All right, I’ve had good luck lately with music recommendations from MWC comments. Sam got me to cue up last summer’s Dirty Projectors record and give “Two Doves” another chance. And it turns out I love it. Jen mentioned a Sundays song in a comment that I downloaded the next day and listened to several times while painting, or walking to and from the studio. Maybe we should just let loose with music talk for once. We’re probably all slightly nerdy and obsessive about music, so let’s all share a few tunes that we’ve been listening to or thinking about lately. No top ten lists or anything, just an album, or a stray song or two.
MWC is for music nerds
October 5, 2009 by Chris
Posted in Not Painting | 24 Comments
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The Fall, c. 1978-1983.
The rock and roll idiom estranged from itself. All the ingredients (guitar, bass, drum, keyboard, vocal) are there, but they refuse to blend into a whole. Each is separate and distinct, displaying an excruciating awareness of the idiom as an inheritance.
all of which drastically overintellectualizes some delightful noise, though not in the sense of the current glut of noise, rather, noise in its approach of, but refusal of, the pop-rock language.
SPK: Leichenschrei
incredibly subtle and well-orchestrated. Really shows how difficult it is to make good noise music. Disproves its own anti-cultural premises and rhetoric, because, however aggressive it is, it remains exceedingly high quality. A masterpiece in every sense of the word.
I’m still really digging Dark Night of the Soul, and like that it (largely) works as a full album. A few tracks I could take or leave (i.e. the Black Francis), but a lot of it keeps evolving for me, and the David Lynch-sung pieces are musts.
Omar Souleyman!!! Bjork turned me on to this on NPR a few months back, and what little I have found is really something. Very little available for download that I have seen, need to order the cd, I guess.
on a slightly sheepish note: Muscles, album: Guns Babes Lemonade; songs: Futurekidz, Jerk, and The Lake
don’t knock it till you try it…
also like: Grizzly Bear, Horn of Plenty
Fleet Foxes ‘Blue Ridge Mountains’
Sarabeth Tucek, Something for You
My summer playlists tend to be a bit more high contrast: classical, older African, a little post-rock type stuff, Blonde Redhead, Old Time Relijun etc.
In the fall, it mellows out a bit, Red House Painters, Smog, Leonard Cohen.
A couple recent faves: The Xx, Xx and Mi and L’au ( the Finnish version of Low, with harp, strings and horns)Good Morning Jokers. Plus I’m psyched up for Mountain Goats.
Grizzly Bear, Deep Sea Diver specifically (i do like that whole album though)
Micachu and the Shapes, “Golden Phone”
VC, let me second The Fall! Love that band. Actually, I second a lot of the stuff already on here. LOVE Blonde Redhead.
Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective made some pretty perfect summer albums this year.
As far as not brand new, I’m diggin’ some U.S. Maple, Joy Division, Townes Van Zandt, Television, Minutemen… Erik Satie has been in my head for months, whether it’s on the stereo or not.
Matt- I remember that Bjork review of Omar Souleyman, that did sound really interesting. I shoulda followed through…
I don’t know what label Micachu and the Shapes are with, but they would certainly fit the Matador label…Good stuff!
+Yeasayer- All Hour Cymbals
+Camera Obscura-My Maudlin Career
+Of Montreal- Skeletal Lamping
+ James – Hey Ma
+ Travis – Ode to J. Smith
The new AIR also comes out Oct 6th!
looking over my most played list (for my studio classes – in which i take requests or play mix CDs brought by students), looks like i’ve been playing a lot of
yeah yeah yeahs
fleet foxes
grizzly bear
of montreal
girl talk
the good, the bad, and the queen
gram rabbit
elliott smith
the decemberists
neko case
monsters of folk
the pixies
My most played list, embarrassingly, is all songs that Tilman likes: Raffi, the Beach Boys, Ella Jenkins. In class: Matt & Kim, Ben Benjamin, Thievery Corporation.
A couple more adds for studio lists:
-Diane Cluck
-Kicking Giant–totally underrated 90s 2-person band, plus the guitar player is a kickass graphic designer, so the CD’s always a treat for the eyes when I put it on.
-Arvo Part
How about some pre-rock, it all started in the delta: Charley Patton, Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, Bukka White, Robert Johnson, Skip James, Muddy Waters.
Hey Joey, do you know Washington Phillips? Kind of obscure easy-going blues guy in the Mississippi John Hurt vein. Not a lot of recordings, about 1 CD’s worth. There are a couple different albums around, different names and labels, but with the same recordings. It’s great stuff.
I’ll second your whole list, though Robert Johnson has just never quite clicked with me. Probably Led Zeppelin is to blame.
No, I’ll look him up. Much of what fascinates me about the blues is the lineage. Patton to Johnson to Zeppelin to Jack White. And the rivalries, everyone stealing from and trying to outdo each other. It’s just like the history of art.
speaking of some of that lineage, my students have been raving about it might get loud, a documentary featuring jimmy page, jack white, and the edge (it’s showing at ragtag).
i’ll have to go check it out…
One more: I don’t think I’ve made a painting mix in nearly 10 years that hasn’t included Nina Simone. One of my favorite undergrad painting profs followed Simone around on tours back in the 60s and would tell stories about it once in a while. Nina Simone and painting are inextricably tied in my mind.
I’ve too have had Grizzly Bear on pretty heavy rotation….also Passion Pit, Wreckless Eric, Gorky’s Zygotic Mynci, and Fats Domino. Truth be told though, I can’t make it through the day without Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson: it’s hard to make art without some dance breaks 🙂
i was transfixed by an npr segment a couple of weeks ago devoted to ‘it might get loud’.
completely awesome…
I listen to a lot of ABBA in the studio.
here are some of my slightly nerdy and obsessive offerings:
Bill Frissell – lately it’s been Good Dog, Happy Man
Matt Wilson – pretty much anything, but I’d recommend his CD, Wake Up to What’s Happening (Larry Goldings is amazing)
for a short song I can fall into for many repeats… Chopin’s Berceuse in Db Op. 57 (I’ve got Pollini’s version) it’s like being in a hammock
Ricky Lee Jones’ Pop Pop
Tortoise – Millions Living Now Will Never Die
and one I always go back to: Bach’s unaccompanied cello (Pablo Casals recording)
tortoise…pardon the pun, that’s another standard. ‘tnt’ is the one i come back to the most.
I know “tnt” is a Tortoise song, but I wish someone were giving props to AC/DC too [love.it]. This whole thread makes me wonder, generally speaking, what are you all “looking for” when you chose your art-making music?
mostly, i’m looking for how different things transfer or arrive in agreement, whether in sound or words. it’s not usually an active search as much as something i’m noticing as things kind of roll by. or, it doesn’t exist in the foreground until it exists in the foreground. like a sudden, negative/positive reversal.
mark kozelek does some interesting ac/dc covers. ‘rock n’ roll singer’ is one…
well said.
Since I am not a musician in any way, I don’t have the vocabulary for music the way I do with painting. That said, I look for structure, layering and a resolution that doesn’t hit me over the head. I also think that by not being a musician, it makes it all seem that much more otherworldly. I can just fall into it. I always say that every good concert needs someone who just claps and thinks the performance is some kind of magic (yes I have been honing my clapping skills for years).
And like the earlier comment about dance breaks, I have my share of songs I need to crank to blow the cobwebs out of the studio – good beat, memorable lines, best played loudly…