music

Moonlight Shining Down On Me

Stumbling on the wonderful Blaze Foley this late in life is a damn shame. If you are like I was, you should give him a listen right now. I also found this blurb from wikipedia, about his master tapes, worthy of sharing.

The master tapes from his first studio album were confiscated by the DEA when the album’s executive producer was caught in a drug bust. Another studio album disappeared when the master copies were stolen along with his belongings from a station wagon that Foley had been given and lived in. A third studio album, Wanted More Dead Than Alive, was thought to have disappeared until, many years after Foley died, a friend who was cleaning out his car discovered what sounded like the Bee Creek recording sessions on which he and other musicians had performed. When Foley died, his attorney immediately nullified the recording contract and the master tapes subsequently disappeared, reportedly having been lost in a flood.

So all the master tapes are gone. But if you’d like, you can still pick up The Dawg Years Reissue on 8 track from Sacred Bones Records.

via Derek Erdman

History Of Spiritual Jazz: 1955-2012

In the final hours of Black History Month, I urge you to explore this marathon 12-hour Spiritual Jazz mix compiled by Black Classical. It’s a historical journey of Spiritual Jazz stretching from 1955-2012. This mix originally appeared on NTS Live, an online radio station based in London with studios in Los Angeles, Shanghai, and Manchester.

The catalog features recognized pioneers Sun Ra, John Coltrane, Gil Scott-Heron, Herbie Hancock, and Pharoah Sanders in addition to South African songstress Letta Mbulu and Brazilian percussion genius Airto. The cuts are deep and the mix is a crate diggers paradise.

Novel Uses For (Rap) Genius

Genius started out as a platform for annotating clever rap lyrics but has since expanded to include more than hip-hop, and more than just lyrics. Over the last week I have stumbled across some increasingly novel uses for the Rap Genius website:

  • First was an annotation of Hamilton: An American Musical soundtrack. These annotations are filled with interesting tidbits and insights into the song lyrics, American history, and production plot.
  • Second was an annotation of the entire Great Gatsby. Wonderful.
  • Lastly, Travis Korte used the Genius Web Annotator to create an informative takedown of the GOP’s recent Mainstream Media Accountability Survey. The annotation exposes the confusingly worded questions, sample bias and leading questions used in the survey.

Magical Mashups

With The Magic iPod anybody can be a good mashup DJ. Simply drag the mid-2000’s hip-hop song across to an available saccharine pop song and you got yourself a bangin’ mashup. Below are few mashups that I liked. But really, this is so magical you’re going to struggle to make any horrible mixes.

Lose Control – Soul Meets Body Mashup

Country Grammar – Complicated Mashup

Laffy Taffy – Misery Business Mashup

(If you download then donate to the ACLU while you’re there)

Call Me A Hole

Call Me A Hole

This Nine Inch Nails/Carly Rae Jepsen mashup is splendid. The juxtaposition is jarring and yet they somehow fit together perfectly. I hate it and love it at the same time.

pomDeter was the original creator of this beauty but it has been pulled from all his accounts so I’m posting it here for your listening enjoyment.

Pat “Sample Detective” Shannahan

This interview with sample clearance expert Pat Shannahan is worth a couple of minutes of your time. Pat is hired by musicians and record labels to clear samples used to make their music. Pat tracks down the original owners of the works being sampled and convinces them to OK the usage in a new original work.

While Pat has worked for a whole slew of notable artists (her first client was Prince Paul) it seems she is most proud of the work she has done clearing samples for both of The Avalanches albums (and rightfully so seeing as how their recent release had a sample that was directly approved by Paul McCartney and Yoko Ono).

The Avalanches have stuck very hard to the true art of sampling, which as I always understood it in the hip-hop community, the true art of sampling was to find these very obscure records and to sample them. They would all go to where the old records are and go to garage sales. They literally dig very deep into the recordings.
I always understood that that was the true way of sampling, not, you know, sampling the current hits that are out there. I guess I get the reputation for being “The Detective” because these records, it was so hard to find who owned them. Like I said, they were all put in the resale bin for $0.99 or whatever.

Running With The Devil

This isolated audio track of Running With The Devil, from Van Halen’s début album, is highly entertaining. I found this buried deep on my old laptops hard drive last night so I have no idea where this originally came from (if you know the source tell me in the comments so I can link to it) but I had to share it. You are absolutely right David – the simple life ain’t so simple.



In The Aeroskank Over The Checkered Pattern

In the mood to ruin one of your favorite albums? “In The Aeroskank Over The Checkered Pattern” is an intentionally shitty all-ska cover version of Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 album “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea”. And it is truly shitty, but for me was worth the listen for the amusement alone. It was also interesting hearing this formidable album transformed into a tongue-in-cheek ska genre. This is “good” in a different way than Hamburger Helper’s “Food On The Streets” album is “good”. That is to say, it’s “shitty good”.

It is not the ska-based cover of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea we asked for, it’s the ska-based cover of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea we deserve. See also: Blooptral Milk Hotel.

Since They Left Us

My wife introduced me to The Avalanches when we first started dating – that was over 12 years ago. At that time, the groups first and only ablum, “Since I Left You“, was already 4 years old. And what a brilliant album it was. It was made entirely through a unique blending of an estimated 3,500 samples (Rumor has it that he song “Frontier Psychiatry” has something like 600 samples on it).

Well, 16 years since their original release, the Avalanches have announced they were finally going to be releasing (scheduled for July 8th) a full-length sophomore effort called “Wildflower”. The first single “Frankie Sinatra” features Danny Brown and MF Doom on it.


If the above single isn’t enough to tide you over here is a link huge list of downloadable Avalanches related mixtapes, live sets, and DJ sets

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