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Sleepwalking Through the Mekong

[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 21, 2009 by admin in Popular Media

Sunday, June 21st, 2009

Just when you thought you’d hear it all, some Cambodian Pop comes along. Yes. I said Cambodian Pop. Eat your heart out, MIA, this is actual music.


View the Trailer for Sleepwalking
Through The Mekong

Just when I’m pretty sure I’ve exhausted the more interesting and obscure pop music fusions from around the world, someone has to come along and show me otherwise. The other day a photographer friend of mine mentioned the film Sleepwalking Through the Mekong. If you haven’t seen it, you’re in for a unique treat. Shot in a casual documentary style, the film follows the LA band Dengue Fever on a tour through Cambodia, explaining how five American musicians hooked up with a Cambodian singer in LA to form a band to play 60′s Cambodian Pop. And before you laugh at the idea of Cambodian pop, give the stuff a listen; it jumps on the wave of 60′s surfer psychedelia and takes it to the tropics with a sort of plaintive island sound that’s probably unlike anything you’ve heard before. The film also explores a painful aspect of Khmer music and Cambodian pop; since many of the original stars of the genre (Sinn Sisamouth, Pan Ron , Ros Sereysothea) were were creating their music in the years just prior to the Pol Pot massacres, they all are presumed to have been killed in the mass slaughter of Cambodia’s legendary Killing Fields. I frankly cried during a profoundly bittersweet moment in the film in which a music teacher who was alive – but of course unable to sing Khmer pop music during the Khmer Rouge regime – was able to see her young students gleefullly performing the happy pop songs she was denied. And ironically, with a group of Americans who have a genuine passion for Khmer culture rather than a passion for carpet bombing their country and looking away as a demented leader slaughters nearly a third of their population. By the way, Dengue Fever not only serves up some heartfelt and authentic pop, they’re apparently commited to assisting the wildlife of Cambodia.

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Support Corporate Fascism – Buy A CD

[ 5 Comments ]Posted on June 19, 2009 by admin in Music

Friday, June 19th, 2009

Shared any music with your friends lately? You may owe the RIAA $80,000 per song.

If you’ve shared any music with your friends in a digital format recently, you might want to wipe your hard drive. That rascally RIAA is at it again, winning an absolutely psychotic copyright infringement case against a single consumer, to the tune of $1.92 million. Who knows how they expect Jammie Thomas to pay the nearly two million dollars she owes for the 24 songs she “pirated”….wait. Did I just say 24 songs for $1.92 million dollars? Yes. I did. That’s why I’m reviving the CopyReich Shop I created a while back. If this isn’t fascist behavior on the part of the recording industry, I don’t know what is. The stupid consumer won’t buy your crappy overpriced products? Destroy their life by suing the f*ck out of them! We just talked about the CopyFight last week; frankly I thought it was kind of a dead movement. Maybe it’s time we revitalized it. If you find the Nazi-esque images of the CopyReich Shop offensive, we also have the Copyfight Shop, which pokes fun at the Creative Commons license. And which is also perhaps due for a revival; it seems Instructables.com may be perverting it’s purpose to screw their content creators. By the way, here’s a nice flowchart if you’ve ever wondered how the RIAA decides to pursue these cases.

Iggy Pop’s New Release – Préliminaires

[ Comments Off ]Posted on June 3, 2009 by admin in Music

Wednesday, June 3rd, 2009

You’ll want to put on Iggy Pop’s new CD Préliminaires almost as much as you’ll want HIM to put on a shirt.


I think it’s finally time
for Iggy to put on a
shirt. How about you?

When you’re Iggy Pop, you have to go to great lengths to surprise people. I mean, after being one of the first to pull your penis out on stage (I think Jim Morrison beat him to “the draw”), being credited with inventing the “stage dive”, and acquiring the moniker “Godfather of Punk”, what’s left? Well, Iggy came up with something. Just enter your Serge Gainsbourg-slash-Leonard Cohen phase at the age of 62 with a release like his new CD Préliminaires. I’ve been an off-and-on fan of Iggy since I was about 16, when his new album The Idiot was on heavy rotation at my house along with with Bowie’s Low. His energy and crazed persona were never what interested me; and half of his music really doesn’t do much for me. But that other half? Holy crap. He just goes places others don’t go, and occasionally brings back something we didn’t know we needed. And I’m reluctantly forced to admit that I’m enjoying what he’s done on this new release. Except that I’d like to strangle him for covering Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Insensatez”. Jesus Iggy, why? Just why? If you want to pick up a copy, there’s a limited edition package available (6,000 worldwide), as well as a regular CD and a digital download. They also have some amusing video clips of Iggy performing the new material in France on Iggy’s site. I wonder if the now legendary (and hilarious) tour rider is still in use? If you’d like to read more about Préliminaires, BlogCritics has a fairly even-handed review. And can someone tell me how you say “please put on a shirt” in French?

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Why I’m Moving To Vienna And Forming A Balkan Funk Band

[ 1 Comment ]Posted on May 26, 2009 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture, Music

Tuesday, May 26th, 2009

The Internet is dangerous. One day you’re watching an American film about suicide, the next day you’re moving to Vienna and starting a Balkan Funk Band.

The Internet is dangerous. It’s because of the Internet that I’m moving to either Barcelona or Vienna and starting a Balkan Funk Band. Let me explain. The other day, I finally saw Wrist Cutters – A Love Story (and wrote about it). I loved bits of the soundtrack, especially the tunes by Gogol Bordello, so I picked up their CD Multi Kontra Culti vs. Irony, because I couldn’t get the song Through The Roof ‘N’ Underground out of my head. There was one part of the lyric that I couldn’t make out, so I googled it, and amongst the results were images of a grass-roofed, insanely organic building designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, whose work is a little suggestive of Antoni Gaudi, one of my favorite architects. As I kept browsing images of Gaudi and Hundertwasser, I got more curious about Gogol Bordello , and found out that one of their ex-members had formed a band called Balkan Beat Box. The damage was done, I had found my life’s new purpose: I am destined to form a Balkan Funk Band. I decided the only way I could draw the inspiration I need is to live in an apartment that has no corners. Don’t ask me why, but it is one of several things that Hundertwasser and Gaudi had in common. The images speak for themselves, but if you haven’t heard the music mentioned here, well, Gogol Bordello plays an odd sort of acoustic slavic folk punk. Their songs routinely capture a bemused melancholy, a hopeful resignation, sort of suggestive of Borat’s more thoughtful brothers or something. Balkan Beat Box is a different story. Imagine Drum ‘n’ Bass, but with the bass lines beefed up with tubas, and the synth wails tempered with trumpets. All with a gypsy-like arabic scales running through it. They use a lot of samples and drum loops. Imagine you hung out with a polka band, dropped some acid and smoked some really good hash, and headed off to the club. Which is what I think I’ll just be doing now.

Del tha Funkee Homosapien – Funk Man (The Stimulus Package)

[ Comments Off ]Posted on May 25, 2009 by admin in Music

Monday, May 25th, 2009

How Del Tha Funkee Homosapien started a hip-hop revival on my hard drive.

I was so busy grinding my own music career into oblivion in the early 90′s that I was too busy to dig deeper into a lot of the cooler music that was going down, especially upbeat hip-hop as defined by bands like (these are all YouTube links) Digable Planets, Dream Warriors, Arrested Development, Digital Underground and others. Which is why I have to thank Del tha Funkee Homosapien for releasing his latest collection for free; I’m a cheap bastard, and I couldn’t resist seeing what he’s been up to. Del was only eighteen when he recorded the infectiously brilliant Mistadobalina, featured in the clip at left, and unfortunately a lot of what hip hop was about at that time got buried in popular perception by the gangsta crap bullshit that followed. Fortunately all the fools who used music to promote hatred and violence have done a pretty good job of offing each other, and now some of the more positive 90′s hip-hop acts are enjoying a little revival this summer, at least in Boston (and on my computer). Take a minute to download Del’s new release Funk Man (The Stimulus Package), it’s worth a spin, and the price is right. There’s nothing groundbreaking here, but he definitely foments some downtempo funk with a crunchy mix (which sounds almost like it was done on tape) that puts to use a lot of heavy compressed bass, Fender Rhodes, and clavinet. Even if Del doesn’t stimulate your package, it’s an excellent stress test for your woofers. Read the rest of this entry »

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