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Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat – Innovative? No. Noteworthy? Yes.

[ Comments Off ]Posted on April 7, 2010 by admin in Music

Wednesday, April 7th, 2010

Charanjit Singh’s 1982 release Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat has made quite a splash in the hipper music press, but my band’s manager in 1982 always threatened to pull the plug when we played stuff like this.

For many who consider themselves sophisticated listeners, the words “synthesizing” and “disco beat” in an album title would pretty much wrap it up in terms of whether or not they’d listen to it. And if they weren’t into Indian music, throwing the word “raga” in there would seal the deal for good. Which would be too bad in the case of Charanjit Singh’s 1982 release Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat. It’s worth a listen. Although I wouldn’t give the raves a lot of pop media blogs are giving it and say it’s history-dismantling or absolutely shock and awe inducing or that Charanjit Singh accidentally invented house music. No, to me the recording is remarkable for other reasons, primary amongst them being the fact that it exists at all. Partly because it’s electronic, partly because it was from an Indian artist in 1982, but mainly because someone took the time to record it so well, and that there was still a master to work with decades later. Although fans of acid and other techno-inspired club music would strangle me for saying this, the music on this record is remarkably unremarkable not because it’s bad in any way, but to be blunt, whenever my band’s manager in 1982 caught us pursuing this kind of repetitious multicultural noodling with our Roland synth and drum machine, he threatened to pull funding. And you could often hear music much like this coming through the studio walls when musicians of the era were stoned and jamming. You never would have thought at the time to record the stuff, and if you did, you probably would have done so on some crappy 4-track portastudio. It took a generation of drugs and clubbing for dance music to evolve to the point where this kind of machine-driven droning was actually perceived as music. I jest a little, but I’m partly serious. Ten Ragas To A Disco Beat is definitely worth a listen simply because it’s worth a listen. In terms of being ahead of its time though? It’s probably more worthy of note because of the fact that the recording made it to tape and lasted long enough for a re-release almost 30 years later than because it was prescient or eerily visionary. I’m just gonna go see if I can find those portastudio tapes now. I may have found an aftermarket for my post-punk era rejected demos . Read the rest of this entry »

Erykah Badu, Lady Gaga & Beyoncé Try To Go Too Far But Don’t Get There

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on April 2, 2010 by admin in Music

Friday, April 2nd, 2010

But Gettin’ Naked & Lesbian Prison Love Still Pays The Bills


We’re tastefully passing on the rhyming
possibilities of the Grassy Knoll.

[Note: If you've been living in a pop music isolation chamber lately, there are spoilers ahead] Okay. This whole “get naked while walking down the street singing your song” meme is getting reeeally tired. Don’t get me wrong – I have no desire to become a critic, and I really love Erykah Badu – but I can only imagine the production meeting for the recent video for her song Window Seat: “Yeah, we’ll have you walk down the street in broad daylight stripping your clothes off, and – WHAT? Matt and Kim and Make The Girl Dance have already done it? Well sure, but I bet they didn’t get SHOT at the end, did they?” Although I’d give her a 6 out of 10 for meaningful and useful artistic expression, and a 9 out of 10 in the trunk department (did I really just type that?), I otherwise am not too stunned with the statement the video aims for. And who’d have thought that getting naked would still have an impact in the 21st century in the first place? Or that Lady Gaga and Beyonce could drive even India.Arie to say “you’ve gone too far!” by making a video that looks like Quentin Tarantino collaborated with Madonna and Oliver Stone to do a remake of Prisoner Cell Block H? Anybody who thinks this video “goes too far” has obviously never heard of this thing called “the 1980′s” and acts like GG Allin. Here are the videos. I’ll shut up now. Read the rest of this entry »

Why Your Music Collection Probably Sucks

[ 2 Comments ]Posted on March 25, 2010 by admin in Music

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

That massive music collection you’ve compiled by buying songs on iTunes? The songs are probably worth just about every one of those 99 cents you paid for them. MP3′s intrinsically suck as an audio file format.

A long time ago we pointed out why your music selections might suck. Well, now we’re going to tell you why your collection sucks. How many songs would you say you have on your hard drive? A few hundred? A few thousand? Did you buy or otherwise download them online as mp3′s? If your answer is “yes”, we can fairly safely say your music collection sucks a little bit. Why? There are two reasons. One is that mp3′s – at any bitrate – simply will never contain the content of the original recording. The methods used for compression in an mp3 file are based on psychoacoustic modeling that by its very nature removes sound that you pay less attention to in the first place. Although you’ll find audio nuts arguing about .mp3 vs .flac vs .wav ’til the end of time on discussion boards, it’s a moot point. If you can’t hear the difference between a high-quality CD and an mp3 rip of it, that just means you can’t hear the difference. It absolutely is there. It may not bother you – which in fact seems to be the case with the iPod generation – but that in fact is just another psychoacoustic phenomena. The other reason your music collection probably sucks is that since the late 80′s, producers and engineers have engaged in what some in the industry call the Loudness War, which is the recording industry’s tendency to abandon dynamic range altogether for the sake of pure volume. If you think this is some sort of obnoxious audiophile whining, see the graph and brief video below, or if you’re interested in an in-depth technical rundown, see A Chronology of the Loudness War (scroll down). The difference is pretty astounding. So how can you resuscitate the quality of your music collection? Well, if you’re listening to it on your iPod or through your computer speakers, don’t worry about it, you won’t be able to hear many of these differences anyway. On the other hand, if you have a lot of disposable income, you could start replacing it all on vinyl and high-quality import CD’s, and play them on your $554,000 stereo system. If you haven’t listened to your music on a full-blown stereo system for a while, see the clip and graphic below to visualize just how bad this problem really is. Read the rest of this entry »

Cam McAzie, Punk Rock Bagpiper – Video Kilt The Radio Star

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on March 19, 2010 by admin in Music

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Aussie punk rock buskering bagpiper gives new meaning to “down under” when he dons his kilt and combat boots


Excuse me mate, I believe
your bagpipes are on fire.

When I was a kid my father used to terrorize me by putting on the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards bagpipe album that featured the hit single Amazing Grace. The odd thing was that it wasn’t the bagpipe music that terrorized me, it was my poor tone-deaf dad’s quarter-step-flat droning voice as he sang along. The bagpipe music I loved. Yes, in spite of jokes like “Why do bagpipers walk when they play? To get away from the sound“, and the fact that the original purpose of bagpipes was to scare the enemy off the battlefield when conventional weapons weren’t doing the trick, I’ve always felt a certain connection with the reedy drone of the instrument. At the same time I’ve never found true gratification with its use; in spite of a lengthy list of bands that have put the pipes to use, no-one’s quite hit the mark for me. You’ve probably heard the more familiar examples like Peter Gabriel’s Come Talk to Me (that link is an awesome stage clip by the way), half the catalog of Afro Celt Sound System, or more recently Eminem’s Bagpipes From Baghdad, but I bet you’ve never heard of Cam McAzie, the BadPiper. Leave it to a country founded by criminals and scoundrels to produce the world’s most rebellious player of the world’s most outcast instrument. McAzie brings new meaning to the term “down under” when he dons his kilt and combat boots, preens his mohawk, and starts pumping his punk rock pipes. Check out the vids below, and another one I threw in for fun, by the Mudmen. Know of any cool uses of bagpipe you’d care to share? Read the rest of this entry »

Christen Lien’s Vol I: Battle Cry Gives The Viola Its Voice Back

[ 5 Comments ]Posted on March 14, 2010 by admin in Music

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

The viola is often the butt of jokes like “What’s the difference between a seamstress and a violist? The seamstress tucks up the frills”, but Christen Lien gives the viola its voice back on her brilliant release Vol I: Battle Cry

I’ve always felt a little bit of sympathy for the viola. The violin, in spite of its rather thin voice and high screech potential, always gets the limelight, while the richer, sonorous voice of the viola gets relegated to harmonies and pizzicatos. Well, I can feel a little less sympathy after listening to Christen Lien’s new CD Vol. I: Battle Cry. Lien definitely gives the instrument its voice back, and lets it say all the things it has the beauty and the power to say when it’s in the right hands. If you like the loop-based cello work of Zoe Keating, there’s a good chance you’d enjoy Lien’s work. Lien uses a bit of looping to help create the voices, rhythms, and textures on Battle Cry. But the fact that both Keating and Lien create atmospheric and compelling music by using looping on their bowed instruments is where the comparison ends. While I adore Keating’s soaring textural broods, Lien branches out a bit more. The tunes on Battle Cry range from the playful to the reflective, and from the almost searingly rhythmic to pastoral realms that literally brought tears to my eyes on repeated listens. There are brief previews of the songs below, and full length previews on her site . It’s available on Amazon as single songs, an album download, or eco-friendly on-demand CD, as well as from the other sources listed on Lien’s site, including CDBaby and iTunes. Learn more about how Lien was inspired by Martin Luther King – among other things – in this SCPR piece. The article includes this clip in which she walks you through the inpirations for the individual tunes. Lien has a lot of interesting things to say, but I’m quite content with what she says with the viola. Read the rest of this entry »

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