Found this one on another blog a while ago. Wish I remembered which one. Anyway, it’s a bunch of Japanese people making droney psychedelic sounds using sitars, tablas and electronics. Really neat stuff.
Here's something to lighten the mood a little after the last couple of posts.
Exactly what the title says. Wave upon wave of beautiful, nightmarish noise.
Partch based this, one of his earliest extant works, on the texts of the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po. Written between 1931 and 1933, The Seventeen Lyrics were composed for Intoning Voice and Partch's creation the Adapted Viola, a hybrid consisting of a cello neck grafted onto a viola's body, its open strings tuned one octave below a violin. Performing the work on this 1995 recording are tenor violinist Ted Mook and intoning voice Stephen Kalm. (allmusic)
The music of Iannis Xenakis can shuttle seamlessly between extremes: from ancient mythology to modern science, from the intensely visceral to the impossibly cerebral and from private insight to public spectacle. Few of his works spanned these poles as effectively as his landmark electro-acoustic tape piece, "La Légende d'Eer. Written for the opening of the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris in 1978, "La Légende d'Eer" is a sweeping 45-minute work that takes its title from the myth of Er as recounted in Plato's "Republic." The music is a dense futuristic assembly of materials including non-Western percussion and constructed noise, and a dizzying array of computer-generated sound derived from Xenakis's complex theories of probability. (http://www.moderecords.com/catalog/148xenakis.html)
King Sunny Adé is the undisputed master of Jùjú, a type of Nigerian pop music that combines electric guitars and synthesizers with dense polyrhythms and talking drums. This was the first record he put out on a major label, and the one that introduced him to the world.
Dense, fractured, ominous electronic pulsations. Almost too much for the human brain to take in at once. This is the kind of thing our robot overlords will be grooving to a hundred years from now.
This was my soundtrack to the summer of 2006. Curt Kirkwood is a member of the Meat Puppets, an Arizona band that put out a string of amazing psych-rock albums in the 80s and then had about seven and a half minutes of fame after making a guest appearance at Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance. This is his first and only solo outing so far, a fun little country/folk record. It’s a fairly stripped down and understated affair, dominated by acoustics guitars and Kirkwood’s trademark acid-fried poetry sung in his lazy drawl.
Roland Kirk was one of the most enigmatic performers of the 60s jazz scene. A blind saxophonist with bizarre dress sense, he very much played the goofball on stage, often handling several instruments at once (including a little flute stuck up his nose) and entertaining his audience with oddball banter. But he took himself and his work seriously, scoffing at being labeled a jazz musician and preferring the term black classical music.
amazon.uk product description:
I have a hard time talking about jazz without sounding like a douchebag, so I’ll just leave you with this little article for basic info.
Wikipedia says:
Cesária Évora, born in 1941 in the port town of Mindelo on the Cape Verde island of Sao Vicente, is known as the barefoot diva because of her propensity to appear on stage in her bare feet in support of the disadvantaged women and children of her country.
This one's awesome. Electro-fried Congolese music. Traditional instruments and percussion are combined with fuzzy guitars and layers of chanted vocals to create deep, trancey grooves. Very hypnotic.
Jazzy electro-pop tunes with lots of crazy found-sound percussion and some beautiful singing.
This king size dub album is a lion of a record roaring with dub plates, rarities and obscure gems. Dominated by the drums of Sly Dunbar it represents a golden period when Channel One held the key to much of what was to follow in reggae music. The sound of Channel One, which achieved worldwide prominence in the mid-seventies reggae boom, wielded an unparalleled influence throughout the world. Its origins were based on Ernest and Jo Jo Hookim’s lifelong love of music and their fascination with the way it was made. They were true visionaries and it is impossible to overstate the influence that the brothers’ custom built studio wielded on the development of Jamaican music. The Channel One drum sound was totally unique and Sly Dunbar, along with engineers Ernest Hookim and Barnabas, would spend days perfecting it. As its fame grew all kinds of people, including Sting and The Clash, came to the studio to try and capture some of the magic that was created down on Maxfield Avenue. (http://www.pressure.co.uk/item/PS55/)
Growing are a guitar/bass duo from New York that create droney, hypnotic soundscapes using loop pedals and an assortment of other equipment and effects. Here’s their most recent album.
Celebrate the first day of spring with some groovy dance music.
This one’s really nice. Substantial is an MC from Maryland and this was his first album, a collaboration with Japanese producer Nujabes. Here’s something from his Bebo profile:
This album came out right after Trout Mask Replica, and is similar in style, though considerably toned-down. The songs here are about as jagged and abstract as those on Trout Mask, but the band is smaller (guitar, bass and two drummers) and more focused. The Captain still belts out his baffling poetry like a rabid werewolf, but also seems to show some concern for traditional song structure, like repeating melodies and the occasional chorus.
Classic album by Chicago house producer Larry Heard. It's a compilation of his earliest instrumental demos from the early 80s.
Boubacar is the man, but his records can be ridiculously hard to find. If you like this one be sure to check out the awesome tape posted over at Awesome Tapes From Africa.
To celebrate the first Chilean flag on my flagcounter here’s the latest Ricardo Villalobos record.
“The Sisters Love released a superb set of soul/funk tracks between 1967-73 including the underground disco classic ‘Give Me Your Love’. ‘Ahead of their time’ is a much used phrase to describe some of the most creative groups and The Sisters Love were most definitely that.”
Because this site needs more Aphex Twin. Here’s allmusic:
Snagged this one off of the Hipinion forums. There isn’t much info about this guy online, but here’s a cool article.
This is about as good as it gets.
Dubstep has been pretty big in the UK for a while now, and Skream is one of its major proponents. Here’s a 2-hour mix he put together for BBC Radio a while back. It covers pretty much all grounds within the genre – from murky and sinister to murky and sinister.
Been hearing about these guys for a while and finally decided to check them out. This is a pretty neat little album. Listening to it is kind of like drinking a whole pot of coffee and being happy and dizzy at the same time. The singer (if you can really call her that) pretty much yelps and hollers all the way through. The few words you can make out are gibberish, but you can tell she’s really excited about something. I give it 4 thumbs up out of 5.
Here's Q-Tip’s 2002 solo record, a loose and laid-back set of tunes with some heavy jazz and soul overtones. A lot of this reminds me of Prince. It was apparently deemed too uncommercial and never released. This is what Q-Tip had to say about it:
This one’s short and sweet. Part of the vinyl Analord series, which saw Richard James’ return to analog equipment after messing around with computer music for a few years. There’s a lot going on in this 13-minute set. Old-school skronky bass stabs, ghostly synth pads and weird vocoder sounds are the order of the day.
This one's kind of nuts. George Coleman sings some pretty demented blues. He delivers rambling monologues, shrieks, whistles, laughs and barks like a dog all while banging on an empty oil drum.
Waves of fuzzy ambient sound, sparse drum beats reminiscent of Boards of Canada, and two very stoned-sounding MCs trading nonsensical lines and telling stories that seem to go nowhere. Really good stuff.
The sound quality’s not great but it’s a wild performance.
From the Wikipedia: 
Cut-and-paste electronic/hip-hop stuff, kind of similar to RJD2 and DJ Shadow.
Pretty good poppy drum‘n’bass-ish stuff from Germany.
I know this album is old news, but I listened to it for the first time in a while today and was reminded of just how good it is.
