make a goddamned bit of sense as an audio book
Deathless prose like:
" BRESCIA (anc. Brixia),
a city and episcopal see of Lombardy, Italy, the capital of the province of Brescia, finely situated at the foot of the Alps, 52 m. E. of Milan and 40 m. W. of Verona by rail. Pop. (1901) town, 42,495; commune, 72,731. The plan of the city is rectangular, and the streets intersect at right angles, a peculiarity handed down from Roman times, though the area enclosed by the medieval walls is larger than that of the Roman town, which occupied the eastern portion of the present one. The Piazza del Museo marks the site of the forum, and the museum on its north side is ensconced in a Corinthian temple with three cellae, by some attributed to Hercules, but more probably the Capitolium of the city, erected by Vespasian in A.D. 73 (if the inscription really belongs to the building; cf. Th. Mommsen in Corp. Inscrip. Lat. v. No. 4312, Berlin, 1872), and excavated in 1823. It contains a famous bronze statue ..."
would benefit greatly from, I dunno, pictures maybe?
Rightthinking Avantgaurdist that I am, I tried various applications of this audio.
Freinds,  I am here to tell you It does not work it does not work as a sleep aid, its'  seemingly soporific drone only brings up horrid nightmares of bolt necked Victorian Mechanical  Men rabbiting on about wainscoting.
Neither can it be used in an amusing post -modern fashion in the creation of electronic dance music.
It toils not, neither does it spin.
Social Historian and R&B hero Edwin Starr might well have seen this coming if he was a prescient sort .
To paraphrase his smash hit "War"- " The machine read audio Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" what is it good for?
Absolutely nuthin-say it again"

Here's an example of what I mean .

Librivox  is a slightly better alternative where you can subscribe to chapters of books in the public domain in iTunes or from an rss feed.

CANINE CRITICS

Why Dogs Don't Enjoy Music- [Scientific American]
Dogs can only dis­criminate resolutions of one third of an octave. They must fucking love house music.

Lagubrious Dollybirds Mope Their Way Through "You Can Have Him"

After sacking their choreographer, girl group also-rans The Cake suddenly realized they had a gig on Ready, Steady Phoooor Thwacket.
Fuck it, let's just get through it, (barely)

OBSCURE HULLABALOOIST DEMANDS PORK

Linda Clark-Looking For My Pig

Dig the screaming teens-are they screaming at the horror of loosing the pig , or are they screaming in favor of loosing pigs?
In any event, the subject matter is not something I would do the Swim in an over-sized sweatshirt over.

DIAL A GOATHERD

Telemegaphone Dale is a seven metres tall wind powered loudspeaker on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway.
Call +4790369389 to have your voice piped through the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale below.
They've naturally been getting quite a few calls , so give it a couple hours to reset if you don't get through at first.



Here's a Greenwich Meantime Map of Norway (with city and telephone info.)

Take A Message To Mary- But Don't Tell Her Our A&R Man's In Jail

Quick, name a song the Everly Brothers shouldn't sing ... Actually, only one of them sings it, but it doesn't stop the thing from going Pete Tong by bar 11 or so. It makes you wonder what business Ibsen had writing 60's pop songs*

*He didn't but this sounds like he might have done. [ed]

Good Night Cafeterium! We Love You!

"A Where Are They Now? for those who never were, then.

This is a sonic history of the American pop band. Our goal is to capture data about every band to have been formed by teens with that perfect mixture of big dreams and questionable talent in suburban garages, high school music rooms, and college dorms across America. And to preserve them cryogenically with the very dry ice they once merited, for future generations."

For Those Who Tried To Rock lets failed high school bands have their day in the sun.

Weird Scenes Inside The Girl Mine

I like girl groups and I like 'em weird- to wit:
I Just Dont Understand Ann Margaret discovers tsuris,with help from the Jordanairs.

Dead Dana Gillespie, you're bumming me out in a supreme fashion. Thanks though.

The Powder Puffs tell me You Cant Take My Boyfriends Woodie . Taken at face value, I don't forsee any problems along these lines. It's a shame that Surf/Girl Group crossovers have to sublimate to the patriarchy.

Tonight You Belong To Me Everything Liberty records finest non live performers Patience and Prudence ever recorded could serve as perfect ironic counterpoint to the creepiest scenes in a slasher movie. This shit gives me the shivers every time I hear it.

We Can't Sing Rhythm and Blues. No one really asked you to Patience and Prudence, and this song is more than enough rhetoric to prove your point.

It Means Whatever You Want It To Mean

I've always liked the expression I Ain't Fattening Frogs For Snakes even though I'm not altogether sure what it means. The Larks try their best to explicate this for me but wind up with a kind of cyclical redundancy that is none the less bluesy, gospely , and all together great.

Be Bop Wino has kindly posted "Up With the Larks: The Uptempo Apollo Recordings 1951-1955 featuring such provocatively titled cuts as: "Eyesight to the Blind" "Little Side Car" "Honey From the Bee" , "Coffee, Cigarettes and Tears", and the classic "My Reverie".

To these ears it sounds like the place where jump blues meets close harmony gospel singing and nobody cares about any sort of boundries, secular or not. Highly reccomended. I'm off to fatten a frog for a snake, just one could'nt hurt, right?

THE LARKS ON YOUTUBE
The World Is Waiting For The Sunrise
Danny Boy
Shadrack- This is the kind of music God likes, I bet.

Roll On, Viagra, Roll On

" To succeed with the opposite sex, tell her you're impotent. She can't wait to disprove it.”- Cary Grant

The folk idiom is rife with tales of sexual bravado and errant potency.
The hokum blues is choc-a bloc with with entendres about grindin' daddy's et al, such that given the frailty of the recorded medium and the overdose of euphamisms, it's often confusing as to what's exactly going on.
You know it's really dirty, but only because of the liner notes

The Ballad Tradition of Great Britain has it's own take on priapism, cloaked in modesty- but smutty if you know where to listen. There is an emphasis on making cuckoldry somehow heroic, knights and highwaymen promise to return to thee after uh, "kneeling before ye...."

The chicks in these ballads being comely ( a euphamisim for having a great personality) and , above all,
way fucking naive, wait for the return of these clanking studs on horseback and wind up dying of a broken heart, or preemptively throwing themselves into the sea or over a cliff.
Not that there isn't some form of revenge in a few of them.
Lord Randall gets fed some spotted eels by his "True Love" for dipping his wick elsewhere.
Spotted eels don't sound good, because they are not good-as it turns out they are poisonous.
but then again who says "Mmmm... a dish of eels, sure hope they aren't spotted, the spotted ones are poisonous you know, munch munch oh , fuck me they are spotted and I fain' would lie doon........."
Don't even get me started on "Little Musgrave" a tiny dude who cuckolds the hell out the gentry and when they catch him says " Yeah, I'm tiny and whatnot, but dudes, I totally cuckholded you.... " The response to this is to quarter him post haste.

It is refreshing then, to find blues and folk songs about impotence. I know of only two, which I present to you below.

Bo Carter My Pencil Wont Write No More mp3
Armenter "Bo Carter" Chatmon performed with and managed "The Mississippi Sheiks" and had a solo career in "hokum" Blues that is ecellently represented on The Yazoo Collection Banana In Your Fruit Basket[buy] . The other songs are typically filthy, but this one is almost a lament. What other old blues mack daddy would pre-emtively tell the ladies he couldn't get it up? That would be no one.
How crazy is Bo Carter? Did you not hear what I just said?
He wrote a song about how impotent he has become and then sang it to some ladies.
It's jaunty and he just doesn't care , obviously. That's how nucking futz Bo Carter is.


Maddy Prior & June Tabor My Husbands Got No Courage In Him .mp3
Maddy Prior and June Tabor came together in 1976 to form " Silly Sisters" during a lull in Steeleye Span's touring schedual , and gameness on June's part .
This song, from the eponymous 1977 album, is a standout amongst several academic sounding olde ballads.
Asking the musical question "Who's a girl gotta do to get out of the Scottish Highlands?" then being more than willing to have a go with hubby, in fact insisting on it, the heroine of the song is thwarted by Lord Noodle Crotch.
Well, if that's the way it's going to be, might as well let the whole town know about it.
Hark the village, wait! Indeed.
I'm not sure if this is a rare example of women's empowerment in traditional balladry, or just randy kvetching.
Either way, it's fantastic.

Ironicly, Not Farts

First Sounds "is an informal collaborative of audio historians, recording engineers, sound archivists, scientists, other individuals, and organizations who aim to make mankind's earliest sound recordings available to all people for all time."
Thrill to the sound of the Metropolitan Elevated Railroad from 40 feet away (1878 Phonautogram) and barely decipherable French people played back at different speeds.
This is history folks!

Rappin and Sleepin

If you care to let's have luncheon, every day here just the same, but sweetheart-if you talk in your sleep, don't mention my name
"If You Talk In Your Sleep"- by Sammy Fain ,The Singing Composer

Somniloquy or sleep-talking is sleep disorder that usually occurs during the 4th stage of NREMsleep. The fourth stage of NREM ( non REM sleep) does not produce as many dreams as REM sleep, and dreams in this state are not as vivid as in REM sleep.

The content of dreams produced in this Slow Wave Sleep mode tend to be disjointed.
Parasomnias, or sleep disorders,- including sleepwalking, sleepeating, sleep sex, teeth grinding, night terrors, rhythmic movement disorder, REM behaviour disorder and restless legs syndrome occur in this state, and any number of these can be an adjunct to Somniloquy .
Sleep-talking has been reported in 50% of young children, who usually outgrow it by puberty,with about 5% occurence in adults, where it tends to run in families.

Sleep- talking appears to be of interest only if it is loud, profane or both.
One of the loudest and profanest of sleep talkers was Dion Mcgregor whose songwriting partner Mike Barr managed to record over 500 somniloquies in exchange for giving Mcgregor a place to sleep.
The choicest sleep talk sessions were released as an LP on Decca called “The Dream World Of Dion Mcgregor”, with cover art by Edward Gorey. A book of dream speech transcriptions.with illustrations by Gorey again was published at about the same time.

In Febrary of 1999, Tzadik Records released Dion McGregor Dreams Again, an additional ten dreams by Dion.
Torpor Vigil Soundworks spat out “The Further Somniloquies of Dion McGregor “ in 2004.

There are several prolific modern- day somniloquists who tend to be self-explotative like:
The Parasomnial Order who couches his morphic utterances in an almost impenetrable faux gnostic schtick
Sleep Talking On The Mic who is quite certain that his sleep disorder is evidence of demonic possesion
Somnography of Somniloquy - Dandan's Sleeptalk who seems to have a healthy handle on it- after all, the colophone to his blog is: “I talk in my sleep. I say weird things. I record it.”
Nate at Night who thinks it’s kinda fucking hilarious
And Ngram .net who just hopes it’s poetry.

Other Resources:
I Talk When I Sleep Support Group
Somnioloquism and the Sleeping Dimension episode of Educational Showdown hosted by Jamie and Adrienne on WRUV 90.1 Burlington Vt.
Dion McGregor On Myspace
Index of choice DM cuts[via Ink Mathematics]

The Winner Take It All .. (To It's Logical Extreme)

I didn't think there was a whole lot of breaking news on ABBA these days , but Mikory's ABBA Blog more than proves me wrong.

Instead of full-on obsessiveness with 1992 style layout and shitty jpegs,you get a well designed site that's ABBAlicious in the extreme with tidbits about what the members are up to now, and choice clippings from back when.

Five Not So Great Auditory Illusions

The comments section says it best about New Scientists' Music Special: Five great auditory illusions .
The popular science mag's website presents 5 examples of supposed fuck -with -yer head-itis that have been artificially created to fool the human ear and brain.
Except why do I feel like it's 1975 and I'm sitting with some balding prat with an over ambitious moustache in a fern bar whilst he tells me that quadrophonic sound is the future?
Cock your fourth ear to these examples and see if you hear what they're telling you you're supposed to.

A PSA ON LSD

The Dukes The Dentist
I thought that this 1968 recording by Germany's scuzz beat psyche merchants The Dukes was going to be a horror freakout all the way through , but then it turns into a public service announcement about the importance of visiting your freindly neighborhood dentist. Who knew? I'm thinking this combo are the same Dukes of "I'm An Unskilled Worker" non-fame.
Come to think of it,that song is ostensibly about the importance of trade schools. Could it be that the Dukes were part of some government program that tried to keep the kids in line with fuzz guitars and Teutonic screaming? I haven't been able to come up with any more Dukes cuts about washing your hands or community gardening , but you never know. Any readers have other songs by The Dukes that fit this civic mould?

She Loves To Yodel

Thanks to the more than excellent Magnets And Lasers I have discovered another yodeling sweetheart in Carolina Cotton .
Billed As The Yodeling Blonde Bombshell, the perfectly named Cotton did it all, radio, tv and B movies, and sang with a who's who of western swing bands.
Let's start with statement of intent-"I Love To Yodel".
"Cattle Call "approaches Desurik Sisters territory which is always a good thing, and then we have the embarassment of riches that is the cyclicly redundant "Yodel Yodel Yodel".

No one ever told Carolina that hoary old chesnut (even for the time) "Nola" was an instrumental showcase.
If they did, she wisely thought "Fuck that noise" and turned in an amazing, pyrotechnic performance.

I Love To Yodel
Mockingbird Yodel
Cattle Call
Yodel Yodel Yodel
Nola

What Makes Bob Holler?

Western Swing wasn't all about Bob Wills you know, it was also about flour- judging by the number of Western Swing bands sponsored by baking supplies.
Western Swing On 78 blog does what it says on the tin- and several adjoining tins- so great is their love, dedication, and altruism in bringing this forgotten music to the fore.
I would also like to thank them from the bottom of my heart for not hosting the downloads on rapidshare, which they could have easily done - they're on mediafire, which, if you're a shameless mp3 hound like me- you know is the good stuff.

Undisputed masters of WS -Milt Brown and His Musical Brownies are conspicuously absent because Milt Brown's estate, which consists largely of empty Nugrape and whiskey bottles, smashed Cadillacs and stale biscuits, is sewn up tighter than,uh, something that's really tight....... No matter, that leaves more room for The Sons Of The West (at Left).
The site has streamlined histories, all- important matrix numbers and not a whiff of acedemia, thank god.
These guys should get some kinda Smithsonian grant ,or something.

The Lord Don't Mind

The Rance Allen Group Talk That Talk pt 1
Having vauge notions of who the Rance Allen Group was/are , I clicked play on this mp3. At first, I couldn't figure out why it sounded kinda stagey- but really good none the less. Then it got to the scat singing part , and at that point I thought "ignorance of the law is no excuse" and ran them through various search engines. A little research revealed why I was immediatly taken with this song-It's secular gospel stuff. And I like that. Mystery solved.


A Soulful Experience [Buy From Amazon}
Rance Allen Group On Myspace (??!!)

The Economics Of AC/DC

University Of Calgary Economics Student Robert J Oxby didn't need fast machines or clean motors to expertly parse the discussion of the Efficiency of AC/DC: Bon Scott versus Brian Johnson .
There's almost a full page of footnotes, none of which really adhere to the age -old (Oh fuck, why not call it aesthetic) argument of who is the better singer; Brian or Bon.
It turns out, in terms of efficiency, Brian is the the better singer.

Ron Murphy Talks About Cutting Records

Lies, Lies Lies, Yeah........... The Secret World Of Vinyl Data

The reliably sporadic , yet never boring kempa.com unearths the fascinating world of Vinyl Data.
What's that you ask? These days, record companies try to get you to buy their product outright by offering dubious CD Rom only content if you buy the prepackadged disc rather than downloading it either legally or illegally.
Apparently, this extra data thing has been going on since the mid -80s with the exception being that the data was packaged as a special edition promo rather than tacked onto existing content, by and large.

In the case of the vinyl data, interested parties would record the specific selections to tape , which could then be interpreted by the mighty Sinclair ZX Spectrum personal computer (with a whopping 48K!).

The article mentions a lot of has beens and never- were's who have added data to their vinyl records (anyone up for a stirring round of the Shakin' Stevens game?) but gives special mention to a full on video game vinylized especially for that purpose by none other than none other than stunting great floppy haired limp -wristers The Thompson Twins. (screen capture pictured at left)
The author admits to not having played it enough to see how it ends, but does mention that "If you go north from the first screen, the Thompson Twins drown en masse. "
A fitting denoument to any game featuring the Thompson Twins, I should think.

The article is replete with emulators and browser playable versions of games and er, things... by artists like the Stranglers, Pete Shelley, The Freshies (Who get a sound critical thrashing, and quite possibly the most thorough history of said group in the proccess) , Information Society and Isao Tomita .

A very thorough overview of something I thought didn't deserve a second glance.
I mean, I knew about the spectrum -bending laser etching on side two of Split Enz "True Colors" album, but this shit is way off the charts- assuming there are charts for crudely drawn stick figure adventures that are hard to translate to a usable medium.

How Vinyl Records Are Made

I find this crap endlessly fascinating.
It's really great how the narration removes any sort of hip cache from the preceedings.
It's really just geeks going through an elaborate process to make something only a handfull of fellow geeks are going to truelly appreciate.
It's almost like the time I had to listen to the guy who ran Chicago's Jazz Record Mart go on and on about lathe settings and vinyl weights just so I could sort through a jumbled up carton of Novelty "cut in " 45s.
What was interesting about the box of 45s was that there where about 400 of them, and none of them were by Dickie Goodman. I don't know why I thought this was historically signifigant, or how this parlayed into me giving a shit, but it was the nineties. Anyway, the record making process is cool;

But Wait, there's more...........

SHAAAAAAROOOON! IT'S THE BLEEDIN' 14TH CENTURY AGAIN, AND THEY'VE NICKED ME CHOONS!

Rondellus are an Estonian Early Music ensemble who cover Black Sabbath songs in Latin on replicas of ancient instruments.
Songs covered include Verres Militares (War Pigs) and Post Murum Somnii (Behind The Wall Of Sleep), but alas-no "Crazy Train"

I Have It On Good Authority That Billie Jean Is Not, In Point Of Fact , My Lover- Oh, And Here's How To Moonwalk

Very detailed instructions on How to Moonwalk

Battle Of The All Midget KISS Tribute Bands!

This week only! (and for all other weeks in perpetuity throughout the universe) it's Tiny Kiss VS Mini Kiss !
Kiss gets short shrift
MiniKISS vs Tiny KISS!
Sploid On MiniKISS vs Tiny KISS