That’s right!
Edited to make it more clear.
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Once again, i’m really enjoying this thread. Its both fun to see what fellow forum members are coming up with and its an interesting exercise to try to stick to the letter of the premise, for me anyway, distinguishing between favorites and albums that could help to explain something about me as a person. Anyway…
For installment three i present:
Duck Stab/ Buster and Glen by The Residents.
I had a passing familiarity with the Residents from my early teens onward but it was based on the occasional song on a mixtape and that sort of thing. Out living on my own in my late teens i’d heard “Third Reich & Roll” and while i thought it was clever and funny it didn’t prompt me to look deeper into the band. It wasn’t until i was about twenty and had moved to the bay area that they clicked for me and this was the album that did it. I was hanging out with someone who was shocked, knowing me, that i wasn’t a fan of theirs. She put this on and i laid on her bed in her tiny apartment at about 3am an gave the entire album an honest listen with no distractions and i was hooked. I got it. It was like i’d been given both a new secret path to follow and a little bit of validation for having looked for the path previously, artistically that is.
Here’s the thing, The Residents had achieved something i had been trying to achieve but had been elusive to me, i wasn’t sure exactly what it was i was trying to do and after hearing this album i finally understood. Let me back up a little bit. I had always liked the idea of psychedelic music but while i’d heard countless examples of it i never felt any of it actually translated the psychedelic experience musically. Most of it was blues derived hippy jam band type stuff, long and repetitive songs with swirly modulation effects, which is fine if that’s your thing but none of it evoked the mind state or emotional state of having an altered experience for me, this album did. It doesn’t use pentatonic solos through a phaser pedal, it evokes the uncanny valley, and that’s some deep shit, and not easy to pull off. It can be beautiful and terrifying and panicked and funny all at the same time. It feels like it’s trying to rewrite your brain.
I spent untold hours playing along to this album, sitting at the organ, guitar in my lap, studying the bizarre harmonies. It’s one of those albums that’s informed my approach to art ever since.
This was their fifth album (1978), i think they’ve done around 60 at this point (and have managed to remain almost entirely anonymous for more that five and a half decades) and they’re still going. Duck Stab was was an EP and Buster and Glen was supposed to be the follow up EP but they ended up releasing them together with Duck Stab as side A and Buster and Glen as side B. While i love the whole thing i feel like side B leans further into what I’ve discussed here. “Hello Skinny” and “Weight-Lifting Lulu” in particular but i think the most haunting track is “Semolina”, its an masterclass in mashing disparate emotions.
The album also features frequent collaborator Snakefinger! One of my favorite experimental guitarists of the era. Its harder than it seems to take a solo that makes no sense but is still cool. Wild violinist too.
I would imagine most people here are at least somewhat familiar with the Residents but if not i highly recommend turning off all the lights, getting comfy, and listening to this without distraction. They have plenty of albums that could be argued are better in one way or another but this is an excellent intro to the band.
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orangesodabandit’s Twelve Defining Albums: March
The Phantom’s Revenge - Charlie (2010)
I really, really, really wanna talk about bloghouse for a second.
I don’t necessarily mean that punk rock-y/Fool’s Gold Records/Kitsuné Maison/post-Nite Versions sound. As much as I do adore bands like Cut Copy, The Twelves, Van She and the like, that’s not what I’m here to preach about today.
No no, the bloghouse I’m talking about is the second big wave of French House music that happened between 2008 'til about 2013.
Work with me for a little while, cuz this is gonna take a minute to get to the point.
Now this period of electronic music does absolutely owe its roots to the garage rock revival of the early 2000s in New York (i.e. The White Stripes, The Strokes, or the unbelievably important LCD Soundsystem), 2manydjs’ As Heard on Radio Soulwax mix series, and Ed Banger Records almost single-handedly rejuvenating Parisian electronic identity with stuff like Breakbot’s Happy Rabbit EP, DJ Mehdi’s Lucky Boy and Justice’s Cross (all in the same year!). But it’s important to remember where exactly the state of French Touch was during all this.
Daft Punk, the posterchildren for all things filtered and funky (for better or for worst, rest in peace to Paul Johnson), had dropped all of the technicolor soul of Discovery - released only just in 2001 - for the industrial, thrashy, abrasive, talkboxed, appropriately robotic synthesized grime of 2005’s Human After All. A fitting change most definitely, and one that probably had more influence than I realize on the music that would follow it in the years to come, but a jarring one nonetheless. How in the hell do you go from Crescendolls to Television Rules the Nation? The same guys who made Superheroes and High Life did Robot Rock and Technologic?!
And check who’s on the roster for the subsequent remix album that came out the same year? Erol Alkan, SebastiAn, Para One, Soulwax and Digitalism. A veritable who’s who of the electro house movement not even two years later.
Eric Prydz and Bob Sinclair would follow the same path. Alan Braxe and Fred Falke had long since gone for synth-ier pastures in the time since 2000’s Intro. And when had Play Paul, Sedat the Turkish Avenger, Deelat or the Buffalo Bunch last released something? Hell, Busy P was Daft Punk’s manager for a time before founding Ed Banger Recs. It seemed like the world had moved on; if Daft Punk can trade in their Mackie mixers, SP1200s and post-disco records for vocoders, Roland synthesizers and Ableton, maybe it we should too?
But even through all of that, disco hadn’t died twice. Lurking in the corners of the internet was a combo of websites that would go on to form the foundation of French House’s second time in the sun; MySpace, The Hype Machine, and a new little music-sharing site called SoundCloud. And while the big dogs of the fidget house/electro house scene continued to rock shit proper all over the world, a new generation of musicians who grew up on Roule and Crydamoure tracks took notes in the background. And waited.
So where was young orangesodabandit during all this?
As a kid in middle school, around 2009 and 2010, my earliest exposure to electronic music had been the stuff that my mom - a South Central LA girl who spent her free time at World on Wheels and Uncle Jam’s Army parties in the mid 80s - and my dad - a farmer’s son who spent all of his time around his uncles and at the roller rinks of Central Louisiana - would play. Lots of Kraftwerk, Soulsonic Force, Art of Noise, Kleeer, a bunch of staples of breakdancing and pop-locking that colored my folks’ teenage years. Whodini’s Five Minutes of Funk was my shit, and if you had asked me back then, I really wouldn’t have known that it was a couple decades old.
Once the big “EDM” boom hit the city’s radios and started making its way through pop music though, then suddenly I was exposed to a hell of a lot of different artists. Skrillex and deadmau5, specifically, caught my ears wide open. I’d just gotten my first personal laptop for Christmas - a cheap, shiny, royal purple HP that weight a ton and smudged easy - and it was a welcome change from the family PC I’d accidentally gotten a virus on from playing games on AddictingGames and Newgrounds. Now all of a sudden, I had access to VirtualDJ and Youtube, and that’s all I needed. Not just for music, but for my life in its entirety. I surfed through hours upon hours of whatever I felt like listening to for the first time in my life. I wasn’t restricted by whatever my mom put on her iPod or what CDs my dad still kept in his car on the way to and from school; if I liked the way it sounded, I could jam on it for hours. I had so much fun listening to stuff, downloading it and proceeding to mix them all terribly and throw a million transition effects over the whole thing. It made me want to be a proper DJ.
A year or two down the line, I came across a channel called alexdaftpunk91. She would post all sorts of older house and French touch jams for more people to check out, and it was the first time I saw someone use a Youtube channel like an archive of music. It’s also very important to note that I was really into original The Karate Kid at the time I found it. So when I saw a song by some dude named “The Phantom’s Revenge” called Johnny Lawrence of the Cobra Kai, I figured, “hell yeah, I’ll see what that’s about.”
I wasn’t ready.
…
Have you ever heard something so far left of your frame of reference of music that it stops you in your tracks? And I don’t mean something that caught your ear, or even something you heard in public and you decided that you really liked it. Nah. I mean, something so critically different and catches just at the right moment in your life where you’re developing your taste in jams that you no longer see music the same as a result?
That is what The Phantom’s Revenge did to me. Twice.
The Phantom’s Revenge has had probably the most interesting career of any artist that I’ve followed since childhood. His early style - what covers the entirety of the Charlie EP and all of his original tracks and many, many, many remixes from 2008 up to 2013’s The Baseball Furies EP - is the result of a dyed-in-the-wool househead living in France during the first wave of French Touch and Chicago ghetto house in the late 90s mashing together the heavy electronic sidechaining, low bitrate MP3s and glitched-out stylings of the bloghouse era. The Phantom’s Revenge didn’t wear his influences on his sleeve, so much as he beat you over the head with an aluminium bat plastered with Armand Van Helden, Dancemania and Uffie stickers.
And it shouldn’t work. To write that out on paper put into perspective for me how bad the music should have sounded. At no point should mixing these two ideas sound even close to as good as this. Even the Ed Banger crew’s times dipping their toes into classic French House stuff (i.e. Justice’s D.A.N.C.E.) was never this faithful to the house formula. It’s much more straight-ahead than his contemporaries, and at the same time, the way these samples are mangled and stretched and rewound and rearranged can sometimes go as far as the most deranged Mr. Oizo track.
The version of the EP I have is an unofficial bootleg that I compiled of a bunch of his tracks that came out around the same time or a little earlier, so it’s not the five-track EP that everyone else got. And I’m not kidding you, I listened to every single song from grade eight to graduation from high school just about every day. “Mr. Fahrenheit”, “The Furious Five”, “A Better Day”, “Late”, so many good tracks that I knew/know by
heart.
What made the experience so mind-blowing is that it took house music from this cool, groovy little thing that I’d grown up with (Crystal Waters’ “Gypsy Woman” or Inner City’s “Good Life”) to something that made me want to dance and throw my body around to. It brought the idea of house music being a physical sport into my life, and to this day, I headbang to house music of all forms. The Phantom’s Revenge made house punk to me.
I know it’s common to talk about certain albums that mean a lot to us and say that they’re the reason why we make music. But I’m not joking when I say that without The Phantom’s Revenge, I would not be making music. My first time hearing Charlie is what made me switch from wanting to deejay with music, to actually making the music I wanted to hear. Then I got gifted with a crack of FL Studio 9 my freshman year of high school and tried my hand at making really, really awful ripoffs of Go Go Bizkitt! and J Paul Getto, and I nearly quit altogether until I discovered vaporwave, but that’s an entirely different story.
It kinda shouldn’t count as my March album since I compiled it and threw it together under the name of an EP that already existed, but whatever. I love this EP to death and I’ll sing bloghouse’s praises 'til I’m blue in the face.
I’ll end this off with a personal story. A few years ago, The Phantom had a competition on Twitter to see who could pick out the one time in the six or seven multi-hour-long mixes he’d released that he’d repeated a track. Me being a fanatic, I figured it out quicker than I’d like to admit, and I actually won. This was around the time he and Montaime were putting out the ALL U CAN EAT compilation, but they had all sold out. Luckily, I got my own copy, but that was supposed to be the prize. So instead, I asked if he could sign the record and send it over anyways. I didn’t really care that I had one on the way, but having a record signed by one of my musical heroes was too cool of an idea to pass over.
A few weeks later, I got this in the mail and I’ll never play it for as long as I live.
FINAL SCORE: CLASSIC/10
Highlights: Charlie, Machine Gun Girl, Mr. Fahrenheit
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TLDR: I like Willie Nelson. My Heroes have always been Willie Nelson. I enjoy his Greatest Hits (& Some That Will Be). It has become comfort food for my ears and has become definitional.
My task was simple: State an album that defines me for the month of March and explain why.
Instead, as typical, I made things entirely more complex than required. For some reason I decided to go on and on about Greatest hits construct generically and also include a side quest where I created barely-adjacent audio that includes the phrase “My heroes have always been Willie Nelson.”
I am much like a poorly trained Australian Shepherd dog that herds the wrong creatures.
Were I a teacher grading me I’d give my result a D- and would want to flunk me.
Can I not simply follow the assignment as stated?
The answer is: Apparently not.
I will go update my Syntakt.
The extraordinarily meandering director’s cut version with bonus track is as follows:
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Music is strange like that. I make various kinds of music, none of which really bear much relation to the music I enjoy listening to. One of the things I enjoy about music is discovering people’s musical influences and the music that isn’t an influence so much as a comfort or part of the background of their lives. It can make for a fascinating contrast, or an interesting confirmation.
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This is a great write-up and has inspired me to check out the Residents (who have never been on my radar). Especially the bit about psychedelic music. I’ve had the exact same experience about music characterized as “psychedelic”. It typically does not evoke an altered-state feeling at all and I’ve always been on the lookout for music that feels truly druggy to me. While not exactly evoking psychedelics I feel like Iggy Pop’s “The Idiot” is a total uncanny valley drug record. You can feel the clammy speed feel and grinding urban craziness all over that record. It’s sinister and synthetic feeling with so much paranoia. It’s a bad vibes drug record. Anyway, thanks for the recommendation.
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Thanks. I often find it difficult to describe music so I’m glad the idea was conveyed. Its like frank zappa said, talking about music is like dancing about architecture.
If you do check them out i hope you like it.
I totally get what you’re saying about “the idiot” (and I’m a very big stooges fan). Iggy nailed that feeling you describe in a way few ever have. Such an incredible record. If you like that vibe you should check out the self titled debut album by the band “Suicide” if you’re not already familiar. The Residents are quite different than either Suicide or the Stooges/ Iggy musically in that there’s often a sort of silliness and very rarely any “hardness” if that makes sense. Not better or worse, just a different road to that uncanny valley.
Something interesting just occurred to me as i was writing this, “the idiot”, “suicide”, and “duck stab/ buster and glen” were all released within about a year of each other. Some good shit making its way through the music scene in 77/78.
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Seems appropriate to me, as I only know him from Hot Chip singing „Half Nelson, full Nelson, Willie Nelson“.
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Hot Chip to the rescue…
Here we come, drop kick
Half nelson, full nelson,
Willie Nelson, Willie Nelson
Body slam, suplex,
Headlock, somer-slam
Elbow drop, jelly-flop
Cage match, grudge match
Snamsno, snamsniey
Alfieley, alscgoboi
Nelsonmas allday, skeluas
Ooh, ooh
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That’s crazy about the year 1977-78. I knew that was a historically great time for music but wild how far reaching it was. It makes me wonder if cultural circumstances just get more fertile for art at certain points. Someone do a study please.
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Jessy Lanza — Pull My Hair Back
Here’s something a little more electronic for the Elektron forum! In 2013, I was writing for a local music magazine and not really loving it. It was, in theory, everything I had wanted just a few years earlier: free albums with structured listening and an avenue to discuss them; free concert tickets; easy connections to some of the coolest bands in town; and a really fun, supportive community of other volunteer writers. In reality, I felt out of touch and surprisingly jaded. Writing also usually felt like a chore — turns out that getting albums for free and listening to them on a deadline isn’t a great formula for discovering new favourites.
At least not usually.
The album reviews editor liked EDM a fair bit, but most of the writers at the time gravitated more towards indie and punk, with a few hip hop lovers too. She was quite happy that I was into electronic music, and every month she sent me a few albums she thought I would like. She was usually right, even though most of the albums I reviewed were good but not great. I remember a few. I’ve forgotten many more. But she made an extra special point of calling out Pull My Hair Back, and when i got home and listened to it for the first time, I felt a sudden surge of excitement that I hadn’t felt from an album in years. And my feelings haven’t changed one bit. In fact, I can just copy my review from more than a decade ago:
“Pull My Hair Back might be an extended love letter to analogue. Jessy Lanza deserves a million extended love letters, although to be fair, Jeremy Greenspan (of Junior Boys fame) is all over this record as well. He deserves your love letters, too. Their record slinks and saunters around itself, simultaneously seductive and slow; sparse wobbles and drifting pads offer scintillating impressions that echo away into nothing, over and over. I can’t stress how complete of an atmosphere Lanza and Greenspan have crafted here: Lanza’s voice is heads and tails above most of her contemporaries and the soundscapes she and Greenspan assembled tap into a timeless middle ground between hedonistic R&B excess and stoned-out progressive electronica.
The wow-wow synth bass on “Keep Moving” and the pervasive vocal echoes on “Kathy Lee” and “Giddy” prove beyond any shadow of a doubt that Greenspan and Lanza can string cheese into gold. The duo puts their granulators and arpeggiators through the paces all over Pull My Hair Back, especially “As If,” one of the few tracks I’ve ever heard that actually makes ring modulation sound sexy.”
(JESSY LANZA | BeatRoute Magazine)
In addition to the above, I can add:
- I’ve currently picked eight of the twelve albums I intend to write about this year, and of those, this is the one I listen to most often.
- Jessy Lanza is the only one of my favourite artists that my wife regularly listens to on her own time.
- Re-reading my review, I don’t think there are granulators anywhere. I switched from a Tascam 788 to Ableton Live in early 2013, and I somehow got into granular before learning how “normal” samplers work.
- We saw Jessy live last year and it was a really fun show! She had her sister playing drums, and I still don’t totally understand how they split the set up between pre-recorded drum tracks and her sister’s live drums. It was a series of absolutely seamless and unpredictable transitions; sometimes I saw her sister fall obviously out of sync while the audio stayed on time, and sometimes I heard the audio follow her sister’s um… very human timing while the rest of the sequenced instruments stayed on beat. It was interesting, and I’m still thinking about it! And for the record, her sister wasn’t a bad drummer — even at my best, I would have made similar mistakes. But it caught my attention because sometimes she was miming and sometimes she wasn’t.
- I still consider Jessy a Canadian artist, even though she’s lived in the US since shortly after this album came out.
- I like Junior Boys, but always found myself wishing they handled their vocals differently. Jessy’s vocals, on the other hand, are perfect IMO. I absolutely love her voice.
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Post - Björk
Post might not be the obvious choice for many Björk fans. Albums like Homogenic feel more rounded and coherent, while Vespertine is more experimental and less pop-oriented than the records that came before.
However, Post is the album that influenced me the most.
I was 18 when Björk first caught my attention. I was still in school and my musical taste was pretty simple: Dream Theater, metal, grunge. There wasn’t much room for female artists in my collection.*
But then there was this one video on MTV that was just weird and instantly grabbed my attention: “It’s Oh So Quiet”. Bursting with joy, theatrical, and incredibly dynamic. The other video I saw was “Army of Me”. Björk isn’t known for heavy music, but this track felt heavy as hell to me. Helmet even recorded a cover version later, but Björk’s original still sounds heavier to my ears.
I’m not even sure how I got the album – maybe I borrowed the CD from someone, maybe I taped it, maybe I bought it after hearing the singles. What I do remember is that Homogenic was a day-one purchase when it came out.
One song stood out more than any other: “Headphones”. I would lie down in my teenage room with my Discman and headphones and listen to that track over and over again. It felt like it had been written just for me.
Post changed a few things for me. It changed the way I perceived female artists. It showed me that music could be deeply emotional without guitars, and profound without being complicated. Even though it’s clearly a pop album, it contains many elements of electronic music that probably influenced me in subtle ways.
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So this mission so far for me has kind of been a bit of a documentation of my imperfect and inglorious musical education.
From the album that helped me realise that even with nothing but a terrible acoustic guitar I could play songs like on the records to the one that helped me understand that provided you had a fuzz pedal and were capable of playing two chords, you could stand on stage in a leather jacket and force people to listen to you..
This album took me a further step towards (almost) rock and roll glory. Sound of Confusion was another blast of DIY punk revelation fucking-hell-I-can-do-this to my developing teenage mind. Coming out in 1986, a whole year after my January mission pick, and not much more than six months after my February pick, it represented - at the time - the absolute high point of what must have been in retrospect a fairly helter-skelter musical coming of age (for all of those around me having to cope with the godawful noise I was making through my bedroom walls, probably something quite appalling and traumatic to share and experience.).
Sound of Confusion made stuff even more fucking rock and roll by stripping it back even further. You could be a rock star of sorts, even if you play slowly and sometimes only played ONE chord repeatedly for a very long time, as long as you did it with swagger and feeling. And even more effects pedals. This was great for a kid with swagger and a few junky effects pedals (of the sort prevalent in the mid-80s), a yearning to be looked at on stage, but no real ambition to put in the harder yards of learning to play particularly well. It was all about the FEEL, not about the technique. Technique was for people who COULDN’T DO FEEL. At this point I could go beyond being in a band to being in a fucking great (to my ears) band.
The album itself is the first and probably the most basic of the Spacemen 3’s short and essential catalogue. But it fucking rocked. Starting off with the stomping narcotic delirium of Losing Touch with My Mind, it defined from the off a new sound that briefly caught the heart of multitude of nodding out teenage wasters. Kind of flat but plaintive vocals on top of heavily fuzzed guitars and ultra basic drums. But in the coolest way possible. The second track Hey Man was more of the same. Maybe louder and stompier. Kind of channeling the Stooges and the Velvet Underground and Suicide and lots of other nihilistic noisy dronesters. In a way no-one else got close to. The third track, Rollercoaster is where it all starts to get properly messy. An extended length thumping grind through the 13th Floor Elevator’s classic, blissful and brutal. Next up another cover version - Mary Anne - an equally brutal reimagining of Just One Time by Juicy Lucy (these guys had astonishing music taste/record collections). And then another cover - Little Doll, in the process somehow out-stooging the Stooges. A brief run through the fairly forgettable “2:35” before the album ends with another stormer, the astonishing OD Catastrophe - 9 minutes of thrashing away on one chord very loudly. Very very loudly.
This was good stuff. And I could do it too (maybe). And so completed my early musical growing up (1985-86).
Of course it wasnt that simple. When I actually got round to getting a proper proper band together it was two years later, and I was past all of this stuff and onto the next thing. In my case late 80s US pre-grunge hardcore. Principally inspired by an astonishing sampler album released by Sounds (RIP great music inky of its time) and Shigaku called Beautiful Happiness. Full of bands like Halo of Flies, Naked Raygun, early Bullet Lavolta, and the magnificent Iowa Beef Experience. That was what I wanted to be and play.
But it turned out that…as a band we were way too incompetent to actually play with the speed and accuracy to get anywhere near any of those guys. Even the most agricultural of them. So what on earth might we do? The answer came quickly. Play slowly, and with soul and swagger. Cos slow was easier. And fuzz covers all manner of slack technique. And actually (and this was the major revelation) feeling and attitude is WAY more important than technical competence. Like so much more.
So we turned back to those fucking magnificent tunes of two years previous to that, listened hard at how it was done. And put it into practice. Slower. Less chords. Louder. More fuzz. Even more fuzz. Even even more attitude. And got gigs. And then a record deal. And toured and stuff. It was great. Of course we were terrible, sold little or no records, probably cost our lovely record company a fortune (in relative terms) and split up after a couple of EPs. But it was fun on the way. And we even somehow got Pete Kember/Sonic Boom from the Spacemen 3 to produce our tunes. So it didn’t turn out too badly, really.
The Spacemen went on to put out a few more albums. The equally magnificent Perfect Prescription, the pretty decent Playing With Fire, and the frankly odd Recurring, by which time the group was so dysfunctional, the LP was split one side each between the warring factions. But it did at least soundtrack a wholly unexpected Simpson’s segment some years later. As well as whole load of unofficial/additional releases including the notorious Dreamweapon live album the story behind which is one of the highlights of Will Carruthers’ brilliant rock and roll memoir Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands.
And then they spawned the excellent but (for me) way too controlled, serious and self-regarding Spiritualized and the altogether more interesting if perhaps less immediately commercially successful career of Pete Kember, embracing everything from experimental noise to duets with Delia Derbyshire and Panda Bear, alongside a load of top quality production work, getting if anything more prolific and interesting as he’s got older.
But for me, certainly in terms of defining me musically, it all started with the Sound of Confusion. What a fucking album. Head down. Not many chords. Very loud. Very fuzzy. And loads of feeling.
Oh, and thanks @Azzarole for setting this thing off at the start of the year. A good prompt for cathartic remembering. One of the best of the mission briefs. So much great content being shared.
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