mandre - light years (opus iv)

mandre - light years (opus iv)

ridiculously cool late seventies proggy space funk with a soaring riff that sounds like the soundtrack to some lost French rip-off of Star Trek, ie with more skin and cooler boots. one of my favorite jams, recommended if you like floyd, alan parsons, air, bo hansson, wilhelm shatner.

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ordinarily I have a policy against posting the actual cover art to whatever the jam de jour is, because it's boring. It fails to produce any kind of surrealist epiphany or revel in synaesthetic possibility. In this case however, it'd be a shame to not share mandre in his full proto-daft punk glory, that is, emerging like a demigod out of a glowing space vag.

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this song was rather hard to find because it's an instrumental. I heard it several hours ago at Rai Rai Ken, an experience which combined two of my favorite material pleasures: hearing something weird, and eating ramen noodles. It was an "oh shit I know that song..." moment and I had to geek out and ask the waiter what it was. new york city: a bustling shrine to the glories of a chance encounter.

jonathan - li song

jonathan - li song

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An acknowledged classic exclusive.  On the heels of Heldon, it's some extremely rare, awesome seventies German deep scifi-prog, with a powerful head-nodding drum groove that's very DJ Shadow-worthy. On top of the solid Bonham pound there's heavenly shimmering organ chords like on Popol Vuh and cheerful analog flutes.  I really want to hear this song with hip-hop scratches. Remember how on Endtroducing there's a part that uses the break from "Sunday Bloody Sunday"? You could do something like that with this. Look out for an exclusive "808s and Drum Breaks" remix here soon. 

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here is the backstory of finding this album. two summers ago my glacial lakes partner jonathan came to visit brave and I in Berlin, where as is our custom we were holded up for the season, practicing in Prenzlauer Berg, spieling fahrrads, hanging with falcon, and drinking beer on the streets. there's a good story involving being a hero goose that is too long to attend to here. Suffice to say one weekend afternoon we were scouting around the Mauer flea market, poking through records, when I handed a copy of the Jonathan album to its namesake, and we beheld its lovely serendipity - you see the music of Jonathan is performed by a keys & drums duo, which is exactly the same lineup of my band with brave. The coincision of these elements had a near astral intensity. J, however, in an odd move, put the record back, noting its high price tag. Curiously, that was only one of two magic flea market finds that day which would fail to make it back to the States with us - brave later procured a fantastic druid garment that quickly became an inofficial band outfit, truly coronating him as the homeless wizard he is. That find too somehow missed rescue, cosigned to the absurdly spacious sublet apartment we left behind in Kreuzberg. 

Needless to say, it's not hard to regret passing up purchasing a tantalizing obscure record that bears your own name, especially when the cover art is your name in huge stone letters on the moon, and there's a kind of apple that's also your name floating above it. Also, trying googling this album. We all thought it lost to the dustbins of time, until one day stina and I were in a random East Village record store and spied it, there, hanging on the wall! the Jonathan record! 

The End

Aluar Horns

Aluar Horns (Zaire/Uganda Border)

I got a record needle. The Gemini PT-2000 record player which now functions in my studio is the first fully operational vinyl playback machine which I has ever owned. This is because, I wager, sometimes one is afraid to be happy. Sometimes there is a happiness that hangs so clearly in your eyes, but you recognize its sheer destablizing force, the way it may also threaten to overtake you once you deign to open your arms to it, that you turn away, preferring to cast your glance instead towards inferior delights.

So lord help me, I have a record player now. And I have literally the worldest's goofiest collection, comprised almost solely either of out-jazz rarities or thrift store oddities acquired upwards of ten years ago when I worked in the Salvation Army, and which I have never ever listened to, but never discarded, fuelled only by my good faith in weird records.

This faith was rewarded when I for the first time played "African Ceremonial & Folk Musics." It consists almost entirely of pleasant, unremarkable chants and babbles, but then out of nowhere, there's an insane horn-section jam, which has such a weirdo-wobbly rhythm that I thought my new record player was broken and playing irregularly. The horns overlap in such a loopy, narcotized way, it sounds like Sun Ra remixed by DJ Screw. Or a beardo edit of New Orleans funeral jazz. One of the most surprise sonic bug-outs I've had in a while, a very solid "what the hell is this?" moment was the result, exactly the sort of experience which makes me hoard two dollar thrift store records for ten years.

Enjoy, you won't be disappointed.