Remain In Light Archives | Parallax Moves

Funkadelic – The Electric Spanking Of War Babies

Posted on August 31, 2018 @ 5:30pm by Coqui

Funkadelic The Electric Spanking Of War Babies

Warner Bros. 1981

Funk. The term has been rinsed thoroughly through the years — applied and mis-applied all over the shop on a seemingly loop — but at the end of the day, what is it really? The groove, hitting on the one, interlocking parts of a rhythm, all of them cycling in clockwork motion, players playing deep in the pocket all night long. Is it tight, is it loose, or somewhere in between? In attempting to answer that question, perhaps it makes sense to rewind to the man who dreamed it all up in the first place...

The Hardest Working Man In Show Business does his thing

Smack in the middle of the 1960s, James Brown released the epochal Papa's Got A Brand New Bag, a frisky bit of proto-funk that took the nimble soul shuffle of early records like Think and Night Train to its logical conclusion. With an agile rhythm that found Melvin Parker's beats seemingly dancing three feet off the ground, while the bassline (played either by Bernard Odum or Sam Thomas, depending on who you ask) hopscotches across the spaces in between, it set the template for funk proper that would be hammered home further in records like Mother Popcorn, Give It Up Or Turnit A Loose, all the way up to Sex Machine, The Payback and beyond.

James Brown famously rehearsed his band The J.B.'s mercilessly, even going so far as to dock a musician's pay if they made a mistake live! The result was perhaps the most tightly regimented rhythmic unit ever assembled, with a style that moved so far beyond precision that they somehow wrapped around into looseness again. In essence, he constructed a a perfect machine from a group of individual human players, an innovation that set the course for large swathes of music's development in the years to come.

Funkadelic at the dawn of the 1970s

George Clinton's Detroit-based empire slowly developed in parallel, off-record in the shadows of Motown's artist roster before exploding with the twin debuts of Parliament's Osmium and Funkadelic's self-titled LP in 1970. Picking up where artists like James Brown and Sly & The Family Stone left off at the tail-end of the sixties, both groups spiked their funk/soul strange brew with a healthy dose of acid. Records like Maggot Brain and Cosmic Slop were shot through with post-Hendrix psychedelia, adding a dirty edge to the proceedings that was in thrall to the times.

Kraftwerk, on stage and deep in the groove

Seemingly on the flipside of the coin lies that other institution that would prove to be so crucial in the development of Detroit's nascent progressive scene: Kraftwerk. They're often placed on opposite ends of the spectrum, Kraftwerk and Parliament, machine music and funk, but the truth — as is so often the case — is far more messy than one might expect.

There's that oft-quoted remark from Detroit club kids that Kraftwerk were so stiff, they're funky. Then, you hear something like The Model and Sex Machine back to back, and the parallels between the two become striking. Both tracks glide three feet above the ground on the horizontal tension of tautly arranged components interlocking like clockwork: rolling rhythms finding joy in repetition.

Somewhere in all of that was the sound of the future...

Whole worlds would spring from this fertile nexus — from techno and g-funk to r&b and electro — in the years to come, post-disco realms of sound stretching out in every direction, dazzling in their strange shapes and oftentimes even their distance from each other. And yet if there's one record that embodies this point of intersection — and did so before the fact, even — then it's surely Funkadelic's The Electric Spanking Of War Babies.

Funkadelic takes the stage 1980

The Electric Spanking Of War Babies is the final album from P-Funk's original run, the last stop before George Clinton's Computer Games (which made the connections between funk and the machine explicit), an album that it also presages in many ways. War Babies is the illogical conclusion to everything that had come before, a record that throws everything from Flash Light and Not Just Knee Deep to Hit It And Quit It and There Is Nothing Before Me But Thang into a blender of abstraction and comes up with the adrenaline rush of pure future shock.

Metal Machine Music

I often think the record works like a bizarre fusion of garage and laboratory, nestled deep in the heart of the Motor City, a place where mechanics and mad scientists disassemble vehicles and rebuild them in strange new combinations. Then, they flip the switch and machines spring to life, sputtering and scurrying like unwieldy insects across the shot room floor.

This shop operates at the interzone between post-disco, new wave and the nascent electro funk (the latter which Parliament/Funkadelic had a large part in birthing via Bernie Worrell's rubberband electronic basslines and gliding Arps). Rising stars like Prince and Zapp were soon hot at their heels, mapping both parallel and intersecting territory with their own innovations.

And yet, Funkadelic managed to up the ante one last time. Just as Kraftwerk rose to the challenge of new wave upstarts like The Human League and Gary Numan with their masterpiece, Computer World, Funkadelic went out with the left field big bang that is The Electric Spanking Of War Babies. Recorded after many key figures had left the group, including the aforementioned Worrell, the record is nevertheless the band's twilight era masterpiece.

Pedro Bell's rendering of Funkadelic from the record's gatefold interior

The record opens with the title track, which kicks off with what sounds like one of Eddie Hazel's Maggot Brain guitar phantasmagorias (although it's actually played by Michael Hampton). Outer space sounds swirl as a booming voice intones the following madness:

Hi there...

You probably don't remember me, but...

But I remember you.

You probably won't believe this, but, uh...

I, at the early age of 72... was adopted by aliens. [bursts into laughter]

Was adopted by aliens... [bursts into laughter again]

That's right, I said aliens.

They have long since programmed me to return with this message...

Then, a bouncing groove at the intersection of new wave funk and video game music pounces into the fray for the repeated refrain, When you learn to dance, you won't forget it, before it all turns into a trademark p-funk groove in the tradition of Not Just Knee Deep and One Nation Under A Groove, only with an added sense of creeping desperation swirling in the mix. The phrase End Of The World Party springs to mind whenever I hear it, the band standing on the verge of the precipice, still getting it on. I suspect Prince was listening closely (see 1999).

Junie Morrison livin' large

The track is almost entirely built on Junie Morrison's electro funk foundation in the form of squelching neon synth architecture, throbbing basslines and a hybrid man-machine beat, while Michael Hampton shreds guitar into post-acid sparks across the track's entirety. Various members of Parlet and The Brides Of Funkenstein turn up on the chorus, giving their trademark input in the form of a gloriously sneering sing-song of the track's title, while Junie punctuates every bar with synth stabs that punch through the mix like electric-shock therapy.

Truth be told, it probably even edges out Not Just Knee Deep as my favorite P-Funk dancefloor rave-up ever...

Pedro Bell's original, uncensored sleeve for The Electric Spanking Of War Babies

After such a mind-bending opening, Electro-Cuties might feel just a little bit less extraordinary. A minor track, even. Nevertheless, it manages to connect the band's disco funk present with their rock hard roots, fusing a slap-bass fueled groove with a Cosmic Slop-esque riff in the bridge. Like the previous track, it has the lurching feel of disparate random parts recomposed into a brand new machine. The Brides even turn up on backing vocals again, with one even delivering a proto-rap in the track's extended second half.

Sly Stone in the eighties

Funk Gets Stronger Part 1 is another matter entirely: featuring the great Sly Stone, it's the indisputable peak of the record. Opening with a talking drum figure and psychedelic voices drifting in the ether, it kicks into a whirring, stop-start beat that seems to perpetually trip forward over it's own throbbing bassline. It seems another strange machine has been conjured up from spare parts, and more than any other track here, it embodies the record's modus operandi.

Lurching in one direction before swooping and diving in the other, the rhythm seems to be powered by unstable elements, its tripping beat kicking into high-gear double-time every so often as the band struggles to catch up. You're just waiting for the tune to shift gears again, and in its Doppler rush of acceleration and deceleration on can almost feel an eerie pre-echo of jungle.

Adam And The Ants Dirk Wears White Sox U.S. Version Epic

All the while, the track's held-down by Zapp mastermind Roger Troutman's new wave-tinged rhythm guitar that's always struck me as a dead ringer for the sound on Adam And The Ants awesome Dirk Wears White Sox (the American version, of course). There's strong new wave/post punk currents running through the entirety of War Babies, and nowhere is that more evident than here. Think Metal Box, but coming from the opposite direction. Mike Hampton's incredibly pretty lead guitar threads the rhythm almost subconsciously, adding another dimension of emotion to the whole affair.

Sly & The Family Stone There's A Riot Goin' On Epic

Sly Stone famously in the mix here, credited as co-producer alongside George Clinton and Bootsy Collins, and combined with staccato trumpet lines provided by Sly's old band-mate Cynthia Robinson in the chorus, there's a definite Sly & The Family Stone flavor to the whole strange affair. There's even a lush organ passage in the breakdown in the breakdown that would have fit right in on There's A Riot Going On! I'd swear it was laid down by Sly Stone himself, but the only keyboards on the track are credited to Roger Troutman, who works the Moog synthesizers. However, as with Riot's famously hard to navigate album credits (see also the Talking Heads Remain In Light), I suspect that it's not the whole story. It's a late-era, extended band kinda thing...

The tune gets reprised a couple tracks later in the Killer Millimeter Longer Version, which finds the machine being started back up, its heartbeat pulsing quickly before tugging into shape. With its slightly more languid, open-ended arrangement, this version sounds even more like something from Riot. What's more, Sly Stone is credited on drums and keyboards, and late-period Family Stone member Pat Rizzo is present on saxophone. According to the album credits, it also features the lone contribution from original Funkadelic guitarist Eddie Hazel, who had already released his solo album Game, Dames And Guitar Thangs back in 1977.

The Beatles

There's an errant quote from The Beatles' All You Need Is Love before it all fades out and then back into place, with a thirty-second reprise-within-a-reprise cover version of She Loves You over the same rhythm. A drunken group chant, to be sure, and the perfect way to wrap up the Funk Gets Stronger saga.

Running parallel to these new wave/post punk moves, the record also spends a satisfying amount of time messing around with fourth world rhythms, with the extended rhythm sequence Brettino's Bounce nestled between both versions of Funk Gets Stronger. It's the sort of Caribbean-inflected groove that a post punk band like A Certain Ratio would kill for, with the band seemingly effortlessly unfurling a rolling percussion frenzy that lasts the better part of four minutes. A gong brings it all into focus, chattering polyrhythms and talking drums careening across the sound stage, before another gong sounds to conclude the jam session. Some might call it filler, but I think it's great!

Funkadelic's Shockwaves Warner Bros.

The other big fourth world moment is Shockwaves, a cod reggae number that rocks a malfunktioning skank across the showroom floor. Once again, strange machines are afoot in the sound lab, this time with parts imported from Jamaica... Crazy!

At first it almost seems like a joke song, complete with ridiculous fake island accent in the verses, but like Chuck Berry's Havana Moon it quickly bolts toward the sublime. The sprightly rhythm slowly goes overcast with the descent of soaring backing vocals and its incredible chorus:

I'm from the first world,

I like to groove.

Don't want no problems,

Set up that groove.

I'm probably out on a limb here, but it always makes be flash on Bowie. Particularly contemporary things like the proto-Remain In Light fourth world stylings of Lodger (the most obvious example being Yassassin), Up The Hill Backwards and even twenty later with Earthling's Looking For Satellites. It certainly fits right in with the wider My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts drift of the times. Interestingly, aside from the title track, it was chosen as the only other single from War Babies, coming out on 7" wax. Shades of new wave's détente with reggae (see also The Police, Jah Wobble, The Clash, et al.).

More peak-era Funkadelic onstage shenanigans

The following Oh, I almost feels like a breather after the breathless experimentation of the record's mid-section. It's the most straight-up p-funk number here, relaxing in a gently mid-tempo manner the way that Mothership Connection and Aquaboogie were. Adding to its sun-glazed aura is the acid-tinged, Ernie Isley-esque guitarwork of Michael Hampton and Jerome Ali. Interestingly, an unreleased 12" version of the tune later washed up on Parliament's The 12" Collection And More.

War Babies's scandalous rear sleeve, from the singular mind of Pedro Bell

The record closes with the rubberband electro funk jam Icka Prick, the key final track in this song cycle. With its machine box rhythms rolling along at a hip hop pace, it's practically a g-funk track. David Lee Chong holds down synthesizer duties here, injecting the track with squiggly day-glo boogie shapes, while Michael Hampton returns (yet again) for some crunchy lead guitar work. One's immediately reminded of Zapp, but this is much looser, and less locked down, coming on like an amorphous, jell-o take on the electro funk sound.

As the song opens, Michael Hampton ad-libs Oh, you ain't seen obscene yet, We gonna be nasty this here time, and he ain't lying. Icka prick and iron pussy, yucka fuck and muscle cunt, while we servin' pussy from the shoulder, she servin' dick from the head, and Elmo MacNasty, mental masturbation, psychological perversion (hey, hey), are just some of the couplets you're treated to after he warns you to Put on some protection for your ears. Ain't no decent dick in Detroit! The Brides' backing vocals retort That's disgusting!

Without warning, it all goes supernova in the track's denouement, with soaring Hit It And Quit It vocals, whining Drexciyan synths and metallic guitars elevating the track toward its epic conclusion before it all fades without warning...

Video still from live performance of the title track 1981

Over the years, The Electric Spanking Of War Babies has crept up on me to become my favorite piece of the P-Funk story. I've never seen it singled out for praise as such, but for me it distills nearly everything great about Parliament/Funkadelic into a sleek capsule aimed toward the future. Its man-machine hybrid draws together disparate contemporary strands — the post-disco funk of Zapp and Funkadelic themselves, the new wave shapes of Prince and the Minneapolis sound, and fourth world sonics straight out of the My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts playbook — all while pointing the way toward Cybotron, Model 500, Kosmic Messenger and beyond.

And as such, it's myriad routes stretch right up through the present day... not to mention the fact that it's a killer party record.

Terminal Vibration: Bonus Round (Island Disco)

Posted on April 19, 2018 @ 11:45pm by Coqui

A palm tree street overlaid by a grid of records — Island Disco

Picking up where we left off with the last chapter (Imperial Slates) and in light of the recent Parkway Bowl Disco Mix, it's as good a time as any to touch on a key element in the Terminal Vibration blueprint that doesn't fit anywhere else in the schema. Consider this a cool breeze of an interlude between last episode's heavy dub shapes and next week's hip hop brakes. At the interzone between post-disco, new wave and boogie lies a tropical dancefloor sound that runs like a thread right through the 80s (and beyond). This sound is embodied by no one quite so much as (you guessed it) the Compass Point All Stars.

Bobby Konders "All The Massive Hits" In A Rub A Dub Stylee Nu Groove

The crucial ingredient that sets this sound apart from what everything that came before is the thorough absorption of dub reggae's sonic toolkit into dance music's fabric. One can hear the reverberations echo through the ensuing years, most obviously in the spangly textures within the music of house figures like Bobby Konders (and by extension much of Nu Groove's output), Larry Heard and Tony Addis' Warriors Dance setup.

The thread then gets picked up by the likes of The Future Sound Of London (the earlier material in particular, see Accelerator, The Pulse EPs and the Earthbeat compilation), The Orb (Perpetual Dawn, Blue Room, Toxygene, et. al.) and even progressive figures like Leftfield and Andrew Weatherall.¹

Wally Badarou Chief Inspector 4th & Broadway

Tangentially, large swathes of trip hop — Massive Attack, Smith & Mighty, Bomb The Bass and loads more — seem to flow naturally from the more downbeat corners of Grace Jones' (I've Seen That Face Before (Libertango), for instance) and Wally Badarou's (literally, in the case of Mambo) discography. And like trip hop, this is a territory that I only mean to touch on briefly in the context of the Terminal Vibration series, as I plan to spend a much more time in this region in the not-too-distant future, with a feature of its own. Like I said, this is just an interlude of sorts.

Gwen Guthrie Padlock Garage/Island Trading Co.

This sound — which I'm still rooting around for a good, concise name for — was a key part of the story of what went down sonically at the Paradise Garage. Larry Levan's production on Gwen Guthrie's Padlock mini-album epitomizes the sound, in which deep grooving bass, spangly synthetic textures, dubbed-out percussion and disembodies vocals all coalesce in a swirling headphone symphony. This is a four-dimensional, tactile approach to sound design that pulses through the era like a homing beacon, bringing all manner of disparate figures into the fold as the decade rolls on like the pied piper.

As I was saying before, the key crew in all of this was the Compass Point All Stars, who cooked up something quite special down in Nassau on a series of records for artists like Grace Jones, Gwen Guthrie and the Tom Tom Club. Island disco, Parallax Pier, coastal dub... whatever you call it, it's very much a sound all its own.

It's interesting to note — and I've mentioned this before — the way Caribbean transplants Grace Jones, Eddy Grant and Billy Ocean all seem to have put in early work hammering this sound out in isolation over the course of the prior decade, their unique geographic perspective informing the music they were making within the context of what was the by-and-large straight up disco community.

Then there's the whole new-wave-gone-to-the-tropics phenomenon that probably started with the Talking Heads' I Zimbra and Remain In Light (who were coming at it from a West African-informed trajectory), and The English Beat's shimmering Caribbean inflections. I'm talking about Burning Sensations' Belly Of The Whale, Haircut One Hundred's Pelican West and XTC's It's Nearly Africa, not to mention David Byrne's production for The B-52's Mesopotamia mini-album (the influence of which seemed to stick around through their third album, Whammy!, even informing certain corners of their Cosmic Thing comeback in 1989).

The Special A.K.A. In The Studio Two-Tone

The whole thing wraps around to the extent that the Talking Heads seem to be influenced by the groups that they influenced themselves (along with the Tom Tom Club's records), going full-on tropical with Speaking In Tongues, which was actually recorded at Compass Point. It's a sound not unlike what Kid Creole And The Coconuts had been up too, a sound that was co-opted and given a dark twist by Jerry Dammers on The Special AKA's In The Studio. Interesting that many of the ska bands ended up shearing into this territory, with English Beat songs like Ackee 123 seeming to split the difference between calypso and township jive.

King Sunny Adé & His African Beats Juju Music Mango

One doesn't need to search far to find the real-deal flipside to these island incursions in the honest-to-goodness Jamaican disco like Crashers' Flight To Jamaica (Cool Runings) and Third World's Now That We Found Love (which despite hailing from 1978 sounds like something from, oh about 1993), while music coming out of Africa like Juju Music by King Sunny Adé & His African Beats and Tony Allen's Afrobeat 2000 squared the circle between new wave post-disco and their Yoruba/afrobeat roots. Once again, the circular logic is in evidence throughout, with the original influence being touched in turn by the music they'd originally influenced. And on and on and on.

And let's not forget Thomas Leer's globetrotting, sun-warped new pop, records like 4 Movements and Contradictions where he perfectly captures that Mediterranean drift between Tangier, Cairo and Ibiza (and often makes me flash on The Jewel Of The Nile!). There's also Suicide's second album, the glistening, mirage-like synths of which — coupled with Ric Ocasek's ace production — which always struck me as an almost unexpected detour into such sun-kissed terrain.

In many ways, I've often thought that records like Dream Baby Dream and Suicide: Alan Vega · Martin Rev run parallel to certain Arthur Russell records like Let's Go Swimming, In The Light Of The Miracle, Lola's Wax The Van and Dinosaur L's In The Corn Belt. Indeed, large swathes of the Sleeping Bag catalog sit quite comfortably in this vein, as does much of the early Easy Street output.

Even European dance music like My Mine's Hypnotic Tango, RAH Band's Clouds Across The Moon and Yello's exotica-tinged sides seem to fit into this puzzle with ease. To reiterate, the currents of this music seem to run through the very fabric of the era's dancefloors... but that's another story for another day, and I've already gone on far too long tonight.

LISTEN NOW

TVBRR Island Disco

The English Beat Too Nice To Talk To Go-Feet
Thomas Leer Hear What I Say Cherry Red
Gwen Guthrie Seventh Heaven Garage/Island Trading Co.
The Orb Perpetual Dawn Solar Youth Mix Big Life
Talking Heads This Must Be The Place Naive Melody Sire)
XTC It's Nearly Africa Virgin
King Sunny Adé & His African Beats Ma Jaiye Oni Mango
Yello La Habanera Carl Craig's Hands On Yello Urban
The Special AKA Bright Lights Two-Tone
Kid Creole And The Coconuts Table Manners ZE
Tom Tom Club Genius Of Love Island
Eddy Grant Living On The Frontline/The Frontline Symphony ICE
Tony Allen with Afrobeat 2000 When One Road Close Another One Go Open Wrasse
Suicide Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne Antilles
The Future Sound Of London While Others Cry Jumpin' & Pumpin'
Grace Jones I've Seen That Face Before Libertango Island
Massive Attack Tricky & Shara Nelson Daydreaming Wild Bunch
Dub Poets Black & White Massive B
Bomb The Bass Bernard Fowler Sandcastles 4th & Broadway
Arthur Russell In The Light Of The Miracle Talkin' Loud

The English Beat - Wha'ppen? — Terminal Vibration (Bonus Round): The Records

Thomas Leer - Contradictions — Terminal Vibration (Bonus Round): The Records

Footnotes
1.	One of the great musical epiphanies of mine a few years back was realizing that Leftfield were merely picking up where Bobby Konders and No Smoke left off.

Garden Grooves 003

Posted on April 4, 2018 @ 11:42pm by Coqui

With Spring beginning to take flight, it was high time for the crew to get involved in some horticultural escapades at the Parallax Gardens. Consequently, here is the third edition of Garden Grooves (aka the music we played). Spanning a casual week of afternoon work, here's the selection as it played out:

Toyan How The West Was Won

Greensleeves 1981

Kicking off the whole affair was this bass-heavy deejay record, Toyan's proto-dancehall tour de force. What sleeves these records have! Ranking Toyan does his thing over crisp, dubtastic riddims laid by the Roots Radics and mixed by Scientist. A Henry "Junjo" Lawes production.

My second favorite Grace Jones LP by a country mile. Unlike my #1 pick (Nightclubbing) it's comprised almost completely of Grace-penned originals (the one exception is Melvin Van Peebles' The Apple Stretching). Boasting killer tune after killer tune (My Jamaican Guy, Nipple To The Bottle) and the descending neuromantic boogie of Unlimited Capacity For Love (choice), Living My Life rounds out Miss Jones' Island trilogy with aplomb.

Jah Wobble And The Invaders Of The Heart Invaders Of The Heart

Lago 1983

Discovered this record only recently over the course of formulating the whole Terminal Vibration trip. This rounds out another trilogy alongside Full Circle and the Snake Charmer mini-LP, featuring Wobble in collaborative mode (this time with the Invaders Of The Heart, who he'd hit full stride with in the 90s). Hauntingly exotic post punk/post-disco moves inna My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts stylee.

Indian Ocean School Bell/Treehouse

Sleeping Bag 1986

Arthur Russell's abstract disco freakout, knocked out with rolling percussion and seemingly improvised vocals. You hear these Arthur Russell records and they really opens up the whole idea of 80s music, straining at the confines of the predictable collective memory of the era to inhabit similar climes to Hindustani music, cosmic jazz and krautrock. Much like King Sunny Adé's Ma Jaiye Oni, my favorite part is when the keyboards take the reins about 2/3 of the way through.

Tom Tom Club The Man With The 4-Way Hips

Island 1983

Sumptuously three-dimensional new wave disco from the Tom Toms' second album Close To The Bone, the 12" gives the groove room to breath with those sublimely detailed synths and tactile percussion. The flipside's dub version is a real treat, and like Wally Badarou's Chief Inspector plays like a proto-house instrumental (once again, those synths!). Clearly, there was something in the water down at Compass Point.

Shiny post punk funk on the Y imprint and featuring prior members of The Pop Group and the Glaxo Babies. I always want to give this, along with The Slits' Cut and Come Away With ESG to every 15 year old I know. Coming on like a left-footed, untamed English Beat circa Special Beat Service, its brilliant skanking rhythms square the circle between new pop and punk funk better than anyone else. Shame that it isn't more easily available...

...and with the closing bars of All Wrapped Up!, we put away the tools and kicked back for the evening. The following day found the clouds rolling in, and the overcast skies had a decided impact on the playlist as it unfolded...

New York crew get down and dirty with storied 4-track EP, wringing magic from the whole affair only to get ripped off by Grandmaster & Melle Mel's White Lines Don't Don't Do It. As much as I love White Lines, the original loping groove in Cavern is where its at. Plus, you've got Optimo's Central Park conga jam and the rolling clockwork downbeat groove of the post rock-predictive Out. A true gem of a record. And non-stop props to Señor Lavelle for putting out the Liquid Liquid comp on Mo Wax back in the mid-nineties.

Ian Dury & The Blockheads Do It Yourself

Stiff 1979

— Sophomore full-length outing from old Ian and co., this is often classed as a disappointment but have you heard it lately? Sounds to me like a worthwhile follow up to New Boots And Panties!! and the slew of ace 7"s The Blockheads spat out over the course of the late seventies, with a heavy emphasis on post-disco rhythms, a couple quasi-reggae tunes and even shades of Lodger. Something like Sink My Boats is utterly original, definitively seventies — like watching six hours of The Rockford Files and then falling asleep to a fever dream where Barry Newman, Rudy Ray Moore and Peter Wyngarde wander into The Last Of Sheila — and somehow manages to sound unlike anything else around.

Various Artists Babylon: The Original Soundtrack

Island 1980

Rock hard reggae soundtrack from the 1980 film starring Aswad's Brinsley Ford. Scored by the great Dennis Bovell, it also features Aswad's Warrior Charge (a Parallax staple). Great cloudy day reggae (see also Horace Andy's Dance Hall Style) this was the perfect way to wrap up the second day, with darkness settling in on the Eastern horizon.

Forrrce's slap-bass odyssey kicked off the third day, the proto-raps unfolding over dub disco production as we cleared our way into the herb garden and the various banana groves scattered about the premises. The awesome Keep On Dubbin' With No Commercial Interruptions takes matters even deeper into left field with François Kevorkian dub-inflected hall of mirrors approach in full swing. At this point, the sun was hanging heavy in the sky and the 4/4 pulse was in full effect.

Lino Squares The Role Of Linoleum

Humboldt County 1997

Moody minimalism from Andrew Weatherall and Keith Tenniswood on temporary holiday from their Two Lone Swordsmen project, at this point gaining full steam. Neuphrique is like a dress rehearsal for No Red Stopping and is very much in the 2LS deep house vein. A quintessential '97 record, you could take this, Moodymann's Silentintroduction and Primal Scream's Echo Dek and have a decent thumbnail sketch of where I was at the time. Blue Pole Dancer always reminds me of 44's Groove Station, even if it came out a couple years earlier.

William Onyeabor Anything You Sow

Wilfilms 1985

Sparkling guttertronics from Nigerian synth wizard William Onyeabor (his final record in fact). This is very much in the chipper bubblegum Kraftwerk vein of Depeche Mode's Speak & Spell (or latterly Hot Chip's latest record), but shot through with a distinct highlife flavor. I picked this up seven years ago (at Amoeba Records in San Francisco) on my honeymoon.

His records were extremely hard to come by at the time, and I absolutely adored Onyeabor's Better Change Your Mind (as featured on the Nigeria '70 compilation) and the Body And Soul 12" with the Scientist remix (which I did have). I couldn't believe my luck at finding this ace reissue and upon returning home and dropping it on the turntable instantly fell in love with the sounds contain therein. Fast-forward a few years and Luaka Bop releases the lavish Onyeabor box set (containing his entire discography), and the world rejoiced.

As if to drive the point home, here's that latest Hot Chip LP. I quite like this sound they've arrived at, perched midway between Cowley/Moroder synth-disco pulse and twinkling bubblegum electropop. There's even room for the odd surprise, like White Wine And Fried Chicken's slow-motion country ballad. Good stuff.

Patrick Cowley Menergy: The Album

Fusion 1981

The conventional wisdom on Patrick Cowley seems to have always been that his album ventures like Megatron Man and Mind Warp were disappointing and that his productions (Sylvester's Your Make Me Feel Mighty Real) and remixes (Cowley's psychedelic Mega Mix of Donna Summer's I Feel Love) were where it's at.

Well, sure it's hard to top those highs, but I quite enjoy these full-length electro-disco excursions (think Cerrone and Moroder). What with the recent reissues of his cosmic synth music (School Daze and Muscle Up) and abstract post punk (Catholic), he seems almost like a West Cost, mechanoid Arthur Russell.

Andrew Weatherall Qualia

Höga Nord 2017

Last year's Weatherall solo shot plys a sort of instrumental electro-inflected krautrock. This very much reminds me of Death In Vegas' Satan's Circus, in that it plows a similar furrow with live drumming and spiral sequences that conjure up a sound that strikes me as ever familiar and yet I'm unable to place it. Mr. Weatherall's been on a roll this decade, with four solo LPs, The Asphodells' cosmic disco extravaganza and The Woodleigh Research Facility record, all of which I've enjoyed immensely.

Holger Czukay On The Way To The Peak Of Normal

Welt-Rekord 1981

With the sun setting and parties split off to procure dinner from The Tako Factory, Czukay's haunting solo endeavor seemed a natural choice. Ode To Perfume is quite simply a masterpiece, eighteen minutes of low-slung imaginary soundtrack music that rides a loping rhythm as guitars tears into the mix sounding like some distant cousin of Can's Deadlock. Czukay even works in his beloved French horn.

Back in the mix with late-period Can — we're pulling Winter weeds, turning the Northside lawn into a putting green — whose liquid rhythms pour over the morning dew-covered grass and out into the palms. For me, this record is in the upper echelon with Ege Bamyasi and Future Days, it finds the band spooling out that Moonshake sound across an entire record. If I've said it before, I've said it a hundred times: if this were by some new band called Jar or Receptacle, and not coming in after Monster Movie and Tago Mago, we'd all mention it in the same breath as the Talking Heads' Remain In Light and the Meat Puppets' Up On The Sun. Exquisite.

Mr. Cale's music is one of the great understated treasures to spring from the 1970s. This the fifth of his LPs from the decade, and you'll want all of them. His rhythm box is still fading in and out of the mix — perfectly integrated with the live instrumentation, like in a Moodymann record — with some tasteful synth licks creeping in here for good measure. Like the four records to come before, the production is otherworldly, exquisite. Alongside Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, one of the great songwriters of the era.

Prince Far I Under Heavy Manners

Joe Gibbs 1977

Prince Far I's classic platter found us back on the Southeast Terrace to work some landscaping magic. This is one of the deejay records (alongside things like Dr. Alimantado's Best Dressed Chicken In Town and Dillinger's CB 200), with Prince Far I's stentorian delivery front and center over peak-period Joe Gibbs backing. A stone cold classic, this record.

Incidentally, I got turned onto Prince Far I via the instrumental Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter 1 dub outing (mixed by Adrian Sherwood), owing to Long Life's featuring in a Rockers Hi-Fi mix.

Various Artists Calypsoul 70: Caribbean Soul & Calypso Crossover 1969-1979

Strut 2008

This compilation of (put crudely) Caribbean funk and disco is an unmissable romp, put out by compilation heavyweights Strut. Highlights include Amral's Trinidad Cavaliers Steel Orchestra's instrumental version of Gwen Guthrie's 90% Of Me Is You and Cedric Im Brooks' Blackness Of Darkness. There's even a cover of Barrabas' Woman!

Some tracks veer quite close to afrobeat territory, nevertheless I suspect that this contains the germ of the Compass Point/Parallax Pier sound. It's all quite evocative to me of time spent on the island back in the day, especially the way influences will run to and fro between the islands and the mainland. It's all very cosmopolitan in a casual way. Upon reflection, I suspect that some of these sounds were still hanging around when I first visited Puerto Rico, such is their lingering familiarity.

Sweet Talks Hollywood Highlife Party

Philips 1978

The Sweet Talks were a Ghanaian highlife band that sprung up in the mid-seventies and developed something of a profile, touring the world and ultimately winding up in L.A. and recording this little album, full of sparkling guitars and driving 4/4 rhythms. It's nearly impossible to overlook this music's compatibility with contemporary disco. I wonder if — like Manu Dibango's Soul Makossa — it made it's way onto any of the era's disco dancefloors?

The Beginning Of The End Funky Nassau

Alston 1971

Crack band from the Bahamas cut killer funk LP, on par with James Brown and Cymande's contemporary output. This very nearly made the Golden 200. Funky Nassau is one of those great 7" singles, and you get the whole thing right here at the record's opening. Interesting to think that this band were doing their thing in Nassau about a decade before the Compass Point All Stars coalesced into an institution.

Discovered this only recently thanks to the Singles As Bs & 12 Inches box set put out by Repertoire (check out the excellent Roger Dean sleeve). I have the Black Ant and a handful of their LPs, so this anthology filled out the gaps quite nicely. I had no idea about the band's 80s output, and this record clearly stood out as something special and I tracked a copy down accordingly.

Featuring BIG production, like ABC's How To Be A Zillionaire! (in fact, that very well could have been the next record played — if this hadn't been the last), it could slot right into a contemporary soundtrack during some montage scene. It's all about the Bush-Fire-Mix. I was momentarily certain that the getting hot, getting hot chorus showed up in Ice Cube's No Vaseline, but that notion appears unfounded (it was just a (sample) mirage).

Appropriately, this provided the grand finale as we wrapped up work on the Parallax Gardens, the assorted terraces and groves now properly prepared for summer just around the bend...

Jah Wobble/The Edge/Holger Czukay – Snake Charmer

Posted on February 25, 2018 @ 10:44pm by Coqui

I alluded to this record earlier, but seeing as it's turned into Jah Wobble week I figured it was worth delving into it in greater detail. As I was saying, the Snake Charmer mini-LP is a great little record that straddles the nexus between post-Eno/Byrne My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts/Talking Heads Remain In Light fourth world rhythmic madness and the sumptuous post-disco electro boogie of contemporary early 80s dancefloors. As one might expect, the sound here is often adjacent to that of the Compass Point All Stars, with Ollie Marland's keyboards often recalling the synth stylings of the great Wally Badarou.

Operating at the interzone between these two of-the-moment sonic permutations, the emphasis is often on atmosphere and texture which is in part down to the presence of The Edge (on loan from U2) and the spiraling guitar architecture that he weaves around the tracks he happens to appear on. Those great arcs of slide-guitar feedback in the title track seems to predict what he'd be up to about eight years later on Achtung Baby, while his crystalline pools of six-string ambience add whole layers of depth and splendor to Hold On To Your Dreams.

Coming as it does between U2's War and The Unforgettable Fire LPs, one wonders how much his involvement in this project played into his band's radical shift into more atmospheric territory the following year. Obviously Brian Eno played a crucial role, but like Bowie with Station To Station, I suspect that The Edge — being the atmospheric gent that he is — was already harboring some ideas of his own.

Wobble and 1/3 of Can in the studio — Jah Wobble, Holger Czukay & Jaki Liebezeit

More than anything else, however, the vectors of Jah Wobble and Holger Czukay are what place this record at its unique fourth world vantage point. Interestingly, Wobble's bass seems to be operating at an octave higher than usual, indulging in some slap bass action along the lines of Jeremy Kerr's work in A Certain Ratio rather than his usual dub-heavy bottom-end. Also, while most of the record is given over to instrumentals, Wobble provides vocals to the opening Snake Charmer.

Holger Czukay/Jah Wobble/Jaki Liebezeit Full Circle Virgin

Czukay reprises his role from their previous collaboration Full Circle as the master of atmosphere, contributing blasts of French horn and more of that spooky grand piano sound from How Much Are They? to Snake Charmer, along with guitars and his trademark Dictaphone inserts throughout. Everything here very much informed by Czukay's peerless soundscapes achieved on his 1981 solo turn On The Way To The Peak Of Normal (even if nothing here quite reaches the heights of Ode To Perfume).

As if the three principals weren't enough, disco heavyweight François Kevorkian takes his place behind the mixing desk alongside the inimitable Paul "Groucho" Smykle, fresh from his sessions remixing King Sunny Adé's Ja Funmi. You're starting to get the picture now, aren't you? It's 1983, and this is shaping up to be an exceptional slab of post-disco magic. Let's put the needle 'pon the record...

Snake Charmer provides the opening gambit with a rolling syn drum fanfare before launching into its left-footed digifunk groove, setting the stage for this record's excursion through the shifting sands of the Moroccan outback. Synth flourishes begin to splash into view at the start of every bar, while Jah Wobble goes to work on the bass. A blast of Holger Czukay's French horn splits into the scene front-end-center, making room for his guitar atmospherics and haunted dancehall grand piano to enter the mix. Then, the synths seem to cruise into strangled arabesques as Jah Wobble contributes his maniacal vocals:

Messages beamed from Mars

Straight in my mind.

Try to get in my mind...

They made me do it! They made me do it!

All the while, Czukay's scrambled Dictaphone ramblings spool out in the background. Then, the bottom drops out into a snatch of on-the-one funk guitar from Animal for but a moment, before returning to the groove and that central piano motif. Moments pass and then The Edge starts to strangle great arcing shapes from his guitar as Wobble continues:

My dream orders on my mind's TV camera

I think I'm Bogey living in Casablanca.

Scattered newspapers drift across derelict land,

spreading spurious lies and sordid details of my private life.

An angel swope to my chest swooping all it’s glory!

The Edge cools out the groove with his graceful arcs of guitar in slow-motion and Holger returns with his soaring French horn figures. Then, the beat trips into electro funk territory, rolling off into the horizon as Wobble adds:

Yes, but you don’t understand

I was the man hanging from the noose.

And you don’t understand

I was the world leader, the world dominator.

And the beat goes on. You're cruising across the Sahara, sun setting in the distance. This is all so clearly of a piece with My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts that I feel corny even mentioning it. Also Thomas Leer's 4 Movements. If you love those records, then you owe it to yourself to hear this tune. Trust me. You could build a club night around these three records. Please do that and invite me! Please... please? Anyway, we'll give Wobble the final words to close this thing out:

Many voices going through my head

Voices of the living and the voices of the dead.

Journeys through history, journeys sublime

And even, journeys to the end of time.

And then a flourish of twinkling piano takes us directly into the achingly gorgeous Hold On To Your Dreams. A gentle synth pulses while shades of The Edge's guitar sparkle all around. Wobble enters the fray to push this groove along with a gliding bass figure, and then then a synth slips into a progression to herald the entrance of the beat. Czukay's pal-from-the-Can-days Jaki Liebezeit starts to do his thing behind the drum kit, holding down that slow-motion disco rhythm. Somehow you're now in the best nightclub in town, bathed in blacklight and shards of white light scattering off the disco ball onto the dancefloor below and damn your girl's looking good.

As I've mentioned before, this is pure post-disco boogie, along the lines of the Compass Point records and Ashford & Simpson's Babies Dub Version, which François Kevorkian himself would produce a year later. I wonder if Hold On To Your Dreams was still running through his mind when he was mixing that record down, as the resemblance is uncanny. Uncanny!

Similarly, Wide Awake In America's Love Comes Tumbling almost seems like an attempt by U2 to resurrect the dynamic of Hold Onto Your Dreams and The Edge's crystalline lattice of guitar unfurled here. It's all very much in the vein of a chugging mid-tempo boogie, which places it at the lower-right corner of the Parallax Pyramid's foundation.

As if to make it official, High Fashion's Marcella Allen¹ takes the mic for lead vocals, giving us a glimpse at what High Fashion tunes like I Want To Be Your Everything and A Little More Time might have sounded like with her singing lead. The whole effect is quite atmospheric, indeed this is the tune where the presence François Kevorkian and Paul "Groucho" Smykle is felt most dramatically, with layers of guitar swathed in blankets of echo and dub disco bleeps reverberating through the mix almost subliminally. It pulses on for nearly nine minutes before disappearing into the stars.

Brian Eno/David Byrne My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts Sire

And so closeth side one. You flip the record over and we're back in the fourth world, with It Was A Camel. Blah blah My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts blah blah. You must be so sick of hearing about this by now. But remember Moonlight In Glory? Well, you could certainly spin this and that one back to back. It's got that same loping groove and low key pumping quasi-brass synth creeping in and out of the rhythm — with Jaki Liebezeit doing his thing behind the drum kit yet again — while Holger Czukay's grand piano takes center stage and his Dictaphone rambles out beneath it all.

Then, a highlife-esque guitar appear out of nowhere like it's the most natural thing in the world. It's all so improbable, but one could imagine a whole scene in the penumbra of these records. Jon Hassell's Power Spot worth a mention here as well. The rhythm just fades out into the dunes...

With no warning, Sleazy cuts in out of nowhere at a breakneck pace about 20 BPM faster than anything else here. Jim Walker's furious, crashing drums and Jah Wobble's frenetic basslines lay down a frenzied rhythmic bedrock for Animal to spray his wailing guitar feedback over. Old Ollie Marland contributes a bit of keyboards too.

Jah Wobble And The Invaders Of The Heart Invaders Of The Heart Lago

I should mention that Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart band is credited on the record's sleeve after all the other luminaries listed, with Neville Murray providing percussion throughout the record. It's interesting to note the Invaders Of The Heart debut 12" from the same year (I'm pretty sure it preceded Snake Charmer, but I'll have to speak with Dignam to confirm), with its similarly pungent fourth world stylings. Today's tile of the day was actually a toss up between the two records.²

The mini-LP closes with an instrumental reprise of Snake Charmer which is actually longer than the original. It plays like a dub version, with added emphasis on the track's electro aspects, and you can hear Groucho's trademark tricks in evidence throughout. It's a fitting close to this record's circular story, which plays like a possible soundtrack to one of William Burroughs Tangier hallucinations. Definitive interzone music. Strangely, it's still not available digitally or on CD... so it's a good thing y'all have a record player.

Footnotes
1.	Interesting to note that Marcella Allen also sang with Norman Connors' Aquarian Dream and on Lonnie Liston Smith's Love Is The Answer. It's a post-jazz funk boogie, proto-SA-RA type thang... I feel it!
2.	Snake Charmer won out because it's got more angles to it, but check out the Invaders Of The Heart 12" sleeve, as its brilliantly evocative of Wobble's windswept desert music of this era.

Terminal Vibration V (What Time Is It?)

Posted on February 16, 2018 @ 8:48pm by Coqui

In the beginning there was rhythm

As the hours keep turning and the moon hangs deep in the sky, we move toward the back of the crate toward the voodoo records. Here's where we get into the heaviest, most atmospheric music that could loosely be termed punk funk without shimmying into krautrock territory. Word of warning: things are gonna get weird. Escape routes take you everywhere from West Africa to the Caribbean, from Brazil to Indonesia and from Bristol to The Bronx. Far and wide.

Today's chapter essentially boils down to three post punk dynasties: The Pop Group/Slits continuum, Material/Bill Laswell and the mighty Public Image Ltd. (and related solo endeavors). All of which — critically — take you well into the nineties and beyond, tributaries cutting a jagged path across the landscape to feed into pockets of industrial, hip hop and technoid innovation leading right up to the present day. But first, let's start at the beginning...

Public Image Ltd. Metal Box Virgin

Public Image Ltd.'s Metal Box is in essence the the Rosetta Stone of the whole endeavor, a decoder ring of sorts. When you come to terms with the record, suddenly everything else makes sense. Albatross sets the tone with a twenty ton bassline snaking its way through ten minutes of grinding, cavernous funk, followed swiftly by the spidery guitar of the filmic Memories and the return of Death Disco — the group's 12" tour de force — which gets transmuted here into Swan Lake (the guitar at one point mirrors Tchaikovsky's ballet of the same title).

Public Image Ltd.

In all three Lydon wails like a banshee, Levene splinters his guitar into jagged arcing feedback and Wobble walks his bass across the track like a brontosaurus. The story goes that the trio had been been mainlining on krautrock and Jamaican dub, and it's all in full effect here: the bass towers menacingly at center stage while the guitars often recall Michael Karoli's spidery fretwork on Tago Mago.

Like Funkadelic's The Electric Spanking Of War Babies, Metal Box appears to deconstruct itself before your eyes over the course of its hour-long running time. Tunes like Careering and The Suit are the jaded, staggering flipside to Swan Lake, while Graveyard eschews vocals altogether, staggering zombie-like through the Gothic crypt.

Socialist — another instrumental — comes on like the dub version of a straight up punk song circa 1977. Similarly, Chant is another x-ray punk endeavor — maddening in its atonal repetition and refusal to release — while No Birds is the closest thing here to PIL's First Issue and Public Image. The closing¹ Radio 4 is a drifting synth instrumental anchored only by Wobble's bassline, who also dominates the heavy dub stomp of Poptones.

Jah Wobble Betrayal Virgin

Out of the three principal malcontents in PIL, Jah Wobble spent the most sustained time in this fertile territory at the intersection of funk and dub. His solo debut Betrayal even used some backing tapes from the PIL sessions (which accordingly got him kicked out of the band) and turned in a worthy successor to Metal Box, with synths and atmospherics taking on an even wider role in the sound this time out (not to mention looser, more nimble rhythms). Blink and you'd swear the vocals in Betrayal — the track — came courtesy of Shaun Ryder! It's a promising beginning to what turned out to be a long and fruitful discography at the nexus of funk and dub.

Jah Wobble/The Edge/Holger Czukay Snake Charmer Island

Two of Wobble's subsequent records were collaborations with Can bassist Holger Czukay that perpetrated further capers in this arena, with Full Circle (also featuring Can's Jaki Liebezeit on drums) boasting the post punk dancefloor classic How Much Are They? (which eerily seems to predict the atmosphere of The Good, The Bad & The Queen record) and Snake Charmer (featuring atmospheric guitar by The Edge of U2 fame!), the latter of which takes matters strikingly close to contemporary electro boogie. And I mean running in parallel, two steps away, too close for comfort. Glenn Close, even. Hold On To Your Dreams, in particular, which features High Fashion's Marcella Allen on vocals, could slot rather comfortably into a set alongside contemporary Ashford & Simpson, Gwen Guthrie and the S.O.S. Band. Conversely, the title track's atmosphere bears an uncanny resemblance to My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, which is no small praise indeed.

Jah Wobble

These fourth world vibes turned out to be the lifeblood of the man's output for the next decade plus, where he drew influence from Jamaica, North Africa and even the Celtic music of his own British isles for a series of albums with his new band Jah Wobble's Invaders Of The Heart. This phase of his career will be covered further in the next chapter of Terminal Vibration (where we trace all these threads through the latter half of the decade into the nineties), but Wobble actually got around to issuing the Invaders Of The Heart self-titled debut 12" as early as 1983 (the year of Snake Charmer, in fact).

Jaw Wobble And The Invaders Of The Heart Invaders Of The Heart Lago

It's an utterly beguiling record — spread across three separate mixes — with Wobble's trademark wall of bass riding a motorik post-disco groove across the Sahara, as trumpet arabesques and sampled wailing vocals weave across its surface. I always loved the way that synth bass comes in at times to echo Wobble's pulsing b-line ever so often. It's all very much in keeping with the Byrne/Eno experiment, especially, but also things like Thomas Leer's 4 Movements and Tony Allen's N.E.P.A. LP. Future music, in other words. With the icon Wobble clearly having a hand on the pulse.

Material

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, another bass player was embarking on his own excursion that would carve a similar trail across the post punk landscape. I speak now of Bill Laswell. Laswell was a journeyman bassist who'd cut his teeth in various funk bands around Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan before moving to New York before hooking up with Michael Beinhorn and Fred Maher to form the initial incarnation of Material.

The trio got their unlikely start as the backing band for Daevid Allen's twilight-era New York Gong before cutting a trio of EPs for Red Records.² The band debuted in 1979 with Temporary Music 1, a dense, lo-fi slab of prog-inflected post punk that ran the gamut from On Sadism's mid-tempo punk funk to the Canterbury-esque prog moves of Process/Motion.

Material Temporary Music 1 Red

Temporary Music 2 followed a couple years later with cleaner production and a more spacious mix, boasting the motorik dancefloor moves of Secret Life and Dark Things' foggy post-Bitches Brew atmosphere. American Songs rounded out the trilogy the very same year, with tracks Ciquri — the next in their line of mid-tempo funk tracks — and Discourse, which illustrate the band's comfort with the form (which I suspect — once again — is down to the band's jazz roots). Still, the rockier Slow Murder is almost-new wave in the same way Public Image was. One suspects that they're feeling the spectre of Remain In Light-era Talking Heads throughout.

Material Memory Serves Celluloid

The band followed these EPs with two albums in quick succession: Memory Serves (1981) and One Down (1982). Memory Serves picks up the thread of rough-and-tumble post punk from the EPs, even bringing back some of the proggy/fusion-tinged flavors of Temporary Music 1. Rollicking punk funk tunes like Memory Serves and Conform To The Rhythm are accompanied by appropriately doomy vocals from Michael Beinhorn (in the former, he almost sounds like an off-the-rails Oingo Boingo-era Danny Elfman), while the abrasive Square Dance manages to surpass the atonality of even Temporary Music 1.

Material One Down Celluloid

Conversely, One Down makes an unanticipated swerve into nearly straight up electro boogie territory. Featuring vocals from the likes of Nona Hendryx (who also worked with the expanded Talking Heads during the same time period), Bernard Fowler (of the N.Y.C. Peech Boys and later Tackhead) and a pre-fame Whitney Houston (on the stately ballad Memories, also featuring Archie Shepp in an uncharacteristically gentle mood), this is very much of-the-moment, state-of-the-art boogie a la Hold On To You Dreams. With Roger Troutman-esque talk boxes dominating the Beinhorn-voiced tracks, the transition is complete. The band even turns in an excellent cover of Sly Stone's Let Me Have It All! Everything here fits squarely alongside the likes of Mtume, Kleeer and the Compass Point records.

Material Bustin' Out Celluloid

Sandwiched between both albums is the Bustin' Out, which found the band moonlighting on ZE Records and makes sense of the band's sudden shift in direction between the two LPs as they thoroughly absorb the label's mutant disco aesthetic³ for some tasty rubberband funk action. At this point, activity from Material essentially halted until the end of the decade while Laswell devoted serious time to his Orange Music studio, working on various projects for Celluloid Records like mid-eighties albums from The Last Poets and Fela Kuti (which sadly don't rival their legendary 70s output), along with the storied five rap records (to be continued).

Like Jah Wobble, Laswell's increasingly global vision continued to expand throughout the the decade, and by the nineties he was mixing up hip hop, funk, dub and African rhythms into a heady stew that were very much apace with post-Eno Ocean Of Sound vanguard. Interesting to note Laswell's presence on My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts way back in 1981, playing bass on America Is Waiting. Also interesting to note that Brian Eno returned the favor the following year, contributing to One Down's Holding On.

Once again, all these seemingly disparate figures rubbing shoulders around this time (roughly 1979-1983), figures like Brian Eno, Fela Kuti, David Byrne, The Last Poets, Afrika Bambaataa and Laswell himself, speak to not only the catholic elasticity of Celluloid's broad-minded setup but also the intoxicating spirit of cross-pollination that hangs over this era like a magenta haze.

Tackhead

As if to prove the point, the Tackhead/Fats Comet organization were beginning to gather steam just as Material went on indefinite hiatus and PIL splintered into a thousand pieces. Interesting that core members of the crew started out in the backing band for Sugar Hill Records, laying the backbone for the early rap classics that surfaced on the label during its heyday before striking out on their own as a 21st century avant funk crew upon meeting On-U Sound-man Adrian Sherwood. One can certainly hear traces of records like New York New York, Scorpio and Message II (Survival) in the DNA of the crew's twisted cyberpunk grooves.

Doug Wimbish Fats Comet Don't Forget That Beat World

Fats Comet's Don't Forget That Beat is a slap-bass fueled, funk-tinged electro workout akin to Hashim's Primrose Path — released the following year — albeit with a groove that rolls at a breakneck pace punctuated by machine gun beatboxes and freewheeling Art Of Noise-esque orchestra stabs. Conversely, Stormy Weather rocks a dynamite go-go beat while an almost-prog/fusion guitar shreds through the groove (and your eardrums), pointing the way forward to the group's next phase as Tackhead.

Mark Stewart + Maffia Learning To Cope With Cowardice On-U Sound

Tackhead found the crew on Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound and the BPMs were accordingly dialed down to an herbalist's pace, matching the post punk stomp of the Mark Stewart records they played on as The Maffia. Hard-edged downbeat slates like High Ideals And Crazy Dreams and Liberty City (both from Stewart's Jerusalem EP) glimpse a nightmarish vision of dub that prefigured what much of the best trip hop would become.⁴

Mark Stewart + Maffia Mark Stewart Mute

It all came to a head on Stewart's third, self-titled LP. Leading with the metallic Survival — where the Maffia gets to revisit their very own Rapper's Delight bassline! — a master class in pulverizing machine riddims and the inimitable wail of Mr. Stewart, it makes the flashes of cyberpunk dread hanging around this crew explicit. In fact, much of the record is built around samples and quotes from other songs — a Trouble Funk breakbeat here, some Billy Idol guitar there, and a Moroder bassline capping it all off — which puts it at the bleeding edge of sound collage right along with hip hop's burgeoning sampladelia.

Mark Stewart

It's nearly as patchwork an affair as something like Tricky's Maxinquaye (which Stewart had a crucial influence on, even producing Aftermath while mentoring young Adrian Thaws). Trip hop dress rehearsals like Forbidden Colour offer up a downbeat cover version of David Sylvian and Ryuichi Sakamoto's Forbidden Colours, while Hell Is Empty sounds like the most twisted Close The Door-era Terranova track imaginable. Stranger Than Love even put Smith & Mighty on wax for the first time when they contributed the dub version to its 12" single, making the link between post punk and trip hop Bristol explicit. In retrospect, it's rather fitting that a figure like Stewart would stand at the intersection of both eras, both scenes.

The Pop Group

Mark Stewart started out in a little crew that grew up frequenting funk nights together as youngsters — where they'd get down to the sounds of BT Express and The Fatback Band — and reggae at venues like the Bamboo Club.⁵ It only makes sense that such heady origins would be felt considerably in the band's subsequent recordings as The Pop Group. Their hard funk roots can be heard in deeply warped fashion on The Pop Group's debut LP Y (which actually preempted Metal Box by a few months) and the She Is Beyond Good And Evil, which pulses almost subconsciously on a walking bassline while the remainder of the track — especially Stewart's throat-shredding wail — seems to dissolve all around it.

The Pop Group Y Radar

Produced by Dennis "Blackbeard" Bovell, it sets into motion a particular sensibility that would become the basis for the Y Records⁶ sound: sparse instrumentation played loose in an aggressively atmospheric soundscape, captured brilliantly with Bovell spacious, three-dimensional, clear as a bell production. Bovell's skill behind the mixing desk pays immediate dividends when the band hangs a left turn into some of their more outré passages (like a vivid snapshot of chaos, where you can nevertheless clearly discern every element in the image).

Indeed, there's a considerable free jazz presence in the group's wilder, more abstract passages, which puts them to the left of even PIL. Put simply, one cannot overestimate the centrality of The Pop Group. Along with PIL's music, this is ground zero for post punk's twisted take on funk, a sound that takes you into the nineties and beyond via funk metal and myriad other sounds. In fact, Y's opening track — Thief Of Fire — even sounds like an apocalyptic precursor to The Red Hot Chili Peppers!

The Pop Group For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder Y

The Pop Group followed Y with the We Are All Prostitutes, where Mark Stewart's lyrics grow yet more didactic and political even as the band's groove settles deeper in the pocket. The group's final record, For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, was — at the album level — actually more straightforwardly funky than anything that had come before, settling into a watertight post punk boogie that nevertheless retained a healthy dose of chaos in the mix (much of it provided by the ever dependable Stewart, who — much like Iggy Pop during The Stooges era — simply won't be reigned in).

It was along these lines that the band ultimately split, with the rest of the group shearing off to form bands like Rip Rig & Panic, Pigbag, Glaxo Babies, Shriekback and Maximum Joy, while Stewart — as discussed earlier — hooked up with Adrian Sherwood's On-U Sound setup for that blistering series of records in the mid-eighties.

The Slits

On the flipside to The Pop Group coin is a band equally central to the post punk story. In many ways, The Slits were something of a sister group to The Pop Group, as both bands dropped similarly unruly, junglistic debut albums within months of each other in 1979 (both of which were produced by Dennis Bovell). Both groups shared a sense of shedding the constraints of civilization and starting from scratch — Back To Nature as Fad Gadget once opined — and in many ways their debut albums came on like field recordings of some as yet undiscovered tribe, in the way that My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Can's Ethological Forgery Series seemed to conjure up similar images.

The Slits/The Pop Group In The Beginning There Was Rhythm Y

And just as The Pop Group washed up on Y Records upon departure from Radar, The Slits put out a record on Y after leaving CBS. Appropriately enough, it was the split 7" single In The Beginning There Was Rhythm/Where There's A Will There's A Way: a head to head duel with The Pop Group.

The Slits Cut Island

The Slits' debut album Cut was an instant classic, with (once again) perfect production from Dennis Bovell. There was a heavy dub/reggae presence to the record — perhaps more so than anything else discussed today — with atmospheric reverb wrapped around the band's skeletal, turn on a dime playing. The rhythm of tunes like So Tough and Instant Hit seem to be happening on multiple plains, every note played like a phrase imbued with myriad layers of meaning.

The Slits Typical Girls Island

The extraordinary thing about The Slits is that even at their most shambolic, they manage to maintain a strong pop sensibility. I'd wager that you could give this album to any fourteen year old and chances are they'd fall in love with it. This strength was explored further on the band's excellent cover version of Motown standard I Heard It Through The Grapevine (on the b-side of the Typical Girls), which remains my absolute favorite version of the tune (just beating out the Gladys Knight & The Pips original). Built on an unlikely bed of vocal humming, it rides the trademark group's skeletal rhythms with a chanted lyric from Ari Up in one of the great not-Disco Not Disco-but-could-have-been moments in post punk.

The Slits Return of The Giant Slits CBS

Return Of The Giant Slits, the group's second and final album found Dennis Bovell behind the boards once again, this time cranking up the atmosphere to distinctly oppressive levels. Now there was a heavier worldbeat presence in evidence throughout, which found the group looking to Africa for inspiration around the same time the likes of Peter Gabriel and Brian Eno were making their own forays into the same territory. The opening song Earthbeat rides furious tribal drumming while the ladies' voices hover disembodied above the whole affair.

The remainder of the album shares more of a similarity to the debut, albeit viewed through a murky prism with heavier emphasis on sounds and textures beyond the relatively straightforward bass/guitar/drum setup of the debut. Interesting to note the presence of Neneh Cherry in the group at this point, that strange attractor of British beat music throughout much of the decade, who would go on to have a profound influence on British club music and the sound that would come to be called trip hop.

Once The Pop Group and The Slits had both disbanded, the Y Records aesthetic really begins to be forged in earnest, establishing a loosely played post punk boogie⁷ seemingly sourced in The Pop Group's tendency to operate at that thin jagged line between order and chaos. In truth, that's the only place to be, where the tension between the two is at its absolute tautest. Depending on which of the label's groups we're talking about, the emphasis falls on one side or the other. To illustrate the point, let's dive into a three-band post-Pop Group sub-section...

Maximum Joy Station M.X.J.Y. Y

Maximum Joy hold court at the less chaotic end of the spectrum, rivaling even The Slits' pop brilliance with their solitary album Station M.X.J.Y.. The crew operated very much at the axis of boogie — in the tradition of ex-punks getting down at the disco — but they managed to do it more convincingly than just about anyone else in the scene. Typically led by the sing song vocals of Janine Rainforth, the tunes would skate nimbly along loose rhythms with an abundance of bright flourishes slipping into the mix.

It's a sound that's also evidenced in 12" singles like Stretch and In The Air, records that were practically new pop even as they maintained the rude, shambolic spirit so crucial to post punk's edge. One would expect nothing less from a Y Records outfit.

Interestingly, Bristol mover and shaker Nellee Hooper started out in this crew before blazing a path through the island's hip hop scene to help define the burgeoning UK urban sound that would culminate in trip hop. At this point it makes sense to highlight the considerable lattice of connection going on here today, with the presence of Mark Stewart (as already mentioned) tied into not only Tricky but also Smith & Mighty and The Wild Bunch that would spawn Massive Attack.

You can clearly trace a straight line between late seventies Bristol and the nineties Bristol surveyed in Smith & Mighty's Bass Is Maternal, Tricky's Maxinquaye and Portishead's Dummy. Of course, I'm getting ahead of myself again; suffice it to say Station M.X.J.Y. just might be the greatest pop record on the Y imprint.

Rip Rig & Panic God Virgin

Rip, Rig & Panic, by contrast, dwell at the most chaotic end of the spectrum, conjuring a defiantly post-Miles' On The Corner racket as they worked their way through three albums in as many years (starting in 1981). The band named themselves after a Roland Kirk album from 1965, so you'd be right in expecting the heavy hand of free jazz to hang over the proceedings. Rather fittingly, Neneh Cherry was a key member of this crew upon the disintegration of The Slits. Fittingly because her step-father was the great Don Cherry, whose fourth world-preempting recordings from the Brown Rice era are very much of a piece with what her band were up to here.

Rip Rig & Panic Attitude Virgin

In fact, if you imagined a more abrasive, atonal version of Don's Hear & Now, then you wouldn't be too far off. Fascinating the way the free wing of jazz often seems to overlap with post punk sonically. Of course, the group did have the occasional almost-pop moment — tunes like Bob Hope Takes Risks and Constant Drudgery Is Harmful To Soul, Spirit & Health that seem to arrive at a post-disco boogie seemingly by accident — but their hearts quite clearly lie in the abstract. This is a tangled, untamed music that strains at the label post punk, threatening to double back and break into the seventies for proper account alongside the likes of Miles Davis, Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders.

Pigbag Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag Y

Lying somewhere between the chaos of Rip Rig & Panic and Maximum Joy's glossy sheen is the beloved Pigbag, a band that managed to blend the searing post-Miles brass of the latter with the dancefloor dexterity of the former. The band's debut single, Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag, even climbed to #3 in the UK! Rocking a frenetic post-disco rhythm replete with furious percussion and a looming bassline, the band seem to offer up a nightmare version of Madness' ska with tight-as-a-drum horn charts ruling the tune even as spectral brass creeps in and out of the mix.

Pigbag Dr. Heckle And Mr. Jive Y

Throughout the band's three year tenure — overlapping perfectly with that of Rip Rig & Panic — Pigbag managed to consistently run down some spooky voodoo on wax. Dr. Heckle And Mr. Jive — from the debut album of the same name — launched drowning arcs of eerie brass across a nagging bassline and rolling percussion, while the uptempo Getting Up placed the band's horn charts front and center over furious percussion and chicken-scratch guitar while holding down a pulsing 4/4 rhythm. Like Maximum Joy, the band can play it remarkably straight and go for the dancefloor jugular, yet at a moment's notice they can veer off into left field with dense, oppressive atmospherics that rival that of Rip Rig & Panic.

23 Skidoo The Gospel Comes To New Guinea Fetish

The final crew in the mix today is 23 Skidoo, which I've appropriately only revealed just now. While not a Y Records band, they were fellow travelers exploring a densely atmospheric fourth world vision. The band came crashing into the public consciousness with The Gospel Comes To New Guinea, a ten-minute slab of churning, murky post punk funk. Group chants and strange woodwinds fade in and out of the fog as the band seem to pound out their beat at the other end of the cave. This is 23 Skidoo clearly taking the field recording ethos of My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts to its logical conclusion.

23 Skidoo Seven Songs Fetish

The band's debut LP Seven Songs found them alternating between the droning atmospherics of New Testament and the relatively straight up funk of Vegas El Bandito, but it was the closing Quiet Pillage⁸ that pointed the way forward to the band's next obsession: Indonesian Gamelan music.⁹

23 Skidoo The Culling Is Coming Operation Twilight

The Culling Is Coming was the band's second LP, and the debut's occasional funk had given way to pure, shadowy atmosphere. The opening G-2 Contemplation launched straight into the first of the band's explorations into Gamelan music, a sound they interpret as deeply in thrall to the strange. At times reminiscent of the more nebulous portions of the Third Ear Band's Music For Macbeth, it could just as easily score the eeriest moments of Fellini's Satyricon.

Tone poems like Shrine and Mahakala are like being lost in the fog of a deserted temple, while the closing Healing (For The Strong) reveals that the temple wasn't deserted after all! In essence, the record prefigures what would come to be called dark ambient years later, about as far from the dancefloor as could be.

23 Skidoo Coup Illuminated

Which makes the about face of Coup all the more astonishing. Turning up on a non-LP 12" later that year, it was the band's greatest pop moment. After two bars of the band's crispest drum beat yet, Sketch Martin drops that bassline into the mix before horn charts sweep in to carry the melody. I say that bassline because it was later resurrected by The Chemical Brothers fifteen years later for their epochal big beat classic, Block Rockin' Beats, which came crashing into the charts in 1997. Meanwhile, the flipside's Version (In The Palace) feeds Coup through the cold machinery of dub.

23 Skidoo Urban Gamelan Illuminated

The band's final album — Urban Gamelan — featured a new version of Coup titled F.U.G.I. and a couple more moments of low slung funk, but it was mostly devoted to the band's atonal Gamelan symphonies. Like I said, the exit routes from today's music shoots you out all over the globe, and that pan-global vision was one of its greatest strengths.

23 Skidoo

In the decades to come, 23 Skidoo's music was actually rather well curated. At the turn of the century, their album were reissued on the heels of the band's self-titled reunion album just as the post punk revival was starting to gather steam. On second thought, reunion might be a bit of a misnomer. As the Just Like Everybody compilation proved, the band had been far from dormant. Rounding up two discs worth of unreleased nineties material, it showcased some of what the band had generated while loitering in dance music's shadowy back alley... the same back alley where all manner of post punk figures were lurking throughout the decade.

You see, the band played on...

LISTEN NOW

TV005 What Time Is It?

Jah Wobble/The Edge/Holger Czukay Snake Charmer Island
Brian Eno & David Byrne The Jezebel Spirit Sire
Public Image Ltd. Death Disco Virgin
The Slits Earthbeat CBS
The Pop Group Thief Of Fire Radar
Pigbag Papa's Got A Brand New Pigbag Y
Material Disappearing Celluloid
23 Skidoo Coup Illuminated
Mark Stewart + Maffia Liberty City On-U Sound
Maximum Joy Let It Take You There Y
Holger Czukay/Jah Wobble/Jaki Liebezeit Hold On To Your Dreams Island
Ashford & Simpson Babies Dub Version Capitol
Material featuring Nona Hendryx Over And Over Long Version Celluloid
Gwen Guthrie Peanut Butter Special Mix by Larry Levan Garage
Kleeer Taste The Music Atlantic
Melle Mel & Duke Bootee Message II Survival Sugar Hill
Doug Wimbish featuring Fats Comet Don't Forget That Beat World
Rip Rig & Panic Constant Drudgery Is Harmful To Soul, Spirit & Health Virgin
Holger Czukay/Jah Wobble/Jaki Liebezeit How Much Are They? Virgin
Public Image Ltd. Careering Virgin
The Pop Group She Is Beyond Good And Evil Radar
The Slits I Heard It Through The Grapevine Island

Jah Wobble/The Edge/Holger Czukay - Snake Charmer — Terminal Vibration 5: The Records

Brian Eno & David Byrne - My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts — Terminal Vibration 5: The Records

Footnotes
1.	Note that the original triple 12" record was designed to be played in any order, so the tracklist I'm using is the one delineated by the Second Edition reissue (after all, that's how I encountered this record in the first place, stateside brother that I am).
2.	These three EPs are handily compiled on the relatively easy to find Secret Life anthology.
3.	In fact, the band managed to contribute a song to all three volumes of the Disco Not Disco series, which essentially enshrined the mutant disco sound. If I'm memory serves, they were the only artist to do so.
4.	Put simply, twisted hip hop staggering down the back alley in a desperate state, its mind warped on unkind substances and unhealthy emotion. But that's another story for another series, which I'll delve into further at a later date.
5.	Reynolds, Simon. Totally Wired. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2009. 94. Print.
6.	The label — started by Disc O'Dell — that seemed to spring up around The Pop Group nexus upon their departure from Radar.
7.	Although, they did put out Sun Ra's Strange Celestial Road and Nuclear War LPs as well.
8.	Doubtless a play on Martin Denny's exotica touchstone, Quiet Village.
9.	Incidentally, a fascination shared with Claude Debussy when he crossed paths with the music nearly one-hundred years earlier.

Terminal Vibration II

Posted on January 12, 2018 @ 11:46pm by Coqui

My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts and Remain In Lights drifting through the streets — Remain In Ghosts

Two years ago I asked the question Where does machine funk intersect with post punk? It's a question I'd meant to jump into deeper at the time, but then the moment seemed to pass. I'd been toying with the notion of revisiting it recently, weaving a narrative around these two strands of music that seemed to run in tandem for much of the eighties (and beyond, truth be told).

Just the other day, my brother Matt was over and we were listening to a selection of music that in large part sprang from this continuum and he commented on the striking sonic overlap between post punk, disco and funk, that the three genres almost formed the sides of a triangle that — and I'm jumping in here — had a profound shaping influence on modern music.

Jermaine Jackson lookin' superfly in the 70s — Jermaine Jackson

The tune that instigated the comment was Jermaine Jackson's Erucu, playing out on the heels of a bunch of late-period post punk along the lines of A Certain Ratio and 23 Skidoo, but something like Barry Waite & Ltd.'s Sting or James Brown's I Can't Stand It "76" would make the case just as strongly.

That is, the stripped-down tautness of funk, aspects of disco's four to the floor minimalism and the funky edge of post punk's year zero reinvention of the rhythmic wheel (sourced in large part in the very no-nonsense funk of the seventies in question here) share a certain sonic kinship that (teasing in reggae here as well) seems to have laid out the next decade(s) in advance.

A scene of the climactic live performance from the end of the film Wild Style — Live at the Amphitheatre (from the film Wild Style)

Wheeling this back to my original comment about post punk vis a vis machine funk, what you had in the eighties was this great convergence between the two worlds, almost as if two dimensions overlapped for this blessed spell of time and characters were able to move freely between the two worlds in a great exchange of ideas. I'm talking about Bernie Worrell joining the Talking Heads on tour, Blondie's Chris Stein providing those moody dubplates for Wild Style, New Order hooking up with Arthur Baker and John Robie in New York for Confusion, and about a thousand other examples.

Hashim on the streets of New York — Hashim

Speaking of Baker/Robie (the producers of Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force's Planet Rock), the picture really falls into place when you take things like electro and early hip hop into consideration. On one hand, you have the spectral missives of Hashim (whose Primrose Path sounds like the digital cousin of 400 Blows' Declaration Of Intent, both sharing in those same slap-bass future shock vibes) and Man Parrish's Special Disconet Remix of Hip Hop, Be Bop Don't Stop.

Man Parrish Special Disconet Remixes Ram's Horn

Hip Hop, Be Bop Don't Stop, whose rubberband bassline seems to recall The Clash's The Magnificent Seven (whose bassline seems to recall Chic's Good Times (whose bassline was seemingly imitated by everybody else as well)), while on the other you have The Cold Crush Brothers' Punk Rock Rap and Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five's New York New York. All of which could theoretically soundtrack a rough-and-tumble cinematic take on William Gibson's Neuromancer. Of course, it doesn't stop there...

John Lydon wails as Keith Levene shreds guitar in the background — John Lydon & Keith Levene of Public Image Ltd.

Take Prince and his affinity with not only new wave but also PIL, whose Metal Box is one of the cornerstones of post punk; if the genre does indeed have a pantheon, then it's right in there at the top. Interestingly, along with dub and funk, PIL were deeply shaped by Can's krautrock/funk, whose Ege Bamyasi and Saw Delight slide right in this continuum without much fuss at all.¹

Brian Eno, Robert Fripp and David Bowie hanging out in the studio — Brian Eno, Robert Fripp & David Bowie in Berlin

Once krautrock enters the discussion, the elephant in the room is obviously Brian Eno, who — along with David Bowie — were one of the main conduits of the music into the post punk collective consciousness (and beyond). Indeed, Bowie jumping from the plastic soul of Young Americans into the Autobahn-surfing Europe-endlessness of Station To Station and on into the Berlin trilogy — where the aerodynamic funk of those two records gets yoked to an electronic framework that is firmly in this continuum (see Breaking Glass, Blackout and D.J. for starters).

Brian Eno and David Byrne in the studio — Brian Eno & David Byrne

And Eno of course went on to become the crucial guiding force in not only the Talking Heads' post punk trilogy (particularly Remain In Light) but also the tremendously prescient My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Both of which are defining records in this post punk/machine funk district, and lie at the heart of what I will call my idea of the eighties.

Tony Allen with Afrobeat 2000 N.E.P.A Never Expect Power Always Wrasse

You can hear the overlap between the rolling rhythms of these two strikingly modern records and — on the one hand — West African monster jams like Tony Allen's N.E.P.A (Never Expect Power Always) and — on the other hand, perhaps more unexpectedly — early rap excursions like Spoonie Gee's Spoonin' Rap, with all four records sharing that same sense of thick atmosphere rising like vapors from the twilight city streets.

We will hang out in this neighborhood for awhile, so don't go anywhere, but I must leave you for a moment to score some alcapurrias from this bodega on the corner. Chill here on this bench for awhile and listen to Remain In Light and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts back to back while watching the traffic, and I'll be back in a bit.

To be continued...

LISTEN NOW

TV002: Remain In Ghosts

James Brown I Can't Stand It "76"
A Certain Ratio Shack Up
Barry Waite & Ltd. Sting Part 1
Jermaine Jackson Erucu
Talking Heads I Zimbra
Grandmaster Caz & Chris Stein South Bronx Subway Rap
Brian Eno/DavidByrne Regiment
400 Blows Declaration Of Intent
Hashim Primrose Path
New Order Confusion Substance Version
Man Parrish Hip Hop, Be Bop Don't Stop Special Disconet Remix
Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five New York New York
Tony Allen with Afrobeat 2000 When One Road Close Another One Go Open
Talking Heads Born Under Punches The Heat Goes On
Spoonie Gee Spoonin' Rap I Don't Drink Smoke Or Gamble Neither I'm The Cold Crushing Lover
Brian Eno/DavidByrne Moonlight In Glory
David Bowie The Secret Life Of Arabia
Can Sunday Jam
Talking Heads Listening Wind
Brian Eno Energy Fools The Magician

James Brown - Hell — Terminal Vibration 2: The Records

A Certain Ratio - Shack Up — Terminal Vibration 2: The Records

Footnotes
1.	Indeed, I've always thought that the oft-derided late-period Can records like Flow Motion, Saw Delight and Can only suffer by comparison to the band's seismic earlier material; taken on their own merits, I think they stack up quite favorably as shadowy precursors to things like Fear Of Music, Remain In Light and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Just because something isn't Halleluwah doesn't mean it's worthless! So don't sleep...

Footnotes

Indeed, I've always thought that the oft-derided late-period Can records like Flow Motion, Saw Delight and Can only suffer by comparison to the band's seismic earlier material; taken on their own merits, I think they stack up quite favorably as shadowy precursors to things like Fear Of Music, Remain In Light and My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts. Just because something isn't Halleluwah doesn't mean it's worthless! So don't sleep...

The Parallax 200

Posted on January 8, 2018 @ 10:41pm by Coqui

It's been three years and three days since I first posted the original Parallax 100, and I've been wanting to delve into the next 100 for some time now. Over the course of the intervening years, I've worked up a little list that I've tweaked here and there but have somehow managed to shape into a sequence as firm as the original rough-and-tumble 100.

The rules remain the same: each of these records have had a critical, sustained impact on me beyond the rush of a great new record, are all killer front-to-back and I still listen to them all the time. Albums, EPs and singles all rub shoulders here in what is — in the spirit of the original list — a deeply personal selection from the log book of my sonic travels.

Take it as a check-it-out list from a 21st century lapsed rave-dancing chrome-plated digital soul man chilling beneath the computer blue palms of the Parallax Gardens, sipping on a glass of cognac while the soundsystem is likely pumping out any of the following sounds on any given day while the Heights does its thing all around.

Once again, each and every one of these is a stone cold killer.

And so we descend...

200. Eden Ahbez Eden's Island The Music Of An Enchanted Isle

Del-Fi 1960

Mystic exotica from the man who wrote Nat "King" Cole's Nature Boy (he once said that he "heard the tune in the mist of the California mountains"). A concept album shaped around a drifter's encounters on a mysterious island, with gently swaying rhythms cut adrift in an ocean of sound. It's tempting to think of this as one of the very first "head" elpees, arriving just in time for the new decade.

Smoldering Miami soul, like an even more lush and lived-in take on Willie Mitchell's Hi Records output (Al Green, Ann Peebles, et al.). Gwen McCrae's tough vocal presence, already in full force on this her debut LP, is one of the great treasures in soul music. The centerpiece here must surely be the lavishly glazed, smoldering sway of 90% Of Me Is You, which remains one of the great downbeat jams in seventies soul.

198. 2 Men A Drum Machine And A Trumpet Tired Of Getting Pushed Around: The Mayhem Rhythm Remix

I.R.S. 1987

Improbably early oddball house from the two Fine Young Cannibals that aren't Roland Gift. The original version comes on like prime Yello, while the remix finds Derrick May stripping the track down to its essential organ/whistle framework (while not forgetting that trumpet!) and injecting a nagging piano vamp into this stop-start motor city groove.

197. Dâm-Funk Toeachizown

Stones Throw 2009

West Coast g-funk spanning ten sides of vinyl like an endless stretch of California highway. There's an almost undisclosed amount of straight up techno running throughout, emerging in the moody surfaces of In Flight and Keep Lookin' 2 The Sky, but the heart of the record lies in the blissed out machine soul of Brookside Park and I Wanna Thank You For Steppin' Into My Life. The atmosphere takes me back to endless summer afternoons in the heat of the mid-nineties, daydreaming to similar moods and grooves for hours on end.

196. Ananda Shankar Ananda Shankar

Reprise 1970

Raga-rock hybrid, in which massed choirs, oscillating Moogs and Shankar's sitar stalk the streets of Calcutta. First, you notice the excellent (and utterly unique) covers of rock 'n roll standards Jumpin' Jack Flash and Light My Fire, but it's the haunting downcast moments like Snow Flower and Sagar The Ocean that give the record it's unfathomable depth and dimension.

195. Yoko Ono Walking On Thin Ice

Geffen 1981

Icy disco inna new wave style by Yoko Ono, from the last sessions John Lennon ever played on (he was holding these tapes when he was shot). The surreal mood seems to predict both Yello's most atmospheric sides and David Lynch's later cinematic adventures, but Lennon's violent rubberband guitar solo still sounds wholly alien. It's all thoroughly in the tradition of the Plastic Ono Band records, with It Happened and Hard Times Are Over both incredibly moving expressions of a woman coming to terms with devastating loss and vowing to soldier on no matter what the future holds.

194. Nat King Cole and His Trio After Midnight

Capitol 1956

Well into his late-period career as a baroque pop crooner, Nat King Cole reunites with his original trio for some cool jazz action in a dream after-hours jam session. The group work their way through standards like It's Only A Paper Moon and a killer rendition of Duke Ellington's Caravan, while revisiting Get Your Kicks On Route 66 and even cutting the opening song from Tin Men (Sweet Lorraine).

193. Docteur Nico & L'Orchestre African Fiesta L'Afrique Danse No. 8

African 1969

The birth of soukous, the Congo's beloved post-rumba musical export. In L'Orchestra African Fiesta (the group Docteur Nico formed with Tabu Ley Rochereau), his finger-picking style came to define the sound of the genre. This record the eighth entry in an flurry of LPs that emerged in the late sixties to chronicle contemporary Congolese music, three of which were devoted to Nico and remain the easiest way to get ahold of the man's music. The whole set should be reissued — in a spirit similar to the William Onyeabor box set put out by Luaka Bop a few years back — with gorgeous sleeve art intact.

192. Augustus Pablo East Of The River Nile

Yard 1971

Instrumental reggae 7" crafted by man from the East Herman Chin-Loy around the singular Melodica stylings of Augustus Pablo. Its smeared exotica stylings and off-kilter skank always make me think of The Man Who Would Be King and Michael Caine and Sean Connery's long journey through the Khyber Pass and beyond.

191. Gilberto Gil & Jorge Ben Ogum Xangô

Verve 1975

Unfettered head to head guitar duel between two luminaries of MPB, wherein loose strings are bent into soaring fractals as guitars tango like clockwork in the sunset. Transcending even their most stellar individual work, the duo flutter between the lush calm of Nega and the wild careening frenzy of Taj Mahal. The fact that the vocals seem almost improvised, an afterthought even, only adds to the charm of this loose, freewheeling double-album.

190. Mantronix Scream

Sleeping Bag 1987

Electronic hip hop epic in widescreen. MC Tee's trademark rapid-fire raps hit hard before flipping into sing-song mode for the chorus, all of it backed by impressively futuristic production from Kurtis Mantronik. You also get an extended mix thrown into the bargain, along with a dub version — which might be the man's absolute finest — in which the track's filmic descending spiral gets chopped into strange shapes before shocking you with a cyborg rap in the climax.

189. DJ Rashad Double Cup

Hyperdub 2013

Chicago juke. I first crossed paths with Rashad's music via DJ Godfather's Twilight 76 and Juke Trax labels (this within the context of Detroit ghetto tech electro) back when I was living at the 1808, and I've kept an ear tuned in ever since. I was pleasantly surprised when he hooked up with Hyperdub a couple years back for both the Rollin' EP and this record, a true masterwork. Hypnotic synths soar over a bed of furious drum programming throughout, as slow-motion raps and bottomless bass twist and turn within. The man was a virtuoso and his music still sounds like the future.

188. Grachan Moncur III New Africa

BYG 1969

Grachan Moncur's great galleon of soul-inflected free jazz, coming out of left field on the storied BYG imprint (arguably the genre's spiritual home). Moncur's trombone flourishes glide gracefully over the loose, swinging rhythms of Andrew Cyrille and Alan Silva's wide open double bass as he trades lines with the likes of Roscoe Mitchell and Archie Shepp. It's the sound of wide-open spaces and crystal clear skies, full of freedom and possibility.

187. The Rolling Stones Exile On Main St.

Rolling Stones 1972

Stranded in the south of France, The Rolling Stones lose themselves in the basement studio at Nellcôte and manage to wring magic from the whole affair. Careening from the dirty barroom rock of Rip This Joint into the raw Clavinet funk of Ventilator Blues and spending a satisfying amount of time with Gram Parsons-inspired country rock numbers, this band of dandy rogues turn out a ramshackle masterpiece that manages to capture the very essence of rock 'n roll.

186. A.R. Kane When You're Sad

One Little Indian 1986

Sun-warped post-Beach Boys blues. When You're Sad is a joyously aching teenage daydream with Alex and Rudi's gently soaring harmonies drenched in wild-eyed feedback. Meanwhile, the b-side's Haunting offers up an unresolved slab of guitar melancholy that seems to lay the blueprint for the whole shoegaze endeavor and by extension predicts the sound of nineties indie rock about four years ahead of schedule.

185. Joni Mitchell Song To A Seagull

Reprise 1968

The birth of canyon folk, featuring songwriter Joni Mitchell front and center with virtuoso fretwork and that voice. In a bold move, Mitchell decided to rely entirely on new material rather than fall back on songs that she'd already provided to other artists (as was common practice for singer-songwriter albums at the time). The results are stunning, with a rich thematic continuity running through the record even as individual songs like Marcie and Cactus Tree glisten like gems in their own right, epitomizing everything that makes Mitchell's music such a treasure.

184. Burning Spear Burning Spear

Studio One 1973

The Burning Spear's debut album, full of deeply spiritual roots music. Bottomless bass and rock hard riddims play out in stately slow-motion while Winston Rodney's haunting vocals hover above it all like a ghostly mirage. Songs like Ethiopians Live It Out and Fire Down Below ride tough rocksteady beats into the sunset, while the deeply moving Creation Rebel and Down By The Riverside are among some of the most gorgeous roots music you'll ever hear.

183. Funkadelic The Electric Spanking Of War Babies

Warner Bros. 1981

The final Funkadelic record, where all previous electrofunk innovations are taken to their illogical conclusion. P-funk's engine is deconstructed, the parts spread out across the floor of a Detroit garage while the band methodically rebuilds them into freaky malfunktioning warped machines. The deliciously bizarre Funk Gets Stronger (featuring Sly Stone), seems to rev its engine only to reel it back down again in a nagging stop/start groove, while the title track re-routes their early guitar freakouts through the new wave hall of mirrors before wiring it all up for the next decade's dancefloors.

182. René Et Gaston Spectacle De Foire

Fresh Fruit 1994

Dutch techno par excellence from the inimitable Dobre and Jamez, in one of their myriad guises (Jark Prongo, Klatsch!, Tata Box Inhibitors, Chocolate Puma, etc. etc. etc.). The carnivalesque wild ride of Spectacle De Foire is undoubtedly the centerpiece here, but the Moroder-inflected digital disco pulse of Houp! seems to contain the germ of house music's next ten years in its gloriously geometric groove.

181. Cheb Khaled Hada Raykoum

Triple Earth 1985

Algerian raï from a true pioneer of the form. Cheb Khaled plays the cosmopolitan desert mystic, singing his winding, hypnotic chansons over sun-glazed synths and spidery machine rhythms in a stunning roots 'n future mash up that defies its period of origin with striking clarity. He'd go on to international stardom and eventual political exile in France, but this record — released smack in the middle of the eighties — remains Khaled's crowning achievement.

180. Public Image Ltd. Metal Box

Virgin 1979

Pre-eminent post punk malcontents lose themselves in the studio, intoxicated by the twin experimentations of krautrock and dub, in the process deconstructing the album format into three 12" singles packaged in a metal reel-to-reel film cannister. The ten-minute Albatross creeps out the soundsystem like a ghostly steamroller, Jah Wobble's ten-ton bass kicking you in the chest, while Keith Levene's searing guitar shoots sparks across its surface and John Lydon wails deep into the abyss. And that's just the first side...

179. Areski & Brigitte Fontaine L'incendie

BYG 1971

Iconoclastic chanteuse Brigitte Fontaine blends sophisticated songcraft with Areski's droning inflections (inspired by music of the Algerian musicians that he grew up around) in a haunting set of skewed chansons. Les Borgias and Ragilia are shot through with a distinct North African inflection, while Il Pleut Sur La Gare and L'abeille come on like Medieval folk ballads. The duo also touch on their jazz roots in Déclaration De Sinistre and venture into acid folk with L'engourdie, a gently psychedelic reverie. Indispensable.

Brittle art techno masterpiece. BDP's deep space sonics remain in full effect throughout this sprawling set of electronic head music, touching on everything from skittering techno to ambient house and the abstract hip hop that had informed their music since day one when they first set to work cloistered in the mystery of Black Dog Towers. The esoteric current running through the trio's work — that ancient quality haunting the music's shadows even as they pushed headlong into the future — inhabits every corner of this record and sounds like the soundtrack to some secret society in lunar orbit.

177. Mýa Sisqó of Dru Hill It's All About Me

Interscope 1998

Siren song in 3D. Sumptuously produced headphone r&b laid down by Da Bassment cohort Darryl Pearson and masterfully inhabited by star-in-the-making Mýa. From that period when a slowjam would casually sound like a UFO landing in your backyard. Every element, from the crisp beats to the blurred instrumentation and of course Mýa's wistful multi-tracked harmonies, is meticulously placed and blissful to the ear.

Lazing Texas rap from Devin The Dude, featuring guest appearances from the likes of Scarface, Spice 1 and the rest of his old crew, the Odd Squad. It's a supremely lush and mellow LP, to my mind surpassing even the excellent Fadanuf Fa Erybody as the finest full-length on Rap-A-Lot. A laidback, homegrown live sound prevails throughout, with deep blunted bass, smooth guitar runs, synth strings and dusted bleeps enveloping Devin's loose-limbed raps like a twilight mist.

175. Derrick Harriott Whip It

Hawkeye 1983

Discomix reggae cover version of the Dazz Band's immortal Let It Whip, self-produced by the great Derrick Harriott, which somehow manages to surpass the sterling original. The version on the flip is reworked by Paul "Groucho" Smyke, who also dubbed King Sunny Adé's Ja Funmi into oblivion around the same time. The sumptuously pulsing bassline quickly grows hypnotic as myriad shards of sound reverberate across the soundscape, marking this out as the neon-bathed cousin to the x-ray dubs of Lloyd Barnes on Horace Andy's Dance Hall Style.

174. Johnny Hammond Gears

Milestone 1975

Definitive jazz funk produced by the Mizell Brothers during their blazing arc of seventies studio excursions. This one is without a doubt my favorite, featuring veteran key master Johnny Hammond tinkling the Rhodes over rock hard rhythms and soaring ARPs while that odd spectral chorus weaves its way in and out of the ether. The sound of the city.

173. Jonny L Hurt You So Alright

Tuch Wood 1992

Candy-coated ardkore from the man with the golden haircut, recorded well before he turned to the darkside and pounded the jungle scene into submission with his techstep brethren. The Full Mix rides tumbling breakbeats into the trancelike bridge before collapsing into a blissed out lovers rock chorus, while The L Mix brings hard-edged hoover stabs into the equation before exploding into the ecstatic piano-led climax.

172. The Beach Boys Sunflower

Brother 1970

My absolute favorite era of The Beach Boys is the six year period spanning between Smiley Smile and Holland. There's a strange charm and paradoxical rough-hewn smoothness to the sound that seems of a piece with both Lee "Scratch" Perry's sun-glazed productions at the Black Ark and latterly The Beta Band's oeuvre. The only trouble is, most of these albums are fairly patchy (thanks Mike Love). The one exception is Sunflower, in which Dennis Wilson emerges a master songwriter in his own right, kicking off the whole affair with Slip On Through's insouciant counter-clockwise groove and striking yet again with the immortal ballad Forever. Brian Wilson's presence remains in full force as well, lending his touch to the gorgeous sunstruck reverie Dierdre (co-written with Bruce Johnston), All I Wanna Do's ethereal drift and the ambient surf music of Cool, Cool Water.

Cheo Feliciano cut his teeth in legendary groups like Tito Rodriguez's Orchestra, the Joe Cuba Sextet and the Eddie Palmieri Orchestra before gradually descending into drug addiction and bad times. After a stretch of rough years and hard miles, Cheo kicks heroin for good and finally makes his record. A delicately crafted masterstroke, it finds him confidently working through a peerless set of Tite Curet Alonso songs like Mi Triste Problema and Poema De Otoño with unmatched depth and splendor.

Nocturnal electronic jazz from Detroit whiz kid Matt Chicoine. Standing outside the boundaries of any one scene or genre, he unfurled a number of exquisite delights on an unsuspecting public at the turn of the century, none better than this astonishing five track EP. Kicking off with the oddball deep house of Soul Clap 2000 before launching into Get There Tonight's off-kilter boogie and the bebop stomp of Landscaping, it's not long before he's easing into the half-lit downbeat moves of Insomnia In Dub and Four Ways Of Saying Goodbye's multi-part jazz funk excursion. A crucial record for me at the time, it's stayed with me ever since.

169. Blue Orchids The Greatest Hit: Money Mountain

Rough Trade 1982

An utterly out of time acid-soaked masterpiece, existing in the netherworld between post punk and a living, breathing psychedelia. The Blue Orchids splintered off from the mighty Fall, and in the process stretched that band's speedfreak intensity out into a wild, pantheistic celebration of the great outdoors. Una Baines' ghostly keyboard mirages are the crucial factor in these eerie, widescreen sonic tapestries. The mood here curiously similar to On The Silver Globe, and I've often thought that this album could soundtrack the haunting ritual beach scenes from the first half of the film.

168. The Mover Frontal Sickness

Planet Core Productions 1991/1992/1993

The soundtrack to your nightmares. Mark Arcadipane — the man behind The Mover — wrote the blueprint for rave hardcore with Mescalinum United's We Have Arrived and a sequence of uncompromisingly bleak 12"s that surfaced on his Planet Core Productions (yeah... PCP) imprint. This double-pack combines both volumes of the Frontal Sickness EPs into one blazing package of sonic extremism, ground zero for the zombie sound that would come to be called gloomcore.

167. Skip James The Complete 1931 Session

Yazoo 1931/1986

Stone cold blues from the Mississippi Delta. Skip James' music remains deeply unconventional, full of shadow and mystery, marking it out as utterly unique even within the rich terrain of early blues recordings. Still, there's quite a bit of weary joy to be found hidden within this record's grooves, even if only in the promise of salvation after a lifetime of hardship and tragedy. Hope against hope, in other words.

Cymande — featuring musicians from Guyana, Jamaica and Saint Vincent — are the sort of group that could have only formed in a town like London. Merging Jamaican Nyabinghi rhythms (the bedrock on which reggae was formed) and American funk, the crew forged a wholly unique sound that on first listen seems almost too good to be true. The glorious rock hard beat of Bra rubs shoulders here with gentle moments like Listen and the slow-burning groove of Getting It Back, while the eleven-minute Dove finds the group stretching out into a rolling longform jam. There ought to be a copy in every home.

165. Ramsey & Fen Lynsey Moore Love Bug

Bug 1998

A particularly elegant slice of slinky UK garage, Love Bug's bionic two-step groove seems to expand on both the liquid garage sound of Roy Davis Jr. and Timbaland's android r&b. Diva Lynsey Moore's vocals get chopped and twisted through the tune's very fabric, in which every piece clicks like percussion in the clockwork machinery of this sultry digital juke joint jam.

164. Talking Heads Remain In Light

Sire 1980

Uptight New Yorkers cut loose in widescreen, stretching the impenetrable atmosphere of Fear Of Music to its outer limits as they mainline on African rhythms and the information overload of modern America. Each track is a dense web of sound spun from layers of throbbing bass, drifting synths, strange guitars and those rolling, polyrhythmic beats. Hard to believe the album predates the sampler, so intricate is its multifaceted construction. Indeed, you can hear the germ of nineties music (and beyond) buried deep within these unfurling, technicolor grooves... it sounds a lot like a blueprint for the future.

163. Tony Allen with Afrobeat 2000 N.E.P.A: Never Expect Power Always

Wrasse 1984

Eighties electro-afrobeat monster jam, with Fela Kuti's right-hand man in the driver seat, rocking the drum kit with singular style and finesse. N.E.P.A comes on like one massive arcing groove stretched over two sides of vinyl, each housing a song in two versions (with both an original and a dub) that probe different aspects of the same central theme. Sounding a lot like a pirate radio transmission from the distant future, this is the original groove that won't stop.

162. Prince Jammy Computerised Dub

Greensleeves 1986

Digital dancehall! This the instrumental companion piece to Wayne Smith's epochal Sleng Teng LP, produced by Prince Jammy, which famously brought reggae into the computer age. Taking Sleng Teng's brittle electronic rhythms into the spacious realm of dub, these tracks embody a sort of machine perfection that one usually expects from places like Cologne or Detroit, but slackened and smoked out with a singular Jamaican flavor.

161. The Three Degrees The Three Degrees

Philadelphia International 1973

The Three Degrees hook up with Philadelphia International after their appearance in The French Connection, resulting in a vocal masterpiece of lush Philly soul. The ladies' breathless harmonies deftly swoop and glide through the gossamer orchestration of Gamble & Huff's Sigma Sound, their exquisite production ringing clear as a bell. You can hear disco's wings begin to spread in the driving pulse of Dirty Old Man, while in If And When's epic balladry and the swirling A Woman Needs A Good Man their pathos is undeniable. You also get When Will I See You Again, quite simply one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

A joyful hip hop symphony composed by the late great J Dilla just before his untimely departure from planet Earth. Slicing and dicing all manner of loops and breaks from his seemingly bottomless crates of arcane records and reconstructing them into rock hard beats and interlocking movements, he created his unassailable masterpiece: a boundless, wildly shifting song cycle that feels like a glorious tribute to life itself.

159. Basic Channel Quadrant Dub

Basic Channel 1994

Dub techno par excellence. As difficult as it is to narrow it down to just one record from the dynamic duo of Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald, for me Quadrant Dub just edges out Lyot Rmx for the #1 spot. Its two elongated tracks — spanning one to each side — last the better part of forty minutes, dubbing Round One's soul-inflected I'm Your Brother deeper and deeper into shimmering cascades of four-dimensional sound. Over twenty years later, it still sounds like the future.

158. Can Ege Bamyasi

United Artists 1972

In a further elaboration on the towering eighteen minutes of Tago Mago's Halleluwah, Can submerge their mercurial kraut-funk deep into the swampy voodoo of their Inner Space studio and surface with a spooked out set of seven songs teeming with otherworldly atmosphere. The proto-world music of Spoon sets a rhythm box against a gently swaying, lopsided rhythm, while I'm So Green showcases the group's pop sensibilities at their absolute finest. The spectral tango of One More Night even points the way toward Future Days and beyond.

Offbeat slacker blues debut from the great Okie troubadour, this one goes down like the smoothest bourbon at sunset. Containing the original, superior versions of After Midnight and Call Me The Breeze, it's a veritable treasure trove of exquisite songwriting. That crawling rhythm box is a particularly far-sighted touch, putting Cale in shared company with Kraftwerk and Sly Stone as the first artists to put electronic rhythms on record. In the context of the hazy dreamtime sparkle of songs like River Runs Deep and Crying Eyes, it's almost as if they're springing naturally from the surrounding terrain itself. A casual masterpiece.

156. Colourbox Lorita Grahame Baby I Love You So

Virgin 1986

The a-side cover version of Jacob Miller's Augustus Pablo-helmed lovers rock standard is a post punk proto-trip hop masterpiece, submerging Lorita Grahame's torch song vocals within a murky stew of towering bass, metallic percussion and film samples from John Carpenter's Escape From New York. The flipside's Looks Like We're Shy One Horse, meanwhile, mines Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West over an apocalyptic groove skanking endless into some dystopian horizon as a blood red sun sets in the distance.

155. Brian Eno/David Byrne My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts

Sire 1981

Remain In Light's (edgier, younger and slightly mad) sister record takes its forward-thinking fourth world moves further yet into proto-sampladelia and the avant-garde. Side one is stuffed with non-stop crazy rhythms: The Jezebel Spirit is a left field disco staple for good reason, spooling an actual on-air exorcism out over a frenetic rhythm matrix, while Regiment's stone cold funk is something like the interzone flipside of Once In A Lifetime. Side two stretches out into pure atmosphere, its individual tracks seeming to materialize from the shadows before drifting off again into the night, spectral and sublime.

154. Mr. Fingers Ammnesia

Jack Trax 1988

A quasi-compilation pulling together a whole raft of choice instrumentals from contemporary 12"s and unreleased material, this record offers a stunning glimpse into the mind of Larry Heard. Bookended by the genre-defining Can You Feel It — the song that took Europe by storm during the Second Summer Of Love — and Mystery Of Love (which has the distinction of being Larry Levan's favorite song of all time), the record also ventures into the deep space ambient house magic of Stars, Bye Bye's sleek electronic soul and the proto-acid madness of Washing Machine. Crucial in every respect.

153. Duke Ellington And His Orchestra Ellington Indigos

Columbia 1958

Exceptionally lush and melancholy jazz for big band, orchestrated and conducted by the late great Duke Ellington. Moody and spacious, the record evokes lonely nights, long moonlit walks and downbeat solo blues. Melancholy meditations like Solitude and Willow Weep For Me are swathed in layers of sumptuous atmosphere, while wistful reveries like The Sky Fell Down and Prelude To A Kiss overflow with the promise of romance. There's even a solitary vocal showcase in Autumn Leaves, featuring the vocals of Ozzie Bailey intertwined with Ray Nance's weeping violin, a haunting duet in a lonely place.

152. Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson Bridges

Arista 1977

Steeped in nuclear dread, economic uncertainty and post-Watergate blues, Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson casually laid down the definitive late-seventies soul album. I was turned onto this record by Moodymann's set at the first DEMF, which he opened with We Almost Lost Detroit (a rumination on the meltdown at Three Mile Island). I was blown away and simply had to track down the album, which includes songs ranging from Under The Hammer's synth-smeared funk to the downbeat blues of Delta Man and everything in between, each of them rising slowly from languid pools of soul.

151. Mobb Deep Shook Ones Part II

Loud 1995

The definitive statement in bleak mid-nineties hip hop, that era when the RZA's sphere of influence seemed to spread across the entirety of the genre. Showcasing the peerless words and sonix of Prodigy and Havoc, the loping unresolved piano figure of the epochal Shook Ones Part II is matched here by the more elusive first part, sounding like something that sprang from the same New York shadows that Terranova was just beginning to essay from across the Atlantic. You ain't a crook, son... you just a shook one.

150. David Bowie Station To Station

RCA Victor 1976

The return of the Thin White Duke, throwing darts in lovers' eyes, sings Bowie as the record opens, setting the stage for his transition from plastic soul crooner to fearless sonic trailblazer. Using his recent forays into Philly Soul as a jumping off point into churning proto-disco rhythms — shot through with the motorik drive of German groups like Neu! and his avowed love of Kraftwerk — he kicks off with the ten-minute multi-part rush of the title track and closes with a heartbreaking rendition of Wild Is The Wind, touching on everything from the insouciant funk of Golden Years to TVC 15's robotic pop in between.

I'm a huge fan of Santana's music throughout the seventies, all of those excursions into space rock and interstellar jazz, but the raw frenzy of the debut remains my absolute favorite. This is where it all began, with the same band that rocked Woodstock within days of this record's release. Songs like Soul Sacrifice and the cover version of Babatunde Olatunji's Jingo are masterful in their building tension and release, while Evil Ways remains one of the great jukebox tunes of all time. If you dig the sound of the Hammond B3, then you need to get down with this record..

148. Janet Jackson The Velvet Rope

Virgin 1997

This is where Janet goes deep. There's a breadth and depth to this record that one usually expects to find in an Erykah Badu or Moodymann LP — you can really get lost in this record's grooves — but it's really just a logical progression of everything she'd been up to since the days of Control. Jam & Lewis square their production finesse in the age of Timbaland and — with the help of Q-Tip and a young J Dilla — unfurl a set of tracks that are both state-of-the-art yet at the same time imbued with the timeless gravity of 70s soul, remaining right at home in the present all along.

147. Robert Owens I'll Be Your Friend

Big Bubbles 1991

Released hot on the heels of his excellent Visions LP, this is my absolute favorite moment from Robert Owens (the voice of house music). Teaming with master producer David Morales and Satoshi Tomiie on keys, this seems to be an attempt to recreate the dynamic of their epochal Tears (masterminded by one Frankie Knuckles) in sprawling widescreen. The Original Def Mix is a moody dancefloor burner of the highest caliber, but The Glamorous Mix takes it to another level altogether, where driving strings and organ runs are woven into an echoic epic over which Owens' voice soars.

146. Wiley Treddin' On Thin Ice

XL 2004

Grime taken out to die in the frozen wastelands. Crafting a surprisingly varied landscape within this icy realm, Wiley roams between the crystalline garage moves of Doorway and the bleak tundra vision of the title track, essaying the almost straight up hip hop shapes of opener The Game and the shimmering r&b inflections of Special Girl along the way. I've always preferred Thin Ice to Dizzee Rascal's Boy In Da Corner, which is the classic grime LP by critical consensus (and a classic it is), but this ploughs a deeper furrow and remains my absolute favorite grime record.

Neon-lit bedroom funk from Miles alumni James Mtume, taking seventies cosmic jazz into the computer age. This is without a doubt the greatest electro boogie LP of them all, boasting computer blue dancefloor burners like Green Light and Your Love's Too Good To Spread Around, while both mixes of Juicy Fruit remain twin pillars of atmospheric machine soul and a font of inspiration for so much music (from Dâm-Funk and SA-RA to Timbaland and The Neptunes) that I hold dear.

144. Yusef Lateef Eastern Sounds

Prestige 1961

When weaving this record's captivating pan-global menagerie of sound, Yusef Lateef looked East for inspiration, predating just about everyone — from The Beatles to John Coltrane and even Sun Ra — in his exploration of the wider world's sonic shades and timbres. The Plum Blossom employs Chinese globular flute in it's off-kilter shuffle, while Three Faces Of Balal features a notably stripped-down exercise in rhythm. Rudy Van Gelder's peerless production imbues these sonic excursions with an almost exotica-esque sense of space, remarkable within the context of contemporary jazz.

143. Tony! Toni! Toné! Sons Of Soul

Motown 1993

The There's A Riot Going On of swingbeat, Sons Of Soul is a lushly multi-textured record that makes for a dense, absorbing listen. Some strange turns are taken in the shifting corridors of this record's jazzed-out r&b (see the almost subconscious funk of Tonyies! In The Wrong Key), even shading into the epic with the closing ten minutes of the Anniversary/Castleers suite. I can't think of many records that I get as much pleasure listening to, regardless of the mood I'm in (indeed, Fun may be the most honest song title you'll ever come across).

142. The Future Sound Of London Accelerator

Jumpin' & Pumpin' 1991

FSOL's sterling debut, featuring ten tracks of brilliantly vivid, four-dimensional breakbeat techno. A brace of tunes from the Pulse EPs get paired with new material like Expander and the epochal Papua New Guinea, rounding out a deft song cycle shot through with unmistakable cyberpunk vibes. From Buggy G. Riphead's striking sleeve art to the paranoid interludes and Central Industrial's slow-motion widescreen cascade, the whole thing conjures up imagery of Neuromancer, Blade Runner and Cabaret Voltaire in its long flowing corridors of Chiba City blues.

141. Forrrce Keep On Dancin'

West End 1982

Exceedingly warped, fathoms deep disco on the legendary West End imprint. Forrrce unleash a proto-rap party jam with an unforgettable whiplash bassline tearing through its very fabric, while François Kevorkian works his inimitable magic on the flip, stripping the track down to its frame and rebuilding it like a ramshackle mine cart before running it off the rails through the illogical machinery of Jamaican dub.

140. The Upsetters Return Of The Super Ape

Upsetter 1977

Weird reggae forged by its greatest band and produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry at the peak of his powers. The title track is one of the finest dub outings ever, running down a languid skank before collapsing into a rock-hard slow-motion climax, while the Tell Me Something Good cover version blows away everyone I've ever shown it to. Throughout, Scratch coaxes the swirling sounds of the Black Ark into a singular negotiation of reggae roots and the deepest chasms of futuristic dub.

139. The D.O.C. No One Can Do It Better

Ruthless 1989

Of all the records to spring from N.W.A.'s axis, this is hands down my favorite. A dense, varied record, full of twists and turns like the liquid funk of the title track and the skittering fast-forward groove of Portrait Of A Masterpiece, it even features the entirety of N.W.A. on The Grand Finalé. Dr. Dre's ace production splits the difference between the hard edges of Straight Outta Compton and the nimble funk of Efil4zaggin, while The D.O.C. out-raps everybody else in the crew. No One Can Do It Better indeed.

138. David Crosby If Only I Could Remember My Name

Atlantic 1971

Cosmic canyon folk from ex-Byrd and CSN main man David Crosby, recorded in San Francisco and featuring local luminaries like Grace Slick and Jerry Garcia (along with further members of Jefferson Airplane, Santana and The Grateful Dead) and a few L.A. colleagues for good measure (including Neil Young and Joni Mitchell). This ad-hoc supergroup shines in Cowboy Movie's low-slung, eight-minute canyon funk jam (a chronicle of CSNY's dissolution as seen through the prism of The Wild Bunch) and the murky tumble of What Are Their Names' abstract, blazing protest, while gentle, otherworldly moments like Traction In The Rain and Orleans quietly steal the show with a shimmering magic all their own.

137. Television Marquee Moon

Elektra 1977

Sparkling proto-new wave from a four piece group of hard-dreaming CBGB luminaries. Picking up where West Coast acid rockers like The Byrds and Jefferson Airplane left off, Television reshape yesterday's wild psychedelia into a contemplative sonic menagerie — with just a hint of punk attitude — that ushered in a whole new era for rock.

136. Popol Vuh Einsjäger & Siebenjäger

Kosmische Musik 1974

Pastoral Krautrock from a large, shifting group of musicians centering around the vision of Florian Fricke. Gentle instrumental sketches like Kleiner Krieger and Morgengruß set the stage, gradually giving way to the title track's lush, multi-part longform jam — featuring the ethereal vocals of Djong Yun — that dominates the entirety of side two. The common thread running throughout is a bucolic sense of tranquility and near-telepathic interplay between the musicians.

135. Underworld Dubnobasswithmyheadman

Junior Boy's Own 1994

Two holdovers from eighties new wave are joined by younger techno DJ Darren Emerson and dive headfirst into dance music, sculpting a moody masterpiece of electronic noir. Karl Hyde's rock dynamics are crucial to the record's singular tone, with the overcast alternative rock stylings of Tongue and Dirty Epic's subterranean guitar moves utterly unique within the context of nineties dance. This is "binary skyline" music, to borrow a phrase from Snakes, shimmering on a cloudy horizon.

134. Wally Badarou Chief Inspector

4th & Broadway 1985

Twelve-inch post-disco dancefloor action from synth wizard Wally Badarou, lifted from his excellent Echoes LP of the same year (recorded at Compass Point Studios in Nassau). The Vine Street mix by Paul "Groucho" Smykle is the absolute best version of Chief Inspector (and it can only be found here!), gliding along with percussion inspired by D.C. go-go and slipping into a zero gravity moonwalk for its dreamlike refrain. Tying together strands stretching from disco to post punk, dub to hip hop and even the nascent house music, Badarou winds up with an eerily prescient hallucination of the next twenty years of club music.

133. Terry Riley A Rainbow In Curved Air

Columbia Masterworks 1969

Late sixties minimalism from one of the prime architects of the form. Absorbing the hypnotic electric pulse of Indian classical music as a prime influence, Riley treats the organ as a proto-synthesizer and plays every note by hand, becoming the human sequencer as he multi-tracks myriad layers of keyboards, harpsichord, tambourine and goblet drum into a cycling electronic ballet on the sidelong title track. The flipside's marathon workout, Poppy Nogood And The Phantom Band, trades kinetic flow for gently droning arcs, with Riley's improvised saxophone dancing across its surface.

132. Jefferson Airplane Mexico/Have You Seen The Saucers

RCA Victor 1970

Jefferson Airplane are the embodiment of radical sixties counterculture's interface with rock and are the obvious precursor to seventies German groups like Amon Düül II (the commune that coalesced into a band) and Ash Ra Tempel. This 7" single stands as their greatest merger of righteous joy and anger into a triumphant firebrand vision of acid rock, continuing the everyone sing at once (preferably in a different key) and let the chips fall where they may late-period sloppy proto-punk vocal style that they'd pursued since Volunteers. Mexico, possibly the greatest song about smuggling marijuana into the country, expands on the spirit of songs like We Could Live Together, while Have You Seen The Saucers is quintessential West Coast space rock, setting the stage for Paul Kantner's Jefferson Starship and Blows Against The Empire.

131. Japan Adolescent Sex

Ariola Hansa 1978

Sleazy new wave glam rock, where punk meets disco in the red light district. You can see where Duran Duran got most of their ideas (executing the whole Sex Pistols meets Chic equation years before it had even occurred to Nick Rhodes and Simon Le Bon), and I've often thought that you can hear a bit of Royal Scam-era Steely Dan in the jazz-tinged grooves of Wish You Were Black and Television. An utterly original sound in evidence throughout, this record deserves to be be more widely heard (and imitated).

130. Dillinja The Angels Fell

Metalheadz 1995

Cyberpunk jungle. Taking in the sonic skyline of Vangelis' Blade Runner Blues and sampling a snatch of Roy Batty's "tears in the rain" speech from the film's conclusion, Dillinja runs riot with his trademark depth charge bass bombs and speaker-shredding breaks to create one of jungle's all-time greatest rollers. The two tracks on the flip pursue the same path of shape-shifting, aerodynamic drum 'n bass intensity, rounding out a three-track set of superbly engineered breakbeat noir.

129. Black Sabbath Black Sabbath U.S. Version

Warner Bros. 1970

Led Zeppelin and Blue Cheer may have gestured ominously in the general direction, but this monolithic, towering LP was the de facto birth of heavy metal. Slowing hard rock down to a robe-shrouded crawl, Black Sabbath injected a blood-soaked sense of the occult into their music while everybody ran for cover. A key outpost in rock's grappling with James Brown's elegant, funky beats inna caveman stylee, this stone tablet is cherished by rock, rave and hip hop heads alike (just ask Ice-T and Joey Beltram). Containing five ruminations on slow-motion fury, for me the debut remains their finest hour.

128. Ambassadeur International Mandjou

Badmos 1979

Mande music snaking its way through the desert sands of Mali, cooked up by the region's finest band and fronted by the inimitable Salif Keita, whose piercing wail cuts through the dense instrumentation like a knife. The towering title track rocks a dusty downbeat rhythm before breaking into a double-time frenzy in its coda, while Kandja refracts Caribbean music back across the Atlantic in mutant form. Balla closes the record on a gentle organ-led shuffle (think Booker T. & The M.G.'s), with a vibrant repartee between the band as they ride off into the sunset together.

127. The Cosmic Jokers The Cosmic Jokers

Kosmische Musik 1974

Endless cosmic jam by an ad-hoc supergroup of Krautrock luminaries, the results edited down into a series of five spaced-out kosmische LPs (of which this is the first) by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser without the knowledge of the band. This is true outer space/inner space music, with one extended track sprawling across each side. The opening Galactic Joke is a pulsing excursion into deep sonar architecture — its guitars arcing gracefully into oblivion — while the flipside's Cosmic Joy inhabits a dark textural sprawl that ultimately spawns a ten-ton bassline. The record should come with a spacesuit.

126. Donna Summer I Feel Love

Casablanca 1977

Brian Eno once called this the most important record ever made, and when you hear it booming over a nightclub soundsystem at full volume it's pretty hard to argue. Pulsing machine music produced by Giorgio Moroder, this forward-thinking computer disco remains wildly influential. And then there's the matter of Donna Summer, who takes the whole affair to another plane altogether, her voice soaring in graceful arcs around that central rhythm and putting all manner of would-be divas to shame in the process. This is hardcore.

125. Masta Ace Incorporated Sittin' On Chrome

Delicious Vinyl 1995

For my money, the greatest late-summer hip hop LP ever. East meets West in this extended song cycle about two cousins from opposite coasts spending a summer together in the city that never sleeps. If you imagine a rap record produced by Roy Ayers, you wouldn't be too far off. Even the skits are good. This always takes me back to August of '95 when my brother and I were refinishing a deck for walking-around-money, tripping out under the blazing sun with Jammin' z90 coming through like a mirage in the Santee heat... Born To Roll, the man said.

124. Bobby Konders House Rhythms

Nu Groove 1990

The perfect encapsulation of Nu Groove's half-lit, anything goes vision of house music, where reggae, disco, ambient and acid rub shoulders on the dancefloor and nobody misses a beat. Of course it's hard to choose just one Bobby Konders 12", but this one's the reason the man's a household name where I come from. From the rolling pianos of Let There Be House to the searing 303 lines of Nervous Acid, Massai Women's eerie Serengeti atmospherics and the sprawling deep house epic The Poem, it's an unmissable EP of off-the-wall New York house.

123. Massive Attack Protection

Wild Bunch 1994

This is the sound of my youth. I could have picked any of their first three LPs, but this one's dubbed out, rootsical bass architecture marks it as my absolute favorite. The voodoo calm of Karmacoma, Weather Storm's invisible soundtrack, Mushroom Vowles, Tracy Thorn's mournful croon, the smoked out Light My Fire cover version, Horace Andy's x-ray falsetto, the depth-charging 303 basslines, Nicolette's serenading of the spirits and Tricky's dread magic — still in full force at this point — all blur into the perfect prescription of blunted Bristol blues and a true smoker's delight.

122. Charles Mingus The Black Saint And The Sinner Lady

Impulse! 1963

Mingus' Impulse! debut finds him righteously at home in the house that Trane built, working through a series of four complex suites inspired by Duke Ellington that — with all apologies to Count Basie — seem to take big band jazz into the atomic era. Mingus was so impressed with Bob Theile's in-house production that in the liner notes he proclaimed that his fans could throw out all of his old records because this was the sound he was after all along!

121. Horace Andy Dance Hall Style

Wackie's 1982

Skeletal, dubbed out reggae from the concrete jungle. Black and white newsprint paranoia reigns supreme throughout, not unlike a remake of The Parallax View set in contemporary Kingston. Spying Glass, later covered by Massive Attack, drapes gutter-glazed synths over its stately, slow-motion crawl. Horace Andy's lonely falsetto is cloaked in layers of desolate production courtesy of Lloyd Barnes, who stretches these solarized riddims out into echo-chambered infinity.

Dark and moody electro dubbed out into a mirage on the fabled Cutting Records imprint. Hashim advances from the sparse, crisp edges of his epochal electro jam Al-Naafiysh The Soul into deeply blunted terrain, the sound of which seems to strangely overlap with that of certain late-period post punk records like 400 Blows' Declaration Of Intent in its slap-bass fueled approximation of William Gibson's visions of the future. This always makes me think of riding around with Snakes back in high school, bombing down the lonely corridors of Grantville and Mission Gorge at night.

119. Sinéad O'Connor The Lion And The Cobra

Ensign 1987

The spectacularly powerful debut, and the unacknowledged midpoint between Kate Bush and Neneh Cherry (by way of 4AD). A treasure trove of striking moments, ranging from the machine rhythms of Jerusalem and I Want Your Hands On Me (which seem to trace a jagged line between Control and Buffalo Stance) to the warrior charge of Mandinka (featuring the unmistakable guitar of one Marco Pirroni) and the indie rock drone of Just Call Me Joe (sounding like The Breeders a couple years early), the record's heart lies in majestic numbers like Jackie and the drama of Troy's towering suite, while the lush folk balladry of Just Like U Said It Would B and Drink Before The War swoop in deftly to conquer all. O'Connor wields her voice like a weapon throughout, and on The Lion And The Cobra she takes no prisoners.

118. Kendrick Lamar To Pimp A Butterfly

Top Dawg 2015

After his stunning major label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city, Kendrick Lamar went on to top it soundly by improbably hooking up with jazzmen like Stephen "Thundercat" Bruner and Kamasi Washington, crafting a vital modern rap record in thrall to figures like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron. There's a wealth of material here, from the staggering modal grandeur of How Much A Dollar Cost to King Kunta's nightclub stop and the free jazz interludes in between, while the bleak intensity of tracks like u and The Blacker The Berry are balanced by occasional moments of lighthearted euphoria like These Walls and i. The sonic breadth in evidence throughout is matched only by the vast array of subjects Lamar explores over the course of this often harrowing — if ultimately uplifting — record. Someday, someone will write a whole book about this record.

117. Michael Jackson Smooth Criminal

Epic 1988

The kid from the Jackson 5 delivers yet another pop masterpiece, the claustrophobic machine shapes and soaring chorus of which mark it out as my absolute favorite moment from the man. The Extended Dance Mix stretches the tune's crashing groove to nearly eight minutes of sonic perfection, with Jackson vamping sublime over its protracted jam. I've often thought this tune was a kindred spirit with the contemporary techno output of Detroit's big three: when those gorgeous, soaring synths hit in the chorus — Jackson's vocals sliding effortlessly across the surface — you're cruising the same sprawling metropolis corridors essayed in Reese's Rock To The Beat, Rhythim Is Rhythim's It Is What It Is and Model 500's Off To Battle. File under futurism.

116. The Ragga Twins Reggae Owes Me Money

Shut Up And Dance 1991

Swashbuckling ragga ardkore produced by PJ and Smiley of Shut Up And Dance. Setting the tone for the nineties, this swings wildly from the breakbeat madness of Ragga Trip and Wipe The Needle to Illegal Gunshot's straight up dancehall moves and the awesome EWF-pillaging groove of The Killing. The instrumental 18" Speaker — a bassbin-shattering slab of dubbed-out ravefloor magic — spools wild bleeps across a shuffling breakbeat strapped with a bassline like an oil tanker. One of those records where everything comes together to form an unlikely masterpiece (in truth SUAD had quite a few of those under their belt), this is what raving is all about.

115. MC5 Kick Out The Jams

Elektra 1969

Legendary proto-punk Detroit heavy metal. Maybe the wildest live album ever recorded, and certainly my favorite. The title track and Come Together ride great churning riffs deep into the redline, while I Want You Right Now seems to split the difference between Wild Thing and 1983... A Merman I Should Turn To Be in a slow-motion come-on of epic proportions. The closing Starship borrows from Sun Ra in a wild freeform launch into the stratosphere, rounding out a chaotic masterpiece that manages to transcend its era and feel brazenly alive in the present.

An urban troubadour rises from the streets of Detroit to cut a blistering folk LP. Rodriguez hits plain and direct throughout — rather than hiding behind layers of abstraction — as he chronicles his singular visions of the inner city. Each of these tunes progress with a wicked internal logic that slowly creeps toward their inevitable conclusion (like the baptism scene from The Godfather). I only recently learned that it was arranged and produced by disco/funk stalwarts Mike Theodore and Dennis Coffey. Right on!

113. Stevie Wonder Fulfillingness' First Finale

Tamla 1974

The lushest, most laidback LP from Stevie Wonder in the seventies, an era when the man could do no wrong. After surviving a near fatal car accident the previous year, he seemed to enter the studio in an even more introspective mood than usual. Indeed, aside from the blistering electronic funk of You Haven't Done Nothin' — the last in his line of songs to take on our very own Parallax icon Richard Nixon — this is by far his most mellow album of the decade. Even more lavishly arranged than usual, it features appearances by figures like Minnie Riperton, Syreeta and The Jackson Five, lending their rich backing vocals throughout, while Tonto's Expanding Head Band coax the verdant shapes of their machines into a sumptuous bed of sound.

112. Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five New York New York

Sugar Hill 1983

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, firing on all cylinders, dropped this 12" hot on the heels of their debut full-length and somehow managed to surpass everything on it. A crucial, forward-thinking elaboration on The Message, with a next-level reality rap flowing sharp and precise over skyscraper-crumbling beats and a searing, futuristic production, this anticipates and exemplifies basically everything I love about modern music.

Jungle came out of nowhere a few years back with this absolutely blinding album, a sterling debut haunted by a dozen of their gloriously fractured dancefloor hymns. Sounding wholly alien and unlike anything else around, I like to imagine this intoxicating hall-of-mirrors post-disco trip would have sounded right at home pumping out the immaculate soundsystem at the Paradise Garage. These shimmering grooves shift and slide like liquid metal, melting into a sonic T-1000 reclining at the cutting edge of dance music and pop.

110. Edu Lobo Cantiga De Longe

Elenco 1970

The mesmerizing Edu Lobo's most intimate record finds him unveiling a thoroughly unique take on lush Brazilian samba. I always liked how Woebot would refer to him as "the Brazilian Bryan Ferry". Here you definitely get that same sense of sophisticated languor one finds in Roxy's more downbeat moments. The peerless Quarteto Novo, fresh from Miles Davis' Live/Evil sessions, provide sumptuous backing with their patented turn-on-a-dime rhythmic panache and nimble touch. Everything here is light as a feather, yet deep as the ocean.

109. Alice Coltrane Strings World Galaxy

Impulse! 1972

Cinematic free jazz with its eyes locked firmly on India. Alice Coltrane takes her boundless vision into widescreen with a full string orchestra in tow for this record's five swirling rhapsodies. Her masterful reworking of late husband John Coltrane's A Love Supreme breaks into a left field beat that leaves you blinking in disbelief at the improbable perfection of it all, while the sprawling Galaxy In Satchidananda feels like the soundtrack to some metaphysical sword-and-sandal epic set on an alien planet orbiting a distant star.

108. Van Morrison Astral Weeks

Warner Bros. 1968

Wild-eyed Celtic folk troubadour cuts loose with a jazz combo, reaching his true potential as he unleashes a stone cold masterpiece imbued with gentle soul and a spiritual elegance all its own. The heart of the record lies in sprawling character studies like Cyprus Avenue and Madame George, where Morrison lingers on these sad characters longer than most would dare. Sweet Thing and the title track seem to magnify the sum total of human love until it threatens to eclipse all of its bitterness and hate, embracing the world in its weary arms. And really, what could be better than that?

107. Monoton Monotonprodukt 07

Monoton 1982

Dense NDW. This is a space music that sounds like something SETI picked up on a particularly long range scan, those churning alien sonics emanating from within the center of some distant black hole. Voices echo just on the outer rim of the soundscape as fractal synth sequences pulsate all around, literally absorbing everything within reach. It feels like a staircase spiraling off into oblivion as gravity's pull draws you ever deeper into the churning vortex below. Surreal and occasionally disturbing — like late-period David Lynch — and the true soundtrack to In The Mouth Of Madness.

106. Model 500 Night Drive

Metroplex 1985

Juan Atkins's second release on his own Metroplex imprint is characteristically ahead of its time with its ultra-modern stripped down production and racing computer blue sequences. A lone driver's tale unfolds, recounting a freaky trip through the nocturnal highways of Techno City and the mysterious passenger he encounters along the way. The flipside is a turbo-charged rework of No UFOs (the centerpiece of the first Model 500 record), which finds Atkins short-circuiting World War III by landing a spaceship in your backyard. A bold, angular line drawn through the middle of the 1980's... this is what Detroit Techno is all about.

105. Pere Ubu The Modern Dance

Blank 1978

Rising from the ashes of post-industrial Cleveland, Pere Ubu are without a doubt one of the great American bands (in fact, they're almost too good to be true), working up their own unique brand of post-Velvets racket long before punk — let alone post punk — even existed. In the past, I'd always gravitated toward their earliest sides (essayed on the Terminal Tower compilation) but over the last year or so the razor-sharp precision of The Modern Dance finally won me over once and for all. This is either the sound of perfection perverted, or perversion perfected... take your pick.

104. Tim Buckley Happy Sad

Elektra 1969

Dreamy, jazz-inflected folk from one of the early visionaries of the Laurel Canyon scene. Lazy reveries like Strange Feelin' and Dream Letter drift weightlessly beneath the setting sun, even as a curling undertow continues to build up deep within until the interminable jamming of Gypsy Woman threatens to pull all of its surroundings into orbit before collapsing into a swirling vortex of proto-Krautrock intensity. Sun-baked with an undercurrent of dread, this is the L.A. of Inherent Vice.

103. The Doors Strange Days

Elektra 1967

Monumental, unclassifiable moody psychedelic cabaret rock 'n roll from the days when giants roamed the lazy beaches of California. Jim Morrison comes on like a twisted beat-poet crooner (echoes of Eden Ahbez in full effect) while Ray Manzarek wields his keyboards as if they were synths. Meanwhile, John Densmore seems to draw his tricky rhythms from anywhere but rock and Robbie Krieger's crystalline guitar style anticipates Carlos Santana. The whole effect is entirely unique, yet so easy to take for granted owing to the sheer magnitude of their historical impact. Utterly essential.

102. Terranova Manuel Göttsching Tokyo Tower

All Good Vinyl 1997

German b-boys cut loose in widescreen with Krautrock legend on guitar. Basically a jazz record, Tokyo Tower is eight minutes of somber perfection, while the flipside's Clone is a slab of seriously bleak microtonal madness that drops you into the middle of The Parallax View without map or compass. Terranova's album from a couple years later was good, but this right here is magic. When this first dropped, it seemed to me like a record from another age... whether that age was twenty years in the past or twenty years in the future, I'm still not quite sure...

101. Sneaker Pimps Splinter

Clean Up 1999

Chris Corner steps out of the shadows to front his own group — sounding like some unholy blend of Scott Walker and Marc Almond — who wrap him up in the raw architecture of feedback and ragged downcast beats on the long road to ruin. The whole trip feels deeply unhealthy and self-destructive — making plenty of stops in some incredibly dark places along the way — yet somehow in its resolute, brave stance finds itself at a strangely uplifting conclusion, crawling through the basement to find redemption. If OK Computer were as good as everyone says, it would sound an awful lot like this.

NOTE: To continue onward to The Parallax 100, click here.

Fall Inna Bassbin

Posted on September 3, 2016 @ 2:25pm by Coqui

During what's turned out to be an exceptionally busy week, I've been vibing out practically non-stop to Woebot's latest mix: Bands a make her dance.¹ The mix's general brief is rapping with instruments inna live band stylee — stretching back through time all the way to the fifties — and it's an absolute burner, packed with incredible music spanning from old school hip hop to killer deejay reggae cuts and beyond: into the nexus of street verse and rough cut funk. Put simply, this is Rap Attack music. Truth be told, it's something of a sweet spot for me, so I couldn't help but dive in with a little off-the-dome commentary... please forgive me.

The mix kicks off with Tone And Poke's lavish production for Jay-Z in 2001's Jigga, from that period when hip hop was routinely interfacing with the machine funk blueprint laid out by Timbaland and The Neptunes. Consequently, the next two tracks are N*E*R*D's man-machine hybrid Lapdance and Timbaland & Magoo's Up Jumps Da' Boogie, featuring Tim's typically lush take on machine soul (with the signature touch of Jimmy Douglass at the controls in fine style).

You could trace a line through material like Supa Dupa Fly and the early Kelis records back into much of the prime late-period swingbeat: things like Tony! Toni! Toné!'s awesome Sons Of Soul record — featuring Raphael Saadiq's fluid basslines and rolling live breakbeats knocked out by Tim Riley — naturally, but also the rugged flexing grooves of Jodeci's sophomore album Diary Of A Mad Band.

Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott Supa Dupa Fly The Goldmind

Indeed, this is where Timbaland's crew Da Bassment hooked up in the first place, with DeVante Swing and Mr. Dalvin linking up with figures like Missy "Misdemeanor" Elliott (still with Sista at this point), Jimmy Douglass and Tim himself, who would all go on to map out the future of r&b through the balance of the decade.

Subsequently, this is the context from which all the great Soulquarian material sprung up: records like Erykah Badu's Mama's Gun and D'Angelo's Voodoo, functioning at the nexus of programmed rhythm and live-played instrumentation. These records didn't appear in a vacuum! In many ways they were an extension of and reaction to the crisp, modern blueprint laid out by producers like Timbaland, even as they sometimes pushed against it and dug deeper into the progressive soul roots of the seventies and beyond.

Questlove — key figure and strange attractor in this terrain that he is — was deeply involved in both records, pulling together personnel, offering historical perspective and of course laying down his trademark offhand rhythms at Electric Lady Studios. Indeed The Roots' Things Fall Apart — another peak-era Soulquarian production — is represented in this mix with the next track, Double Trouble, featuring Black Thought and Mos Def trading verses as they run through the classic Wild Style routine.

Appropriately, that other storied hip hop band, the inimitable Stetsasonic make an appearance next with Pen And Paper (from their classic sophomore set, In Full Gear). I've always loved the sort of shambolic, loose-limbed interface between machine music and live funk that Stet traded in. A lot of L.A. records switch into a similar mode from time to time, like The D.O.C.'s The Grande Finalé (one of the great posse cuts, an N.W.A. track in all but name) and The Pharcyde's Labcabincalifornia (with live drumming from Jay Dee on All Live).

Beat Bop — the mix's next selection and another Woebot fave — must be the Ur-text for this whole sound. The sinewy live instrumentation gets filtered through a futuristic beat matrix, courtesy of Jean-Michel Basquiat's forward-thinking production, over which Rammellzee and K-Rob trade verses in what I've often described as a hip hop update of Sly & The Family Stone's Africa Talks To You/The Asphalt Jungle. It's about as next-level as hip hop got in the early eighties, which is no small feat.

Woe sets the scene within an old school context, drawing deep from the pool of Sugar Hill Records, with selections like The Furious Five's Step Off Remix, Funky 4 + 1's That's The Joint and Trouble Funk's aptly titled Drop The Bomb. All three of which feature MCs doing their thing over live band backing, and right there at the center of rap's evolution (providing further evidence in favor of Woe's central thesis).

The Junkyard Band The Word/Sardines Def Jam

The D.C. Go-Go of Trouble Funk sits righteously in this context, and tangentially brings to mind one of my absolute favorite records from the scene, The Word/Sardines by The Junkyard Band, with its mad squelching bass and pile-driving breakbeats.

Afrika Bambaataa Death Mix Throwdown Blatant

Further old school adventures continue with the improbably early smooth perfection of The Younger Generation's We Rap More Mellow, appearing at the tail end of the seventies as one of the first rap records to hit the shops. There's also the pre-electronic Afrika Bambaataa hip hop tile Zulu Nation Throwdown, featuring raps from the Cosmic Force dancing over a loose-limbed funk jam kicked up by the Harlem Underground band.

More honest-to-goodness funk, this time from The Fatback Band (who were twelve albums deep into their career as a hard funk unit by this point), appears later in the mix with King Tim III Personality Jock, which (depending on who you ask) is often considered thee very first hip hop recording to appear on wax.

Spoonie Gee Spoonin' Rap Sound Of New York, USA

These early rap works bring to mind another one of my favorites records from the era, Spoonie Gee's Spoonin' Rap, which almost sounds as if it could have been a stripped down backing track from the Remain In Light/My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts sessions. Similarly far-reaching and futuristic — and featured next in the mix — is The Treacherous Three's The Body Rock, offering up an evocative atmosphere in which a grinding synthetic bassline snakes through a circular guitar figure held down by Pumpkin's relaxed drum breaks, while Special K, L.A. Sunshine and Kool Moe Dee trade verses through carefully arranged reverb effects.

Various Artists Wild Style: Original Soundtrack Animal

Everything here remarkably in sync with a lot of the era's post punk music: think The Magnificent Seven by The Clash, the Talking Heads's Once In A Lifetime and ESG's Moody.² Many such figures were seduced by the burgeoning hip hop culture of the day, from Factory Records' whole dalliance with the East Coast³ to Chris Stein's (of new wave group Blondie) involvement with the backing tracks for the Wild Style soundtrack and The Clash bringing Futura 2000 on tour with them (while also backing him on the Celluloid rap 12" The Escapades Of Futura 2000).

Gary Clail's Tackhead Sound System Tackhead Tape Time Nettwerk

Then there's the matter of Tackhead/Fat's Comet, featuring Doug Wimbish,⁴ Skip McDonald and Keith LeBlanc of the Sugar Hill backing band. After leaving Sugar Hill, the group started out as East Coast post punk experimentalists, operating their own World Records imprint before running through Adrian Sherwood's cold dub machinery and backing Mark Stewart as the Maffia.

Sherwood's On-U Sound label a crucial conduit of left field dub recordings throughout the decade, stretching back into late seventies with material like Creation Rebel's early output and the Cry Tuff Dub Encounter series (which — spiritually, at least — seemed to pick up where Joe Gibbs' Africa Dub All-Mighty string of records left off).

Various Artists 12" Reggae Discomix Showcase Vol. 1 17th North Parade

Incidentally, the mix takes a left turn into reggae territory with a trio of discomix cover versions from the decade's turn masterminded by Gibbs, Xanadu & Sweet Lady's Rockers Choice (based on Rapper's Delight), Derrick Laro & Trinity's Don't Stop Till You Get Enough and Ruddy Thomas & Welton Irie's Shake Your Body Down To The Ground (the latter two Jacksons covers). Down mix a piece, Woe even gives the original MC music a look in with Big Youth's 1976 deejay cut Jim Squeachy and the impossibly early (1972) Festival Wise by U-Roy.

Gil Scott-Heron Small Talk At 125th And Lenox Flying Dutchman

In between the Gibbs cuts and Big Youth, you get a pair of key jazz poetry cuts from Gil Scott-Heron (The Revolution Will Not Be Televised) and The Last Poets (Related To What). Both artists retroactively recognized as forefathers of rap music, The Last Poets even washing up with an eighties record on Celluloid. There was even a record from Last Poet Lightnin' Rod with backing from Jimi Hendrix that also came out on Celluloid around the same time. Hendrix himself touching on rap with Crosstown Traffic... perhaps the first rap-rock song ever? Well, certainly the best.

Lightnin' Rod Hustlers Convention United Artists

Lightnin' Rod's Sport comes in next, taken from his excellent Hustlers Convention LP and featuring Kool & The Gang providing a nimble funk backing (and a clear precursor to all the old school live hip hop records discussed above). The godfather of funk himself slips into the mix with Black President, another foundational piece of music in hip hop, not only by virtue of its breakbeats — adorning as they do scores of rap 12"s — but also James Brown's ad-libbed vocal asides, dropped into the beat matrix with a rhythmic precision.

Punk Press book on the dining room table — Rap Attack #3

From there, we move into the final stretch of the mix with Pigmeat Markham's Here Comes The Judge (as mentioned in David Toop's Rap Attack⁵) from 1968. Interestingly enough, this record seems to be the basis for the Lee "Scratch" Perry-produced deejay record Public Jestering, fronted by Judge Winchester! And finally, Bo Diddley closes out the set with his epochal self-titled number, bringing it all back to the square root of the blues.

Which drops us into the recent climate round these parts. Post punk, hip hop and the blues. Machine soul is that final ingredient — in its triad forms of techno, house and r&b — of what you might call my kind of music. In fact, this is exactly the sort of thing I meant to broach last winter but for the encroachment of myriad real world commitments (what a drag). Yet with the late summer sun looming deep red on the horizon, it just might be the right time to go deep with it for real. At any rate, it's gonna be a wonderful fall.

Footnotes
1.	Woebot [Ingram, Matthew]. Bands a make her dance. Woebot. Hollow Earth, 28 Aug. 2016. http://www.woebot.com/2016/08/bands-make-her-dance.html. Accessed 2 Sep. 2016.
2.	Note that all three cuts were staples at Larry Levan's Paradise Garage.
3.	Starting with A Certain Ratio recording their debut full-length To Each... at E.A.R.S. in New Jersey and continuing with New Order's work with Arthur Baker, John Robie and Jellybean Benitez (also at E.A.R.S.) on 1983's Confusion, with Factory even putting out an ESG record at one point in the interim. In a strange twist, New Order once played a tumultuous set at the Paradise Garage in 1983.
4.	Wimbish was also later a member of Mos Def's band Black Jack Johnson.
5.	Toop, David. Rap Attack #3 London: Serpent's Tail, 2000. 40. Print.

RAG016: Spring 2015

Posted on May 30, 2015 @ 11:03pm by Coqui

Radio AG Episode 016

Spring 2015

I almost missed the window to do a Spring mix this year, but ultimately ended up putting something together at the last moment (rather than miss the season entirely). Against all odds, this one practically mixed itself. It should be noted right out the gate that this mix leans fairly heavily on the late nineties, particularly 1997 and the first half of 1998, for reasons that I will expand on someday. Suffice it to say that rather than a walk down memory lane, the music here strikes me as locked onto the very pulse of today. Since this mix is coming out late into Spring, the mood is a bit more dusted, more sun-baked than it otherwise might have been. So just take this as a soundtrack to the last weeks of Spring, as Summer rapidly approaches...

Listen Now

The Parallax Sound Lab Radio AG Intro

The standard introductions in place.

Scott Weiland Jimmy Was A Stimulator Atlantic

Kicking off with a forgotten slab of noise from Scott Weiland's solo debut, this is in essence a Nuggets track in all but name: raw garage punk implementing the technology of the era — in this case 808 beats and filtered techno bass — delivering a three minute bolt from the blue. Should have been a single.

Arabian Prince Strange Life Rapsur

Mid-eighties electro. The production on this is perfect! I hinted at the man's underground pedigree here, dating back to well before he'd hooked up with N.W.A.. This record finds him transcribing the vibes of L.A.'s party scene — the house parties, nightclubs and roller rinks — to wax. There was an excellent interview with Arabian Prince and The Egyptian Lover in Wax Poetics¹ a few years back that happened to coincide with a superb retrospective of the man's work that came out on Stones Throw.

Little Computer People Little Computer People Psi49net

Late-nineties electro. Like I-f's Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass, this split the difference between electro and eighties synth pop, predicting the whole electroclash movement years before the media blitz descended. Little Computer People is an obsessive slice of computer disco that could have burned up the charts in any decade, while the video remains one of the great undiscovered promo clips. Check it out!²

Fluke Absurd Mighty Dub Katz Vox Astralwerks

Norman Cook takes a break from his Fatboy Slim alias to turn in this ace remix of a quasi-industrial Fluke track (from their excellent Risotto LP), filtering the original through a Planet Rock prism and winding up with one of the great electro tracks of the day. For my money, this is the definitive version of Absurd, boasting a massive climax not even present in the original version. Possibly Cook's greatest moment (give or take Everybody Needs A 303).

Masta Killa RZA & U-God Digi Warfare Nature Sounds

Yet another space jam in disguise, this time from the Wu-Tang Clan's Masta Killa. Seeming to offer up a loose breakbeat take on the World Class Wreckin' Cru's Surgery, this record teems with richly demented strings weaving through the ether as four-dimensional breakbeats work out their logic beneath. I've always loved traxx like this that hang in there around 110 BPM — that interzone between house and hip hop — plying a deep digital funk existing in a fertile, under-explored territory that remains ripe with possibilities.

Tony! Toni! Toné! Tonyies! In The Wrong Key Motown

This is a strange one, buried deep within Tony! Toni! Toné! third record Sons Of Soul (the There's A Riot Goin' On of new jack swing). From within a sumptuously multi-textured soundscape, Raphael Saadiq sort of half-sings his way through the verses while the rest of the group drops in periodically for the nagging refrain. Tumbling breakbeats — a hallmark of this LP — shuffle beneath it all as dial tone punctuates the endless, rolling rhythm and occasional snatches of blues guitar flicker in the shadows.

Murky Waters Check Yourself Pranna Mix Main Squeeze

The original has always reminded me of Songs In The Key Of Life-era Stevie Wonder, but this dark remix on the flip warps the vocals into oblivion over an eerie slice of electronic jazz that seems to soundtrack some bizarre nexus between daydream and nightmare. The turn of the century was a great time for this sort of thing, culminating in a warped permutation of the neo soul sound that would continue to throw shapes across the ensuing decade.

Blue Öyster Cult Screams Columbia

Gothic biker rock from this thoroughly conceptual band-in-a-box. This from their self-titled debut, an utterly essential hard rock record. The unique thing about the early Blue Öyster Cult is that they come on like a Nuggets-era garage punk group that's stumbled upon heavy metal, maintaining the same sense of raw, unstable propulsion that one expects from The Seeds or the 13th Floor Elevators even as the darkness comes creeping in. When that slow motion chorus hits its like plunging deep into the Black Sea.

Viernes 13 Piérdete Chica Viernes 13

Only recently discovered this crew when they opened for The English Beat last month, where I was totally floored by their live show. I've been rocking both their records ever since, tending to prefer the dust and grime of their debut's sun-baked boleros to the new record's pristine polish, capturing as it does the idiosyncratic brilliance of the band's live show.

Family Of Intelligence Vernon Smith The Fruit Kemet

From the undeniably awesome Champion Jungle Sound double-LP on Kemet. If you want to get at the essence of jungle — its very DNA distilled in the purest form — then this should be your first port of call. I dropped this back to back with the previous record in the spirit of those old Recent Abduction shows where I'd occasionally operate the soundsystem for the band, spinning a mix of jungle and dub between set after set of local punk rock.

Dr. Alimantado Ride On Greensleeves

One of the great deejay LPs — indeed one of the great reggae LPs period — this features Dr. Alimantado toasting mad science over rock hard backing tracks, his singular personality towering over a smeared, sun-glazed psychedelia that stretches for miles. Everybody needs a copy of this record.

The Herbaliser Put It On Tape Ninja Tune

Circa late 1998 — in a moment of existential frustration — I remember saying to Snakes I just want to play trip hop in bars, which became something of a running joke at the time. This one of those records that makes me think of that era. Not a great LP, but it does feature the presence of a then-unknown Jean Grae — trading under the name What? What? at the time — in one of her earliest appearances on wax, plus a couple of instrumentals that have remained with me ever since.

George Duke Peace MPS

This and the next tune were made for each other. Those gently cascading Rhodes wash over everything. Such beauty! George Duke imbued everything he did with a generosity of spirit that really does shine through in the grooves. I was saddened to hear of the man's passing a couple years back.

Cheo Feliciano Mi Triste Problema Vaya

Salsa luminary's belated solo debut after over a decade in the game, providing vocals for the likes of Eddie Palmieri and Joe Cuba's bands. After a rough patch that found the man in the throes of heroin addiction, he quits cold turkey and cleans up for good, getting it together in the studio with songwriter-auteur Tite Curet Alonso and an ace backing band including Johnny Pacheco, Bobby Valentin and Justo Betancourt, crafting these gently rolling, velvet soundscapes in the process. It's hard not to picture the sleepy seaside of Ponce — those gently rolling hills rising in the distance — on hearing these gently aching grooves.

Dee Dee Bridgewater Night Moves Elektra

Now this one I can't even begin to explain. Soul jazz chanteuse Dee Dee Bridgewater covers the theme tune from Arthur Penn's Night Moves — starring Gene Hackman — resulting in this breathy dreamtime confection, all shuffling breezy rhythms and liquid Rhodes. Did the original even have lyrics? From Just Family, the first of her stellar three album run on Elektra, which found Bridgewater navigating the disco era with finesse. It's almost surprising that this tune isn't more widely known.

Tricky Brand New You're Retro 4th & Broadway

From the trip hop visionary's epochal debut. I've gone digital about this one before, and no doubt will again and again, as it is without a doubt one of my favorite albums ever. I never tire of this track's rush of adrenaline smack in the middle of such strung-out surroundings. It is, along with the Public Enemy cover, the sound of fury on wax. It's a shame that the rough edges of trip hop were beveled away with such haste. Many of the genre's wilder numbers remain among its very best.

Can Half Past One Harvest

Late-period Can gets short shrift, but if they'd been an entirely different band no one had ever heard of — without those legendary early records hanging over them — I'd reckon people would be blown away by what they heard. Everything from Landed onward compares quite favorably with Remain In Light-era Talking Heads, and stands on its own as a sort of shimmering fourth world psychedelia.

Millsart Dr. Ice Axis

Turn of the century Jeff Mills in Detroit classicist mode, which might make the skeptics snicker. Whatever. The man had put in so much time living in the 23rd century, who could fault him for taking some downtime to his machines sing like The Temptations? Here he conjures up the same sort of lush techno you'd find on the space jazz records he did with UR, records like Nation 2 Nation and Jupiter Jazz, deftly imbuing everything with the same sharp-tooled precision as his Purpose Maker material. The sound of casual utopia.

Neneh Cherry Buddy X Inspired by......!?! Circa

Do people consider Neneh Cherry to be trip hop? I've always heard her as a contemporary of Soul II Soul and Smith & Mighty, a fellow traveler operating in the same sonic space. Innovators all, in other words. This incredible tune is so functionally tight — yet at the same time spiritually loose — that it seems almost improvised, even in the face of those furiously programmed whiplash beats and Neneh's righteously eloquent message.

Smith & Mighty Alice Perera I Don't Know 12" Mix 1 Studio !K7

Speaking of Smith & Mighty, this slice of paradise in its purest form is without a doubt the crew's peak (although I tend to love everything they touch). Shimmering roots 'n future in a deep way, this of-the-moment machine soul could have been huge given the right set of circumstances.

Them It's All Over Now, Baby Blue Deram

From the second LP by this storied rock 'n roll crew, this finds them stretching out into folkier territory than ever before (prefiguring Van Morrison's later direction). Here, his breathtaking croon pushes the tune onto a deeply spiritual plane. Perhaps everyone knows this as the basis for Beck's epochal Jack-Ass, but this truly stellar take on the Bob Dylan standard should be more widely heard.

The Crooklyn Dodgers Crooklyn MCA

New York hip hop in excelsis, this features peak period production from Q-Tip while Masta Ace, Buckshot (of Black Moon) and Special Ed trade verses about the seventies (the days when kids didn't act so crazy). From the Spike Lee joint of the same name, this perfectly captures the same sense of gentle nostalgia felt throughout that film. Humorously, even as they're all reminiscing on the seventies, it makes me nostalgic for the nineties of my youth!

Stone Temple Pilots Seven Caged Tigers Atlantic

Bringing it all back home. Scott Weiland, yet again. This from the Stone Temple Pilots' Tiny Music... Songs From The Vatican Gift Shop, which found the band teasing out the edges of their muscular hard rock with gentle psychedelic flourishes, the odd touch of lounge and even jazz funk (but only for a moment!). I've always thought this tune had a deeply reflective, almost zen cadence to it, like a man coming to terms with his place in the world, the very sound seeming to radiate a sense of supreme inner peace...

Scott Weiland - 12 Bar Blues — RAG016: The Records

Credits
Time stretching: Johnny Blount and Nautilus Jones.
Vibes: Metal Box, Trans Am, 1997.

Footnotes
1.	Fleisher, Eddie. Machine Funk. Wax Poetics, No. 32, 2008. 54-60.
2.	Little Computer People. Little Computer People. Electro Pop. Rother, Anthony. Lewandowski, Piotr J. Psi49net, 2001. Music Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3-BEqWX0Kc

Footnotes

Fleisher, Eddie. Machine Funk. Wax Poetics, No. 32, 2008. 54-60.

Little Computer People. Little Computer People. Electro Pop. Rother, Anthony. Lewandowski, Piotr J. Psi49net, 2001. Music Video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3-BEqWX0Kc

Terranova – DJ Kicks

Posted on February 9, 2015 @ 11:32pm by Coqui

Was it last year that Studio !K7 held that poll in which people were asked to choose their top five DJ-Kicks mixes?¹ This one was without a doubt my #1 pick,² and it remains my second favorite mix CD of all time (hint: the first is from a different series on the same label).

For those who might not know, DJ-Kicks is a DJ mix series curated by Studio !K7 that gives marquee producers the opportunity to represent another side of their personality outside the studio and in the mix. Starting with an entry from C.J. Bolland in 1995 and continuing up to the present day with last week's Nina Kraviz excursion, it must be the longest running mix series ever.

A unique feature of DJ-Kicks is the fact that (nearly) every mix features an exclusive track worked up by the presenting DJ for inclusion in their mix (and concurrently released as a 12" single). Early on in the series, this track was constructed entirely from samples taken from the mix itself (a short-lived tradition, truth be told, lasting only for the three Detroit-themed mixes that rounded out the series' first phase of deep techno entries), but as the series continued the track would generally be an original work that seemed to spring from the spirit of the mix it was created for.

Terranova sitting in the backseat of a car with Coco in the driver's seat — Terranova with Coco

The Terranova entry emerged from the heart of the series' second phase, an excellent run of trip hop-flavored mixes, nestled between the likes of Kruder & Dorfmeister and Smith & Mighty. At the time, trip hop was a music I lived and breathed (a close second only to techno in my personal sonic pantheon), immersed as I was in records by Massive Attack, Bomb The Bass and Tricky. Then, one day in early 1998, this mix cropped up on display at the old Tower Records on El Cajon Blvd. I snapped it up immediately, purchased more or less blind on the basis of the Studio !K7 brand and a handful of names in the tracklist that I recognized.

I remember Woebot once describing the way a listener will often move from node to node when exploring music, further avenues opened with every path explored. Back in the day, mixes were like pressing the fast-forward button on that process: if you knew that you liked a handful of artists/tracks featured on a mix, then chances are you would discover at least as many more that you'd end up digging too.

This particular mix is a double fantasy of sorts: not only is every track phenomenal, but all avenues presented here intersect at steep tangents before veering off in nearly every direction. It opens with a seven song stretch of both styles of hop (from hip to the trip), veering left into a sequence of skewed techno and house, before finally returning home to the breaks to close out the set.

The spectre of post punk abstraction hangs heavy over everything here, gesturing back toward an era when Mark Stewart hooked up with Tackhead and the Death Comet Crew were in full swing: abstract sonic technicians putting the jagged edges of the city to wax. Tricky — trip hop's greatest auteur — had a similar affinity with post punk (from the well documented Mark Stewart connection on down).

A photo of Rap Attack lying on a coffee table — David Toop's Rap Attack

This is the world of David Toop's Rap Attack, hard electro beats and concrete. Terranova inhabit this realm — they populate this mix with it, floor to ceiling — actually augmenting the base records with additional treatments and textures, stretching the sonic spectrum into every corner of the soundscape.

Standing in stark contrast to the pleasant lifestyle music that downtempo often devolved into when it would get lost in a sort of vaguely cool, chill out impulse, the dub chamber murk and grimy textures in evidence throughout this record operate on an alternate principle: once again, putting the jagged edges of the city to wax. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do trip hop.

The mix opens with one of the great Intro tracks of all time, a rumble of pure atmosphere as the sound of the city streets comes flooding in, a gentle conga rhythm tumbling out across the soundscape. Terranova, Terranova... doesn't that mean new land, right? Wow, that's beautiful. Dropping into Howie B.'s Five Days, a droning slab of mutant tech jazz from the Freezone 3 compilation. It chugs along like some clockwork reconstruction of bebop, the beat marked by muted drums and a horn tattoo jutting out from each measure. Distant tones sound off from beyond the droning soundscape, grinding synths rise like magma within the mix.

As if waking from a dream, it all collapses into reverb as a skeletal hip hop beat begins to take shape. Priest's Disorientation certainly lives up to its title, sounding as if it were constructed from a jumble of unstable elements: its wavering bassline and skittering beat come on like some ramshackle vision of Timbaland and SA-RA meeting for tea in Central Park. Apani B. Fly, Beans and Priest rhyme abstract to the max before everything collapses once again into a pool of pure echo.

Depth Charge Legend Of The Golden Snake Version 2 D.C.

A pounding slab of trip hop from Depth Charge, one of the grand architects of the form (and probably the most obvious influence on Terranova's own m.o.), starts to throb into view like an open wound. Sex, Sluts & Heaven Bordello Mix is the track, from the Legend Of The Golden Snake Version 2 10"³, bleeding wave upon wave of pressure into a cauldron of raw intensity.

The machine beats of DJ Spooky's Galactic Funk release the tension with an almost compulsive ramshackle funkiness. Spooky always seemed to catch a lot of flack for his endless theorizing and sometimes rambling approach to beat construction, but when the man was on, he was really on. Everyone knows the Sun Goddess sample, but it's the mind-blowing twisted Clavinet jam from The Politicians — a mere moment on in time on the original record, sampled and stretched to infinity here — that kicks this track into the fourth dimension. That's the good good, right there. Deep space sonics creep in and out of the funk from every which angle, before they ultimately overwhelm the beat and drag you into the deep black of space, distant sounds from the East creeping upon you.

East Flatbush Project Tried By 12 10/30 Uproar

It's East Flatbush Project's Tried By 12, that omnipresent underground hip hop record of the day, rocking an ill koto loop over the same Al Green break that fueled Timbaland's sampler around the same time. I'd rather be tried by twelve than carried by six. This record's instrumental was everywhere at the time (I even remember hearing it at a high school party the following summer). Sparse and clean, it drops in and out before you notice that the sun-glazed pulse of Peanut Butter Wolf's Run The Line has slipped upon you.

Peanut Butter Wolf Run The Line Stones Throw

Rasco spits nasty rhymes over the smoothest of beats, sounding like he'll knock your block off with or without the slightest provocation. Swap the cut out for the first of the breakbeat tracks from the Stereo MC's' Ultimatum project, The New Birth sampling Devil's Claw. A sonic tundra built around the opening break from Patiently, this track serves as a bridge into the uptempo stretch of this mix, the stately strings from BFC's Please Stand By rising from the glacier's surface. The first of the early Carl Craig tracks here — both of which ride improbable breakbeats — this one shrouded in waves of mystical Prophet 600 synthesizer, timbre hovering somewhere between strings and organ.

Patrick Pulsinger Dogmatic Sequences II Disko B

BFC's widescreen techno drifts off into the horizon as the break drops out, voices intoning astrological signs into the great beyond. Patrick Pulsinger's Citylights Pt. II City Of Starsigns, a scattershot astral jazz shuffle, shambles into view as if powered by some mutant machine's makeshift propulsion. Like Ian Simmonds' Man With No Thumbs, it staggers on an irregular fusion rhythm (quintessential tech jazz straining against the machines), before ultimately collapsing into the void.

Ladies & Gentlemen, one of 69's 4 Jazz Funk Classics⁴ (and the second of the Craig tracks here), picks up the thread with great churning strands of sequenced bass and a fast-forward Curtis Mayfield loop from the Superfly soundtrack. Terranova give you all eleven minutes of the track here, a generous move as it's one of the most sublime techno songs ever put to tape (on what was, at the time, an extremely hard to find record).

Structured as a multi-part modular groove whose main section drops out into a stone cold breakbeat breakdown — forlorn tones cry out ever gently — before those rolling bass sequences return stronger than ever, unfurling in great arcs toward the sky. Terranova close it out in striking fashion, with what must be a custom bit of nearly g-funk keyboard filigree twirling on and on into the sunset.

Various Artists Back To Basics New York Underground

Backroom Productions steps in to give The Definition Of A Track. At the very least, this is definitive New York house, surely: Groovin' Without Doubt. The whole thing rides atop this massive bassline that seems to meander its way up and down the beat matrix, freewheeling and utterly unresolved. This groove segues into a passage in which the synth line from Silicon Soul's Who Needs Sleep Tonight is warped and threaded through The Octagon Man's Modern Funk Beats; both tunes seem made for each other once you hear them in this context. It lasts but a moment before the distant growling bass of Avenue A's ace remix of Terranova's epochal Tokyo Tower pulses into view.

Terranova Tokyo Tower All Good Vinyl
This 12" contains the original version of Tokyo Tower

This version has nothing whatsoever to do with the sublime original (that heavenly jam with one Manuel Göttsching, a tune which I've already mentioned here, and must return to again sometime for further discussion). It's the great lost big beat tune, tucked away on this mix as an exclusive (you can hear it unmixed on the double-vinyl companion to this CD). Industrial breaks klang, run at a half-speed, then shift gears into a beat of block-rocking proportions and back again, bridging the gap back into downbeat territory as I L.O.V.E. You drops the tempo down to a crawl with bass you feel in your chest.

Jungle Brothers Jungle Brother Gee Street

DJ DSL's warped take on lovers rock finds him twisting a bit of Yellowman's Lost Mi Love to abstraction, all effects on overdrive. With a deformed roar, the dope downbeat of Ultimatum's second contribution Stop It! Stop It! Stop It! stalks its way across the soundscape, perhaps marred slightly by some creepy dude that's trying to push his luck with a lady. What's the deal? Still, it's but a moment before Terranova's masterful remix of the Jungle Brothers' Jungle Brother oozes into every corner of the soundscape on a massive Reese bassline and slow motion breakbeats.

If there's been anything that's elaborated on the sound that the Brothers themselves laid down on J. Beez Wit The Remedy, it's this remix, which leaves you wishing Terranova had been allowed to produce the entirety of Raw Deluxe. These mutant beats live up to that title and then some, in what must be one of the most uplifting slabs of hip hop ever put to wax. Those rude voodoo flutes swarm over everything!

The whole soundscape just hangs there, suspended, before being sucked to a pinpoint and morphing to the drop of buzzing bass from The Junkyard Band's The Word. Taking a stab at Reagan-era economic policy over a monster groove, this record just rolls out the speakers in an avalanche of percussion, bass locked in a furious dance with the MCs. This record, one of Def Jam's incursions into the D.C. go-go scene, boasts a compulsively three-dimensional soundscape, one that is continued in the Atmospheric Version of Spoonie Gee's Spoonie Rap, slipping into the mix transition practically unnoticed.

The bedrock rhythm, knocked out by a live band, sounds like a yet-even-more-fluid Remain In Light-era Talking Heads, while the party atmosphere, scratches, warped tones and effects come courtesy of its remix on Harlem Place, sounding like nothing so much as the tracking shot from Mean Streets where Harvey Keitel stumbles through the party and down the hall before collapsing on a cot in the back room, only here it all devolves into a deluge of sirens announcing the nightmare that is Terranova's DJ-Kicks/Contact — the track.

Contact is a warped, druggy take on 70's soundtrack music as seen through the cracked fun house mirror of hindsight: paranoia, conspiracy and malaise caught on celluloid, camera cutting a rakish angle through a deserted alley. I used to imagine some bleak Scorsese-esque movie (before I'd seen any, of course) or cop thriller playing out to the music. It certainly matches the visuals in films like The French Connection (parts I and II), Night Moves and The Parallax View, harboring a raw, churning intensity that puts an awful lot of imaginary soundtrack music to shame. If you come across the 12" single, don't hesitate, as it also offers up an alternate version on the flipside⁵ called Contact Lezlie, a further dive into the dirty shadows.

It's worth reflecting that the prevailing mood of this mix is probably meant to evoke Berlin or even New York, vast metropoles defined by their towering architecture, but for some reason I've always associated it with San Juan and the outlying Carolina district in Puerto Rico. Listening for the first time brought back memories of cloudy days that would result in the inevitable torrential downpour, tropical colors overcast in grey.

The seaside fortress at San Juan on a cloudy day — Castillo del Morro at San Juan

Predictably, the last time I was on the island, I played it out nearly every day — further cementing the association.

Aside from its towering greatness, I often return to this mix because there's an elemental sound here, thick with all-encompassing atmosphere, that I have yet to hear anywhere else in so potent a form. Drawing on routes flaring out from primal musics — hip hop, techno and dub — and feeding them through a prism of post-punk abstraction, they seem to map out a vision of ancient future music that remains vital to this day.

Through the murk and the grime, or because of it perhaps, resolve endures in the gutter: green grows through cracks in the pavement, ribbons of light slip through a crumbling edifice at dawn. City lights smear across a car window in the night, Cosmo Vitelli trying to realize a vision. Dread becomes determination, and Terranova puts all of it to wax.

Footnotes
1.	This poll would ultimately decide which five DJ-Kicks mixes would be offered up half-price in their online store. However, since certain entries were out of stock, they weren't eligible for the poll — thus rendering the results tainted!
2.	My top five would look something like this: 1. Terranova, 2. Smith & Mighty, 3. Stacey Pullen, 4. Kruder & Dorfmeister, 5. Claude Young. At least one of those was not available though, forcing me to pick Rockers Hi-Fi and (if memory serves) Andrea Parker.
3.	As a loose bit of trivia here, you can see this record (along with The Heliocentric Worlds Of Sun Ra, Vol. 1) lying in the background of the barebones room that Coco is sitting in on the B-Sides & Remix Sessions liner notes.
4.	I need to write about this (monumental) record in detail sometime.
5.	A rarity for DJ-Kicks EPs, which were typically single-sided affairs.

Funkadelic The Electric Spanking Of War Babies

Warner Bros. 1981

LISTEN NOW

TVBRR Island Disco

Toyan How The West Was Won

Greensleeves 1981

Grace Jones Living My Life

Island 1982

Jah Wobble And The Invaders Of The Heart Invaders Of The Heart

Lago 1983

Indian Ocean School Bell/Treehouse

Sleeping Bag 1986

Tom Tom Club The Man With The 4-Way Hips

Island 1983

Maximum Joy Station M.X.J.Y.

Y 1982

Liquid Liquid Optimo

99 1983

Ian Dury & The Blockheads Do It Yourself

Stiff 1979

Various Artists Babylon: The Original Soundtrack

Island 1980

Forrrce Keep On Dancin'

West End 1982

Lino Squares The Role Of Linoleum

Humboldt County 1997

William Onyeabor Anything You Sow

Wilfilms 1985

Hot Chip Why Make Sense?

Domino 2015

Patrick Cowley Menergy: The Album

Fusion 1981

Andrew Weatherall Qualia

Höga Nord 2017

Holger Czukay On The Way To The Peak Of Normal

Welt-Rekord 1981

Can Saw Delight

Harvest 1977

J.J. Cale 5

Shelter 1979

Prince Far I Under Heavy Manners

Joe Gibbs 1977

Various Artists Calypsoul 70: Caribbean Soul & Calypso Crossover 1969-1979

Strut 2008

Sweet Talks Hollywood Highlife Party

Philips 1978

The Beginning Of The End Funky Nassau

Alston 1971

Osibisa Getting Hot

Chic 1987

Jah Wobble/The Edge/Holger Czukay Snake Charmer

Island 1983

LISTEN NOW

TV005 What Time Is It?

LISTEN NOW

TV002: Remain In Ghosts

200. Eden Ahbez Eden's Island The Music Of An Enchanted Isle

Del-Fi 1960

199. Gwen McCrae Gwen McCrae

Cat 1972

198. 2 Men A Drum Machine And A Trumpet Tired Of Getting Pushed Around: The Mayhem Rhythm Remix

I.R.S. 1987

197. Dâm-Funk Toeachizown

Stones Throw 2009

196. Ananda Shankar Ananda Shankar

Reprise 1970

195. Yoko Ono Walking On Thin Ice

Geffen 1981

194. Nat King Cole and His Trio After Midnight

Capitol 1956

193. Docteur Nico & L'Orchestre African Fiesta L'Afrique Danse No. 8

African 1969

192. Augustus Pablo East Of The River Nile

Yard 1971

191. Gilberto Gil & Jorge Ben Ogum Xangô

Verve 1975

190. Mantronix Scream

Sleeping Bag 1987

189. DJ Rashad Double Cup

Hyperdub 2013