Monday, August 30, 2004
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glisten: Blue CD 10
19. Aphex Twin - "Blue Calx"
Juan - Not my kind of thing. Never will be.
Brian - Or not. Richard James, John Cage. John Cage, Richard James. That’s a stretch though, isn’t it? Too easy. Aphex Twin creates movements, though, like Cage. He seems restless. He wants to play with tonality. But he’s different isn’t he? Like Cage, or even Brian Eno, he takes some time. Digestion. But you get rewarded. Just not necessarily in the way you expect.
Rob - I listened to this right before falling off to sleep, with all of the lights off. It is a beautiful track that conveys a sense of sadness and desperation. I quite enjoyed it.
Pastor - Ahh yes this was a welcome ear cleaner to scrub out the lingering harmonica gunk from the last track.
Before all the hArD(0R3 aphex phreaks come by to inform me that I've mislabelled this, let me mea culpa in advance and tell you that part of the fun of listening to "Selected Ambient" is trying to figure out just what track you have on in the first place.
Celebrated as one of the greatest albums of the nineties, "Ambient" is perenially music of the future today. Fleshy and crystalline all at once, Aphex has hours of music that runs roughshod over the too clean pigeonholes that electrogeeks love to fall back on. It's among my favorite things to listen to when I need to recharge the ear.
Buy "Selected Ambient Works, Volume 2", a two disc collection of strangely organic electronic music, from Amazon.
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Visit Aphex Twin's site for his album 'Drukqs' from Warp Records.
Lotsa DLable music!
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Read this '97 interview with James.
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Explore Kamm's fairly comprehensive (if outdated) Aphex fan page.
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Bookmark this fairly nicely designed "Blue Calx" blog.
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20. Blind James Campbell - "I Am So Blue When It Rains"
Juan - A bit chaotic and out of tune, but good to sing with your friends at the bar.
Brian - Yes. Yesyesyesyesyesyes. Break out the bourbon, the whiskey, the ‘shine…I don’t care. Joy. Happiness. Morning comes. Perfect ending…I really don’t know what to say…Best song on the cd. There, I said it. Thank you, Blind James.
Rob - Odd way to tend the album, yet somehow it fits.
Pastor - He may be blue but this brought a huge smile to my face.
Heh. Nothing like a little joy to clean the palate, eh?
Buy "Blind James Campbell and his Nashville Street Band," a funky raggedy ass '63 reissue, direct from Arhoolie Records.
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I'm So Blue
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When It Rains
That's all for the Blue action. Thanks again to my reviewers.
C'mon back t'morrah; we gonna get DRUNK!
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spiffy
We made 100,000 individual hits over the weekend. I feel so special!
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All the self-respecting music geeks in the house need to get out to check the Top 100 singles and Top 100 albums of the past five years, as selected by ILM.
Required reading.
I can't even pretend that I agree with all this (especially as there's far too much on there that I know nothing about) but this is definitely gonna color my purchasing for the next year or so. Heck, I already (finally) picked up copies of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and "Kid A" based on their placement.
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A letter from Ray Davis, re: our last entry:
"I play Elvis's 'Blue Moon' every June 16, along with 'Finnegan's Wake' and 'The Croppy Boy' and 'The Low-Backed Car' and 'I Dreamt I Dwealt in Marble Halls' and Van Morrison's "St. Dominic's Preview'. I assume all my fellow Joyceans would agree that Elvis should've played Stephen Dedalus in the movie version of 'Ulysses', although I've never bothered to ask them.
'Bloooom... you saw me standing alone... without a dream in my heart... without a love of my own. Bloooom....'
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Darwin (previously of the ODB/Talking Heads mashup and the excellent Nuclear Beef contributes another mashup from Acapella week and... well, I'll let him tell you:
"> Forksclovetofu sez:
> I have to tell you, this really was difficult for me to get into but I totally bought in after a half dozen listens.
It's weird, because I had a similar experience while writing it. I thought it was just that I have no idea what the original song is about or what the lyrics are saying. Over the last week or so I've noticed that snippets of my remix have popped into my head.. the vocal interacting with the beat.. and I still don't understand what the lyrics mean. Needless to say this hasn't really happened to me before. Thanks for prompting me to do something satisfying which I probably wouldn't have done otherwise.
I also get the feeling that maybe the Ladysmith track is not exactly in the same time signature (time system?) as the backing track. With the long sustains and decays on their vocals (and the fact that the track is a "pure" acapella instead of the vocal for a full track) AND the lack of lyrical signposts, it was a matter of trying to fit it together until it sounded right. Usually when mashing or remixing you have a more defined structure in the original vocal. I think I probably discarded about 20% of the vocal because it didn't "fit" with the musical progression. There's also random segments which I re-used in the middle, to bridge between "verses" ... which obviously would never work with a song in a language that I can understand.
Like I said, not your typical remix!"
1. Ladysmith Black Mambazo vs. Bobby Brown - "A Boy's Prerogative (DJ Darwin Mashup)"
