Eddie Kendricks - Girl You Need A Change of Mind

Eddie Kendricks - Girl You Need A Change of Mind

On deep repeat for several days now. Deep repeat: that state where you need a song like you need fresh water or a warm hug from someone who knows you well, and will always be there to do so no matter what. This cut from Eddie's meisterwerk People...Hold On is a heavenly long-form suite that is up there with the best from the curtis/isaac priests of stirring symphonic soul. It ebbs and flows exquisitely, and before you know it seven minutes have passed and it's serious rewind time. Gorgeous, sunshiney, impassioned, get into it, get up, get involved. 

Talkbox Country

Pete Drake - Forever



Best robot-cowboy hybrid since Westworld




Thanks to As Restless As We Are

Guest Mix: DJ Slow presents Colturky

Our west coast brother DJ Slow sends this sonic greeting on our nation's most hallowed festival of eating. A psych-rock heavy burst of tunes prime for familial merriment, the preparation of the flesh from large flightless birds, and sustained gastronomic overindulgence. Enjoy, and happy thanksgiving!

DJ Slow - Colturky

0:00: COLD TURKEY - John Lennon
5:00: JUSTICE TO THE PEOPLE - Lee Perry & the Upsetters
10:39: DARKROOM - Paul McCartney (Sir)
12:43: LA TUERIE - Sebastien Tellier
15:38: BARMY - The Fall
20:57: FOGGY NOTION - Velvet Underground
27:23: NEVER ANOTHER - 13th Floor Elevators
29:43: HALICTE GUNESIN BATISI - Mogollar ('Love, Peace & Poetry' Turkish Psych Comp)
33:33: ICKY THUMP - White Stripes
37:12: FIDO CASTROL- Killing Floor
41:48: OUR LOVE YOUR LIES - Los Chicros
44:46: DOIN THAT THING - Leroy Vinnegar
49:30: AFGHANISTAN- Turzi
52:55: FIRE ANT NOODLE TASTING OF ACID - Silver Apples / Turzi
58:20: CAMPFIRE - Sonic Youth
1:00:33: A RUFFER VERSION - The Aggrovators
1:03:55: WIGGLE-WAGGLE- Herbie Hancock
1:09:22: AKIWOWO - Olatunji
1:12:36: NEW YORK USA - Serge Gainsbourg
1:14:36: 65 BARS AND A TASTE OF SOUL - The Watts 103rd St Rhythm Band

Peter Beard

The fabulous Peter Beard diaries have just been released by Taschen in a smaller more economical version with a beautiful cloth cover and case. I have hankered after these books since the day I discovered Peter Beard about four years ago and Francesco bought them for me for my birthday. I had a couple of his smaller books, The End of the Game and I havc always loved his diary work. An inspiring, artistic, creative masterpiece, every page is a banquet.

Beard took his first pictures at twelve. and kept a diary from a young age. Photography quickly evolved into an extension of his diaries, as a way to preserve and remember vacations and favorite things. Trips to Africa in 1955 and 1960 piqued his interests and after graduating from Yale, he returned to Kenya via Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen) in Rungstedlund, Denmark. In the early 60s he worked at Kenya’s Tsavo National Park, during which time he photographed and documented the demise of over 35,000 elephants and 5000 Black Rhinos and published two The End of the Game books (1965 & 1977). During this same time period, he acquired Hog Ranch, the property adjacent to Karen Blixen’s near the Ngong Hills and made it his home base in East Africa. Beard has written further works on his African experience: Eyelids of the Morning: The Mingeled Destines of Crocodiles and Men(1973), Longing for Darkness (1975), and his most recent books Zara’s Tales: Perilous Escapades in Equatorial Africa (2004) written for his daughter and his latest book Peter Beard, published by Taschen.

I will leave you with his word's " I could never have guessed what was going to happen. Kenya's population was roughly five million, with about 100 tribes scattered throughout the endless "wild—deer—ness" - it was authentic, unspoiled, teeming with big game — so enormous it appeared inexhaustible. Everyone agreed it was too big to be destroyed. Now Kenya's population of over 30 million drains the country's limited and diminishing resources at an amazing rate: surrounding, isolating, and relentlessly pressuring the last pockets of wildlife in denatured Africa. The beautiful play period has come to an end. Millions of years of evolutionary processes have been destroyed in the blink of an eye. The Pleistocene is paved over, cannibalism is swallowed up by commercialism, arrows become AK- 47s, colonialism is replaced by the power, the prestige and the corruption of the international aid industry. This is The End Of The Game over and over. What could possibly be next? Density and stress — aid and AIDS, deep blue computers and Nintendo robots, heart disease and cancer, liposuction and rhinoplasty, digital pets and Tamaguchi toys deliver us into the brave new world".

Ridin' High Podcast

Now available:

The Ridin' High podcast. 20-30 minutes a week. Because new shit has come to light, man. Indie, electronic, psychotropic. Accessible to the public every monday night/tuesday morning. 

Ridin' High Nov. 24th / beats of no country 

Terence Trent D'Arby - Sign Your Name (Lee Perry Remix)

Babytalk - Chance (Hercules & Love Affair Remix)

Mi Ami  - African Rhythms

Azymuth - Avenida Das Manguieras

Minilogue - Mustafa (A1)

Animal Collective - Brother Sport

Voyage - Point Zero

Stimming - Una Pena

Spencer Parker - The Improvised Minotaur

Nina Simone - Sinnerman (Luciano Remix)

Edu Lobo - Vento Bravo

Honeymoon Killers - Decollage (Prins Thomas Mix)

Rainbow Arabia - Let Them Dance

Shocking Blue - Love Buzz

all edits by William

Vee Speers The Birthday Party

Paris based Australian born photographer Vee Speers series the Birthday party was one of the personal standouts for me at the recent Paris Photo. Birthday Party is a fantastical series executed with great simplicity and a wonderful imagination. Imagine a birthday party with a twist, amongst the princesses and the boxers, the soldiers and the retro bathing beauties are the characters from the darker side of some childhood fantasies. A rodent exterminator or a scary looking collector of dolls, a circus perfomer with a one size too small sailors suit and a girl dressed in white holding a dead rabbit. Some images are unsettling and some images I covet to hang on my walls. Vee Speers was inspired when she threw a birthday party for her daughter Sienna and one of the tiny guests arrived in a three piece suit. Sienna is one of Vee's muses in this series beautifully transforming herself from a singer to a beautiful girl dressed in a harlequin skirt and to the party girl blowing a huge bubble. These photos are timeless. Vee Speers has achieved this with her wonderful cast of character, the simple use of an old wall as a background, styling that is hard to place in any particular era and hand tinting to original Polaroid images.

Dreams of a Winter Mystic

1. Melchior Productions - Who Can Find Me (I Can't)

2. Fennesz - Perfume for Winter

3. Ezekiel Hoenig - Porchside Economics

- - - - - - - - - - 

Three songs to inaugurate the days of a hazy, palid, low-temp submergence. 

1. I'm mildly obsessed with this release by Thomas Melchior on Cadenza. It's a gorgeous, light-rhythmed minimal bliss-out, with drifty girl vocals. It feels like if you're scuba-diving and you look up and see the filtered sunlight flickering down through the water, a shimmering, diaphanous curtain. It's great for walking around on a pale afternoon, watching gusts of wind scatter leaves across the earth.

2. Track from Fennesz's latest, "Black Sea." Why do electronic musicians associate winter/cold weather worlds with metallic, hi-frequency reverb? like the kind you imagine on a Hannett-produced snare drum. It works for me, I'm just curious about the psycho-aesthetic link-up. Here thrown pebbles of white noise plunk past spare, sonorous clusters of sampled guitar, all ebbing and flowing like ripples on a gentle pond. 

3. From his album, the well-titled "Surface of a Broken Marching Band." Feels very much of the Fennesz school, but with some lovely low-tuned fractured hip-hop beats lurking in the murk. 

Elvis Presley - Crawfish (Pilooski Edit)

Elvis Presley - Crawfish (Pilooski Edit)

- - - - - - - - 

1. New collection of edits from the Dirty Crew out now, get it at Turntable Lab, for example. 

2. Said crew has a good blog called Alain Finkielkrautrock that you should read. 

3. Crawfish have five pairs of legs.

4. Even before it became all popular and stuff to do dj-ready edits of older tracks, Pilooski and our friends at Dirty understood that just cutting up disco tracks was fine but not that exciting. In other words they've been thinking outside the box since before there was a box. 

5. This edit of Elvis is my shit. Like Pilooski's edit last year of 'Beggin' by Frankie Valli, this is an infectious soul stormer. There's more extra dancey drum business that gets added this time around, to great effect. It's the kind of track you can play if, for example, you were to openly posit that music is a universal language, only to find your sentiment falling on skeptical ears. 

P.S. Jeez, is the album cover the most pause-able thing ever or what?

Paris.. No snow just long streaks

The boys at the Meteo were right, technically it did snow in Paris on Saturday and today but it lasted about 6 minutes. Not enough to for that magical white. It was super cold and great for a long lazy lunch. On the way home I snapped this.

Screw vs. R.

Two Icons. Doing what they do. And going, Tete a Tete. I feel that this should be acknowledged...as a classic.

Snow Coming .. Tuileries Jardin

The lovely folks at the Paris Meteo have forecasted snow this weekend. Yippeeee.. I raced out and bought my favourite black and white films today and I am preying they are right. Whilst out this afternoon in Paris I snapped this pic as the weather was changing. A couple of Christmas's ago when I was living on the 6th floor on the otherside of the Marais I awoke one morning to Paris covered in white. I screamed, threw on a jacket over my pjyamas, grabbed my camera and left the house. Wasn't such a good look when I came up from the excitement four hours later wandering around the Invalides like a bag lady. Here's hoping. Have a great weekend Carla x

The Onion Interviews Kool Keith

Kool Keith & Kutmasta Kurt

some important quotes: 

"What's your beef with Simon Cowell?

Kool Keith: I think for one guy to sit up and judge people and for him to be British at that—who the fuck is he to judge people? To come to America and try to judge people?"

Why shopping?

KK: I like to smell new clothes, tags. The store has new scents. It's just motivational to me. That's the point of doing something. I always buy something to make myself motivated. It's good to feel that you can buy something and motivate yourself. That's what I do, just buy stuff. I like to buy something new and then record."

KK: One time I had like 75 people interview me, and they started asking me the same questions. One guy was just asking me all types of questions, and I was just like, "Yeah, I went to Bellevue. I chewed my own hand off and they had to sew it back on." And the guy believed it." 

Kool Keith Interview In Full

The Fleetwood Mac Special

Mick Fleetwood - Cassiopeia Surrender

Mick Fleetwood - The Visitor

Fleetwood Mac - Never Goin' Back Again (Tom Croose Edit)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

At AC, every day is Fleetwood day. 

Two jams from Mick's forgotten 1981 solo record, The Visitor, which finds him deep in Ghana in a kind of kitschy Ginger Baker-impersonation. Ooh, look, African children! Bizarrely, while he enlists a small army of indigenous musicians to help him, the record is by and large schizo-split between 70s blues rock on one hand and tribal tunes on the other - they rarely come together in "Graceland" style unity. " I bought this at Kim's, priced for five bucks and marked down another 40%. Some standouts: Cassiopeia" is a pretty solid, minor-key low-slung groover, with cool metallic percussion and that dark decadent vibe that always gets me hyped about the Mac. "The Visitor" is tribal excursion, pretty cool especially for the wild Prophet 5 Synthesizer basslines..

And then, a special re-edit of the Rumors classic that I picked up on 7" at Phonica. Would you blame me if I played this for an hour or so tonight? 

The Plane of Infinite Seduction

Terry Callier - You Don't Care

Jefferson Starship - Miracles

Faze-O - Ridin' High

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

These tunes define a subgenre known at AC as "infinite smooth." 

I shared a demo track with my friend. Of the intro, which seemed to have captured most of her attention, she wrote it reminded her of "Less Than Zero," adding, "i mean the less than than zero comparison is a dreampoint for me. i dont really recall the movie or the soundtrack but it signifies 80's LA sex and easiness. i dont see tits shaking...i see sex at dawn." When I replied that I wish I could make a track that was just a seductive sex at dawn in the 80s intro for five minutes, she said "i wish the first 5 minutes of seduction lasted infinitely.."

Should you find yourself wanting to approximate such a condition, or target it as a sublime goal approached in endless hyperbolic ascent, I recommend starting with these three. 

1. Terry Callier - You Don't Care

Last weekend I went to London. In order to catch Villalobos playing at Fabric, my friend and I woke up quite early sunday morning and showed up at the club for some breakfast beats, Ricardo's set having begun at 530am and terminating sometime before noon. This was a really smart way to see him play, instead of staying up all night. Nonetheless I was thoroughly, deliriously exhausted come early evening, and needed a super-calm aural tonic to serve as nap soundtrack. I found Terry among my friend's records and quickly passed out, waking only during the last song, a gorgeous extended outro where ladies sing only 'you don't care...la la la la la" into the setting sun. 

2. Jefferson Starship - Miracles

I don't want to be weird but I'm giving you the short version here. I know that infinite smooth seems to scream 'extended mix' but trust me on this. The same friend who told me of her wish to stay in a warp of infinite seduction gave me this track several years ago, and it's one I treasure. Opulent, sensual, swirling, it sounds like a velvet-draped opium den. Although I'm troubled by the lyrics that go "If only you'd believe in miracles, so would I." Why does he need her to believe? 

3. Faze-O - Ridin' High

Who or what is the mysterious Faze-O? First of all, this track is the namesake of my monthly dj gig, which you can catch tonight at Savalas in Williamsburg. Because where else do you want to be, other than riding high? The song itself is some blissful slo-mo smooching funk that appears to be stuck on repeat. Really, I tried editing this song once. The point of editing a song is to make it more hypnotic and repetitive and emphasize the groove more. Except the original version is already so perfectly spaced-out and repetitive that there's nothing you can do it. 

Jane Birkin Eternal French Icon

Living in Paris you have the sensation that whilst strolling the streets of the 6th Jane Birkin will pop out of one of those fab big wooden doors. Jane Birkin has been an eternal inspiration to photographers, models, singers, stylists and aspiring actresses. Along with Serge Gainsbourg they were the hottest couple of the 60's amd 70's and sent the world into a spin with their sexy J'taime moi non plus. The Italian radio banned it up until recently! Jane Birkin is ageless and as beautiful today as always and continues to inspire all of us!

Baz Lurhmann's Australia

Being a good Aussie gal I have long awaited the premiere of Baz Lurhmann's news film Australia. The biggest budget film ever to be made in Australia was released last night in Sydney, Darwin, Bowen and Kununurra. I saw a sneak preview on the plane on the way back to Oz in November and there was a wonderful interview with the director of photography Mandy Walker who looks like she has done a stunning job with the images. Australia looks beautiful! Reports say Jackman and Kidman are fantastic but the young Aboriginal newcomer Brandon Walter is the best bet for an Oscar. Here's the plot. A romantic action-adventure set in northern Australia prior to World War II. Australia centers on an English aristocrat played by Nicole Kidman who inherits a ranch the size of Maryland. When English cattle barons plot to take her land, she reluctanctly joins forces with a rough hewn cattle driver the gorgeous Hugh Jackman. to drive 2000 head of cattle across hundreds of miles of the country's unforgiving land only to face the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese forces that attacked Pearl Harbour only months earlier.

I am so bummed out that we have to wait till the 24th of December to see Australia in France. In the meantime I am stocking up on Vegemite and Iced Vo Vo's for the big day. Well done Baz!

Ridin' High @ Savalas: Thurs at 11pm

The temperature has dropped. Don't let your spirits go with it. Join us this thursday night at 11 for Ridin' High at Savalas, on Bedford between Grand and South 1st, where you can warm your sweet flesh to some afro-brazilian heat and then some disco-house fire. It's better than a coal-burning stove. 

Resident: Weekend Prince aka Billy Rauscher (Disco-House Fire)

Special Guest: Sex Panther aka Jonathan Forgang (Afro-Brazilian Heat)

Liquor Store Event: Michael Schmelling

A gentlemanly reading, featuring sophisticated beverages, at the Liquor Store, corner of White and West Broadway in Tribeca. Afterparty: Ridin' High @ Savalas in Brooklyn (duh)