Both Kinds Of Music

It has been a while since my last post, partly due to the usual stuff (work, laziness, alien abductions), but also because I started writing for WFMU’s esteemed Beware Of The Blog. This is definitely my favorite source for music, video, and the stranger parts of popular culture, and I am thrilled to be a contributor. You can jump directly to the list of my posts if you like, but all the posts there are worth reading.

While this is great, it also creates a problem for me, namely the purpose of this very Both Kinds Of Music blog. The WFMU blog has many more readers, and WFMU has virtually unlimited bandwidth and storage space, so why should I continue posting here? Should I scrap this blog altogether, recycle it to something else (e.g. post playlists and show archives from my radio shows), or is there another possibility? I honestly don’t know at the moment, and I would appreciate any suggestions. Please comment on this post if you want to help me overcome my indecision.

By the way, there is definitely one more “real” post coming up, with lots of MP3s. It will all be classical (i.e., really fucking old) music, but that is all I can tell you know. You know, creating suspense and such…

You may know composer and multi-instrumentalist Weasel Walter as the crazy guy behind the Flying Luttenbachers, formed in 1991 in Chicago as a trio with free jazz legend Hal Russell and Chad Organ. Both the line-up and the music of the Flying Luttenbachers changed dramatically over the years, always moving in the wide field between free jazz, punk, death metal, berserk prog, and composed chaos. He has also been in experimental punk band XBXRX, no wave noise terrorists Lake Of Dracula, death-/grindcore misanthropes Hatewave, free glam noise unit To Live and Shave in L.A., and many more. If you want to see a long list of good underground and experimental musicians, just check out the list of collaborators on his website.
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In 1991 the Dutch band Dull Schicksal (”Schicksal” is German for “fate”) released an album called “They Saved Hitler’s Brain”, a musical mixture between Hanns Eisler, brass ensemble punk, prog-rock, and waltz, featuring a song called “Hot Sausage Diary”. OK, you already know that you want the mp3s, right? Well, if you are impatient, jump to the end of this post and grab them all.

The Rotterdam-based band existed from 1984 to 1999 with permanent members Lukas Simonis (guitar, synth, vocals), Hajo Doorn (drums, keyboards, vocals, also known as Raoul Goudvis), Colin McClure (accordeon, bass, sousaphone, keyboards, vocals, sometimes listed as Colin McClean), and Henk Bakker (flute, clarinet, vocals). They had many guest musicians on their albums, most of them playing all kinds of brass instruments.

Dull Schicksal was part of the always evolving and notoriously underrated genre of Dutch-Scottish Squatter Avant-Garde Punk, like The Ex, Morzelpronk, De Kift, Dog Faced Hermans, Andy Moor, Yannis Kyriakides, Cor Fuhler and many more. To my knowledge the Netherlands are the only country in which the fusion of punk and avant-garde produced such outstanding results. Unfortunately, many of the older recordings are out of print and very hard to get, and the Dull Schicksal CDs are no exception, though a few of their releases are still available through ReR.
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The history of my encounter with Hiroshi Hashimoto, aka Contagious Orgasm, has its roots in the culture wars currently raging on American college campuses. The University of Michigan is fairly typical in that respect: Most students and faculty don’t care for politics at all, and the ones who do are usually liberal. This already bugs the few right-wing activists on campus, but what really annoys them is that nobody takes them seriously. I want to take a moment and plead for a little attention and empathy for this poor neglected minority of conservative campus jerks.
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Why would anyone in their right mind make songs longer than two minutes? OK, I admit that there might be valid reasons, but the short format has undeniable advantages. For one, you can fit at least 40 of those short songs on one 80 minute audio CD, whereas you would need more than 4 million CDs for this single composition by John Cage.

So for today we will be sticking with short angular punk songs. One of the best recent bands in this genre were The Teeth from Ann Arbor, Michigan. They played some great live shows in the midwest, put out the CD More Songs About Money and Animals, and then disbanded after a pretty short time, to the dismay of everyone who had seen them in concert or heard their music. But hey, I have some good news for you: They got together again, and they are going to play a show on February 3 at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor.
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This post is brought to you by the department of historical corrections in the history of surf music.

Jimi Hendrix once said “You will never hear surf music again”, and this grew into the popular myth that Hendrix hated surf music. Now it may be true that he hated the Beach Boys (I would not blame him for that), but the quote rather showed his appreciation for Dick Dale, the king of surf guitar. At that time Dale was seriously ill with cancer, and Hendrix thought Dale was about to die. You can read a 1994 interview with Dick Dale about that story and much more. (UPDATE: Probably this is also an urban legend and Dick Dale is full of shit. Jump to the comments to see what really happened. Thanks to reader benbenek for the correction.)

If Dick Dale is the king of surf guitar, King Uszniewicz is the king of surf saxophone. With his band The Uszniewicztones he released three LPs Teenage Dance Party, Twistin’ and Bowlin’, and Doin’ the Woo-Hoo. They are all still available through the great Norton Records label. If you have not pawned your turntable yet, I urge you to get over there and buy them all. Fans of Hasil Adkins or The Shaggs should not even think twice, but for all others I have some more info, mp3 samples, and an important historical correction.
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Since you read this post, you must have made it to 2006 alive. If you need an excuse to celebrate and get wasted, there you have it. Unfortunately, Derek Bailey cannot share the fun anymore, the free improvising British guitar god died on December 25, 2005, at the age of 75. Starting out in conventional dance hall and jazz bands, he increasingly shed all conventions and invented his very own approach to guitar playing and improvising. Though he often played with jazz musicians, he did not like that label and prefered to call his music “non-idiomatic”. His influence on free improvisers, avantgarde musicians and especially guitarists is undeniable and lasting. Bailey did to jazz and improvisation what John Cage did to modern classical music, in a sense obliterating the traditional concepts, destroying conventional form and breaking down boundaries to all other forms of music and noise. Apart from that he ranks with Joseph Spence and John Fahey among the 20th century guitar innovators who will be long remembered. On the practical side, in 1970 Derek Bailey founded the Incus record label with fellow free improvisers Tony Oxley and Evan Parker.
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I am sure that many of you, at least in the USA, have read about the heroic struggle of the oppressed Christian minority in America to save their religion from total extinction. One of the heroes in this fight are the guys at the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who call themselves The Sword and Shield for People of Faith. So it seems appropriate to bring to you a very special Ann Arbor Christmas celebration, as heard over the airwaves of WCBN on Christmas Eve 1993, mixed live by Ed Special and Yax Haxley on 4-5 turntables. The background music is by Popol Vuh and David Hykes and The Harmonic Choir, but most of all it is an educational radio play about The Story Of The Naivete. It will come handy the next time you engage in culture wars about naivete displays in your neighborhood, I guarantee.

Ed Special has prepared a full CD with artwork and everything for your enjoyment. If you already know you want the whole thing, here is a zip file (74:20 min, 85.6 MB) with all tracks and artwork. If you want to preview tracks or artwork, here are the separate files for download: Track 1 (11:57 min, 13.6 MB), Track 2 (17:05 min, 19.5 MB), Track 3 (6:59 min, 7.9 MB), Track 4 (16:47 min, 19.1 MB), Track 5 (11:42 min, 13.3 MB), Track 6 (3:24 min, 3.8 MB), Track 7 (6:37 min, 7.5 MB), Jewel Case Insert, Jewel Tray, CD Label

While I really enjoy being back in Berlin, the big city and everything, I am suffering under a lack of good internet access. The Germans don’t really believe in free wireless, and the only two places I found which have it are the Sony Center and Salomon Bagels (Joachimstaler Str.). However, the first place is a crappy and expensive tourist magnet, and the second one is smaller than your average walk-in closet. I’ll try to keep posting new stuff on a regular basis, but expect delays and not too much audio until January 7th. Oh, and while I am at complaining, the Berlin weather in winter sucks hard. I would choose Montana subzero temperatures with lots of snow and sun over this grey rainy/snowy/sludgy mess any day. And though we Germans like to complain, and I could go on for hours on end, I will refrain from doing so today and get going with the holiday music.
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Daniel Johnston will always be one of my favorite artists, and the cassette he holds in his hand in the photograph to your left, Yip/Jump Music, is one of my all-time favorite recordings. True, he can’t really play any instrument very well, and he is not a great singer. In the old times this would have been the death knell for a musician, but since Bob Dylan we know better. For those of you who don’t know Daniel, he is what some people call an “outsider” musician, suffering from manic depression. His songs are characterized by an incredible honesty and naivete, and many of them are strongly influenced by his Christianity, having grown up in a very religious West Virginia family. Daniel was embraced by musicians such as Yo La Tengo, who covered his song “Speeding Motorcycle”, and Kurt Cobain, who ran around with his Hi, How Are You? T-shirt for several months, wearing it on MTV and for promo photos.

My first (non-)encounter with Daniel Johnston was in the early 90s in Berlin, when I went to see Jad Fair and Daniel playing live. Unfortunately, Daniel had been hospitalized just before the tour started, so Jad Fair played with some other drummer, whose name I can’t recall. The show was great, and I urge you to see Jad Fair whenever he comes to your town, but there was no Daniel Johnston that day. And that is how his whole life has been since he was a teenager, constantly battling with mental problems, being hospitalized, living with medication which dulls all senses. Right now he is again in critical care in a hospital in Waller, Texas. For updates and newest infos check this fansite.
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