Seks Bomba and the Art of Retro-Respect

Today’s band was one I first encountered about 10 years ago but hadn’t thought much of in some time. That is until I rediscovered their stuff on YouTube and eventually wandered over to their site. I then learned they originated in Allston, MA. Allston. The tiny sub-town in which I currently reside. The blogging was on.

A self-described “surf-spy-cocktail rock” group, Seks Bomba formed in 1996 as a quintet consisting of vocals/guitar, organ/flute, drums, guitar, and bass, their name coming from the only recognizable phrase in a Czech magazine frontman Chris Cote was leafing through. Their musical language can best be summed up by looking at the cover of their first album, Operation B.O.M.B.A.; all of the kinds of music you could expect to hear on the soundtrack to a post-Goldfinger 60’s spy movie. No decade has been more eulogized than the 60’s, from Mad Men to the hundreds of hippie throwback genres and here as what has usually been seen as the most disposable genres of their era. The genius of Bomba is their ability to take music meant to be ignored (lounge exotica, cartoon jazz, cheap spy suspense) and bring out all the best qualities of each one, causing the listener to wonder how they could have forgotten them in the first place. “Rum Holiday” is a great example of their craft; their musicianship is super tight, their songwriting is lovely and inventive, and they have a great deal of passion about each note. Some of these hooks I have a hard time getting out of my mind, especially the bridge section in Cmaj7 (at 1:52). And as much as I like their second album, Somewhere in this Town, is even better, featuring stuff like a great cover of “Charade” and the inescapable “5-0-5!!!”

Now I know what you’re thinking: isn’t this the same thing as what Pink Martini does, but with less singing? Well, yes, but firstly I don’t think there can only be one famous band for a possible niche, and Pink Martini didn’t get famous until Seks Bomba had already effectively quit. Both groups occupy an interesting subgenre that probably only could have arisen after the success of the Swing Revival of the 90’s with groups like Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Royal Crown Revue and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. And I’ll admit that Pink Martini have a bit more variety than Seks Bomba, but Bomba is special to me for nostalgia reasons (I listened to Somewhere to death in both Middle and High Schools), and I think they get a lot of memorability for a mostly instrumental group. They Bomba’d for the last time in 2005 with the release of their third album Thanks and Good Night, but all three albums are available for download on amazon.com and other DRM-ridden channels (and possibly under-the-table ways which I won’t link here). Their albums stand as a testament to respecting and glorifying the past rather than mocking it, the latter of which is all too prevalent these days. You can tell that they deeply love their supposed “disposable” music, and their high level of musicianship and songwriting prove their case. Pass the martinis and watch out for knife-shoes.

~PNK

I Hairpsrayed Your Mom’s Remote - The Fuzzed-out Dreamland of James Ferraro

It’s happened. For the past few years we’ve been living in a world of manufactured nostalgia. And why shouldn’t we? We all like snuggling in the big, fuzzy blanket of cloudy memories that is our old VHS tapes and sing-along CDs. Maybe that’s the real impetus behind the hipsterist trend of thrift store scouring, the eternal quest for semi-baffling artefacts from a not-so-distant past (for hipsters my age that past is apparently the mid-80’s to the mid-90’s). That way we can pop in our very own VHS copy of Space Mutiny and laugh ourselves into nostalgia, even though only a handful of us actually saw that particular movie back in the day. It’s not about actually reliving memories; it’s about the feeling of dumb relics, those fetishistic objects that allow us to shake our heads and say, “Man, things sure were goofy and loveable back then.” It’s this same mentality that has brought mid-fi electronic music to the fore, whether via actual synthesizers, 8-bit compositional programs, or revving an Irish folk tune on an old Hot Keyz.

Obviously these things become tedious after a while, as irony keeps about as well as bananas. However, some electronic artists have made sweet ecstasy in Casioville, and I have yet to find one more creative than James Ferraro. Based out of the Bronx, Ferraro’s palette is very wide, and he’s covered a lot of ground in his more-than dozen albums and his work in the avant-garde duo The Skaters. I first got introduced to his music through the favorites list of an experimental video artist on YouTube. And boy, if nostalgia is like watching your favorite show through TV snow, then this song is like the best NY-post-punk-band-recreation-of-a-50’s-soda-fountain-dance track I’ve heard through a bad Walkman:

It’s all here: the gorgeously crappy fidelity, the adventurous feeling of flipping TV channels at 3 in the morning, and utterly gooftacular synth jamz. Other track titles from this album and others include “Buffy Honkerburg’s Answering Machine”, “Find Out What’s On Carrie Bradshaw’s iPod”, and “Jet Skis and Sushi”. I think the closest analog to his sense of humor in a band people may have actually heard of would be Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, the people behind the Kids in the Hall theme and creators of instrumental tracks with such titles as “Cheese in the Fridge” and “Plastics for 500, Bob”. And in case you’re wondering if his humor makes it to his Skaters work, here’s a track that comes with a free picture of hanging meat:

Obviously not all his tracks are jokes, and I wouldn’t even call “Moonshocked Dudettes” a joke, either. Even though he employs expert comedic presentation, his sound sculpting is top notch and his song have a great sense of construction and arc, not to mention a huge range of sonic components which make the whole albums worth it. When paddling through the algea-ed rivers that is modern electronica, variety is a huge and somewhat uncommon plus. For example, another mid-fi artist called Com Truise has a few albums out, and I liked them. Then I realized that every single song had the same tempo. Every. Song. You might not notice it at first, but when you do your heart sinks with each passing beat. Ferraro has a lovely awareness of his work that keeps things like that from happening, and his more recent work seems to have moved on from the crappy fidelity altogether, perhaps sensing that his music would attract the wrong kind of fans (those who decoupage Markey Mark onto their Biker Mice from Mars lunchboxes, which carry iPhones instead of lunch). And even though he has managed to actually grow as an artist (which is always a bummer for shallow fans), don’t worry: his new stuff keeps the wonderful and endearing sense that you’re filming a promo video for an 80’s office building:

~PNK

A Voyage to Distant Lounges with Caldera

I’ll be the first to admit that the avalanche you just witnessed is a bit more “70′s” than we’ve done on DOTE. Perhaps it was just in the ash-encrusted air. I know I got black lung just looking at that cover (as stretched it is on YouTube), but enough with the zingers. Caldera was an excellent group that fell victim to that all-too-unfortunate planned obsolescence of distribution: an art object that’s owned by a major label (in this case Capitol Records) and didn’t sell. As a result, their work is pretty hard to find on CD (at least legitimately or for reasonable prices), but thankfully the piracy juggernaut that is YouTube has helped out a great deal. Let’s hear it for team work.

Founded in 1976, Caldera was a multi-American effort to combine the then thriving jazz fusion scene (their primary influences being Return to Forever and Weather Report) with Pan-Latin influences. Pan-Latin may seem like something I just made up (as I did), but it fits what Caldera considered to be Latin music, which encompassed everything from Afro-Cuban to Flamenco to Salsa and anything else written in Spanich. The mind runs wild. Pulsing rhythms. Synths. Bongos. Keytars. The best-yet-found precursor to Earth Wind & Fire (who would be supplanted by a former member of this group). Perhaps we should just take another listen.

After floating off on a Tomita carpet ride, we hit Heavy Weather and all is right in the world. It’s almost too lovely to behold, swooping from acid to sitcom opener to soul-enriching sax in the blink of an eye. And yet it all works. This track isn’t as Latin heavy as the previous one (aside from a surging auxilary percussion drive), but I’m not one to pigeonhole. I’ll let this track make up for that:

This kind of brilliance lasted them four albums (1976-1979) but they just refused to sell. I can’t even begin to tell you how much of a Sam Hill shame that is, and everybody on YouTube, AllMusic, and Discogs agrees. They broke up after their fourth album The Dreamer and split into other projects, such as the aforementioned Earth Wind & Fire participation. A discussion on why they didn’t get the Big Break could shoot all over the place, with tangents on the public’s willingness to cross-breed genre tropes, to speculation on Capitol’s marketing, to the general direction of Jazz Fusion at the time and what people were expecting to hear if the words “Latin Flanger” are uttered. My first question is to whether or not record company executives actually listen to their product before making decisions (Answer = ? and 1/2). A lone track on the suspicious looking Capitol Rare, Volume 1 compilation isn’t doing it for me.

I’ll leave you with this last portal to a mythical land, with keyboards by Larry Dunn (hey, didn’t he co-found EW&F?)

~PNK

Fresh Princes - the delights of the Vegetable Orchestra

Carrot Recorder. Bean Shaker. Pumpkin Triangle. Radirimba. Gurkenficke with variable vacuum hole. Krautscratch. Celery Guitar. Bohrmaschinenlauchzellerpropeller. I think I’m in love.

One would be hard pressed to locate the true birth of noise music in the 20th century, as anybody has the potential to drop a stack of dishes and wonder how it would sound as Dubstep. But in the fast-moving world of alternative instrument makers, one collective has investigated the sonic possibilities of the salad. Based out of Vienna, The Vegetable Orchestra has produced produce instruments to fit any thinkable timbre, and the more the merrier. Their album Onionoise features all of them, and out of the sheer fun and ingenuity of it all the group turned out one of the best experimental albums I’ve heard in a while. They also know how to drop a beat or two.

The why isn’t important, and they don’t answer it (though they do mention that they are delicious). Perhaps a concept of what a vegetable orchestra is “about” would sully things. The group prides itself on how its members come from all different musical backgrounds, and this shows through in the wide variety of styles and moods present on Onionoise. I’m all for layers (oniony ones, especially), but the last thing I want is a guy in an armchair tapping a radish with a stick and pondering its place in the universe. They aren’t a political message, or a SITTM (Stick It To The Man) collective. It’s aural soup. It doesn’t have to be anything more than itself.

And perhaps most people will view the whole thing as a J-O-A-K. That’s before they’ve heard the slow-burn atmosphere tracks and the pretty-dang-good dance music. That’s before the (inevitable) tour opening for McCoy Tyner. TITK (Those In The Know) are fine with the initial guffaw. It’s a sieve. Those left in the pan will be invited to barrel down the highway blasting distorted cabbage. I’m ready for the next album already.

Here’s their site: http://vegetableorchestra.org/

~PNK

Thus Spake Pianola - Superhuman Music for Player Piano

Special thanks to YouTuber “playerpianoJH”!

It’s odd to imagine machines playing music beyond human capabilities before synthetic sound and computers. This of course wasn’t the first time we had performable music played by non-human entities (mechanical orchestras, anyone?), but the whole culture of musique concrète (music that exists as a single “performance” by a machine or recording) developed around tape manipulation and analog synthesizers, and flourished when digital techniques became advanced and accessible (see my previous article on Easley Blackwood for examples of this era). However, there was a remarkable predecessor to this and all electronic music that must be discussed: the player piano. You can probably remember the player piano from period pictures of the late 19th century, a relic of la belle époque, quaint and lacking in depth. While it’s true that the majority of music for the instrument was either transcriptions of popular classical works of the day or forgettable dance music, it contained a secret power. Beginning in the mid-1910′s (with the above piece by Stravinsky) modernist composers started to see the instrument for what it was: a vehicle for superhuman music, unplayable by normal people.

The Three Pieces by the Italian composer Alfredo Casella are a beautiful demonstration of the new capabilities of this mechanical beast. The Prelude features fast chord jumps that would be impossible to play by three people at the speed required, and also has a chord that would require hands as wide as your legs are long to play. The Waltz uses a melody that stretches across several octaves. The ragtime seems more fitting for exploding cars than dancing people, or maybe somebody attempting to swat flies with a refrigerator door. In a way these pieces are musical jokes, because anybody listening to them would scoff at their byzantine player requirements and the loud and abrasive tone of the instrument, which was attractive to composers at the time because of how it fit into the current craze for “grotesque” music. Casella was no stranger to massive stacked chords, either, and these pieces are chock-a-block with gigantic piles of notes. In the same spirit but taking the unplayability (and some would say unlistenability) up a few levels is this absurd piece by Hans Haass, who I had never heard of before finding this piece:

I personally feel that the work is better art if one looks at the piano roll than if they listen to it (I imagined a scenario where Haass glanced at his patterned wallpaper one day and declared “This is the future of music!”). There were many other pieces (all availabe on the same YouTube channel) but it is necessary for us to jump ahead a few decades. Enter Conlon Nancarrow, an American composer who had been exiled to Mexico after some time tinkering in the murky waters of modern music. Unsatisfied with musicians’ inability to play his exceedingly difficult music, he discovered the player piano and its ability to play extremely complex rhythms very quickly. He got himself a manual piano roll punching machine so he could make his own pieces, and then proceeded to write some 50 studies for the instrument during the next 40 years, entirely in seclusion in Mexico. When he was rediscovered in the late 70′s he was lauded by the likes of György Ligeti as one of the greatest composers of his time, and it’s pretty hard not to appreciate his work, in its intellectual aspects and its emotional and entertainment qualities. All of them are worth investigating, but I'll feature my current favorite right here:

The use of harmony, the captivating and totally original approach to rhythms, and a number of truly miraculous moments make this piece a real joy, and is a great showoff work for the instrument. As the description notes, all modern player piano compositions stem from Nancarrow’s work, and the channel features a number of contemporary works by many interesting composers. Because of the many wonders to behold on this channel (you really should get cracking on the Nancarrow studies) I’ll leave you with a particularly funny piece by virtuoso pianist Marc-André Hamelin that transforms a moldy oldy piano lesson staple into something wholly sinful. Have fun and don’t bang on normal pianos too hard to replicate these works. You might hurt yourself.

~PNK

"Alexander" and the Guttural Cough of Psychedelia

(I understand that this isn't the most factually accurate piece of writing I've done.  However, it was part of my initial burst of blogginating and I think it's pretty funny, errors notwithstanding.  There aren't too many of the older posts left anyways, so just hang tight and new material will be on its way :))

It had been dragged in the patchouli ditch, overstuffed by an uninvited foreign exchange war, and came up from the drink in a rented hangover costume two weeks behind in payments. It was 1969 and, though the American Industrial Music Conglomeriana wouldn’t admit it for the better part of a decade, the Psychedelic movement was pretty much over. As with all outgrowths of 60′s drug culture the original point had been lost and accessible and well-known headliner groups (such as the Doors) had catapulted what started as subterranean and murkily understood by its inventors into that ever-so-dangerous “clean-cut” realm. And at the peak of the buzz two groups attempted to take things up a level: Vanilla Fudge (now considered a seminal cross-genre band and very much worth investigating) and Alexander’s Timeless Bloozband.

I don’t know who Alexander is, or the contents of the Bloozband. I don’t want to know. It would diminish the magic. Careening wildly between a genuinely vervy psychedelic jazz blend (such as in the above Horn Song) and a Bouncing Betty in the form of back-of-the-basement blues revivalism, I’ve never heard a record capture a genre’s collective direction quite like this one. I can’t be sure if most of you will like every track you hear. That may be part of my point. Actually, this first track is probably the best, with a neat grove and harmony, and less boozy than most late psychedelia. However, many other tracks (all available for download on Amazon) smack of a different beast. And all are defined, alpha and omega, by Alexander.

I can’t imagine a better descriptor than “big floppy lawnflamethrower.”. His voice is a hairball expo on karaoke night, almost too lovely to behold. From what little information I was able to gather on the group they played venues all around SoCal in the late sixties. I’ve never heard of any of them (Greasy Slew Duck Club?!), so I can only assume they were flattened by Alexander’s visionary warble.

In a way this record is a testament to just how much the psychedelic movement owed to the blues. Perhaps if this record had sold better people would have latched onto this notion. I think a big part of why nobody did is a central conceit to the genre, in that most psychedelia is about as bluesy as the Beatles. One thing is for certain, though: Alexander was at least channelling the spirit of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and every whiskey he ever played footsy with. He understood the Bloozband for what it was: a vehicle to let his wobbly soul dance. Perfection is out of the question.

I apologize for rambling, but maybe I was trying to skirt the real reason this record exists, and has to exist. It is the last genuine psychedelic blues statement of its time, and between the maybe-once-rehearsed ensemble effort, a recording quality that suggests a garage at the bottom of the Hudson, and the incomparable Alexander, we realized that it couldn’t go any other way. It’s both glorious and disarming. The glory is obvious, but the disarmament comes when the weight of the thing comes crashing to our shoulders. Did the gods bless this as a living funeral, or was Alexander really as clairvoyant as I hope he was? Was it planned from the start to mark the death of the psychedelic music in LP form? Is this what a death rattle plays on the guitar?

I see now why the Bloozband is Timeless. The gutteral cry of humanity’s search for answers in the face of oblivion can never be silenced. Alexander’s unique art merely made it timely.

~PNK

Quixotic Harmonies - the Microtonal Music of Easley Blackwood

The 70’s was a time of prodigious drug use. I don’t mean to say that in any judgmental fashion, just as a statement of fact. The bomb had detonated and previous established rules of conduct were scattered across the floor. In this newfound, confused verve, electronic music was gaining a lot of speed. After a couple decades of cloistered experimentation there were a handful of electronic works that broke into the mainstream, chiefly records by two individuals: Walter Carlos (later Wendy) and Isao Tomita.

These are from 1971 and 1974 respectively, and if you recognize them (or not) it is their defining trait to be electronic recompositions of well-known classical pieces (by Henry Purcell and Claude Debussy, respectively). It was a stark contrast from the previous community of electronic composers, whose compositional devices were avant-garde and largely inaccessible to the general public. I think that these records became so popular chiefly because, rather than composing new music, they offered new ways to hear old music. Regardless of their creators’ intents, these works are much like walking out of your house while high: same shit, different glasses. These records may have also struck a chord with enthusiasts of progressive rock, not just in the shared use of synthesizers, but also in helping bring classical music to the colloquial drug crowd. Though never a drug user, my mother has admitted that hearing the Tomita record featured above (Snowflakes are Dancing) was her introduction to the music of Debussy, just as it can be easily said that the theme to A Clockwork Orange was probably most people’s introduction to Funeral Music for Queen Mary. Both Carlos and Tomita went on to make a number of best-selling records recomposing the classical rep, and the arts community started to notice.

In the late 70’s the National Endowment for the Humanities approached a dynamic composer-pianist named Easley Blackwood with the idea of exploring microtonal music. For the uninitiated, microtonal music that uses scales that contain more notes than the one most used in Western classical music, which has twelve evenly-spaced notes. Composers had been tinkering with microtonal scales since the beginning of the 20th century, but this was a new bag for Blackwood, whose previous works had been described as atonal and polyrhythmic, but formally conservative. His approach could have gone countless routes, including composing works like he had done for the previous twenty years, or adopting a different experimental style. What he chose instead was not only remarkable, but extremely timely.

What you’ve been listening to is from the 12 Microtonal Etudes for Electronic Music Media, released on LP in 1980. In what Blackwood likened to being a “sequel” to Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, each piece is first composed in a traditional tonal harmonic language, and then filtered through a microtonal pitch set, a different one for each etude. Glancing at the sheet music moving past the viewer of the included videos will reveal music that would have fit in nicely at the turn of the 20th century in Russia, with the works of Scriabin and his ilk. The beauty of the use of scales is that the listener doesn’t need to be aware of each exact tone being used, or even how many there are in each scale. He simply has to be anticipating what normal music sounds like, and become swept away by the new quixotic soundworld Blackwood presents. The new scales don’t actually align to any of the notes in a traditional 12-note scale, but they’re often close enough to trick the ear, and listeners are taken on an aural roller coaster, following the tones up and down. It’s intoxicating, and the music by itself would be rich and lovely, pleasant to the ear. These new scales have the power to make good music even better.

The Etudes became some of blackwood’s most well-known works, and the record was reissued on CD in 1994 along with two other microtonal works: the Fanfare using a 19-note scale, and a Suite using a 16-note scale for a guitar with a modified fretboard. These works actually had such a profound effect on Blackwood’s composition that he largely turned away from atonality, instead focusing on sophisticated use of traditional harmony. It’s as if he went through the looking glass and came out even more conservative than he already was. Not that his soundworld is a bad place to be.

~ PNK