i’m going to a small town called venus bay for two weeks to work on my album. me and all my computers and things that make noises. there’s no internet down there, it hasn’t been invented. they don’t even have electricity, or fire.
there was a lot of stuff i was going to tell you about before i went, film clips, remixes for people, collaborations, but i’ve completely run out of time. even this blog post i’ve left until the last possible minute. so there’ll be plenty to talk about when i get back.
lothar and the hand people!
found at
dreamchimney…
Lothar and the Hand People was a late 1960s psychedelic rock band known for their spacey music and pioneering use of the theremin and Moog modular synthesizer.
the band formed in denver in 1965 when NY-born john emelin and his university of colorado roommate richard willis were inspired to form a jug band after seeing the rolling stones play…
Willis, in classic hippie fashion, came up with the band’s appellation while he was sleeping; he had a dream in which an enslaved race called the Hand People was saved by a hero named Lothar, and when he related the scenario to his fellows, who’d been stumped in their search for a trippy handle, the moniker stuck. Only later did they decide that a theremin owned by Emelin was actually the group’s namesake. “People would always ask, ‘Who’s Lothar?’, and we wouldn’t know what to tell them,” Conly says. “But finally we realized that Lothar had been there all along.”
“Our timing was good,” Emelin says. “We were long-haired at a time when there were only one or two other long-haired bands in town; the rest were old-fashioned greaser bands. So we hit the scene with a more modern look, and that propelled us to local fame right away.”
the band moved to new york. they started gigging at a greenwich village club, befriending a local guitarist called jimmy james (who would later move to london and get a few gigs under the name jimi hendrix). the hand people on the other hand (ha!) recorded a debut album, enlisting a novice composer whose only credits at the time involved production music for star trek but whose future credits would involve the lion’s share of stevie wonder’s 70s catalogue, robert margouleff…
It is electronic country, a kind of good-time music played by mad dwarfs, and it is really good to listen to. There is no tension here, no jarring forces at war with each other. It may be strange that New York, the city which deifies speed and insanity, could produce this music, but it is as if Lothar and the Hand People have gone through this madness and come out on the other side, smiling.
Lothar and the Hand People have a spirit about them which pervades all they do. And after awhile, you’ll see, it doesn’t matter what they do, because the spirit is sort of happy and a lot of fun to be with. It captures a New York time when something happened that denied the concept of a city. And something which can do that, which can overcome the smoke and noise and confusion, is to me something very valuable to have.
less than five years later, the band would wrap things up. a couple of years ago, “presenting… lothar and the hand people” was
re-issued by razor & tie records.
the full story of lothar and the hand people can be read
here.
here’s a clip of a dude listening to “machines” on LP in his lounge room. the internet is an increasingly absurd place to hang out:
here are just some reasons why this 2 minute live performance of “jacaranda” from 1976 is awesome:
- sailor were a completely nautically themed band. they sang songs about the sea, they played synthesisers which on-stage they built into a contraption they called the ‘Nickelodeon’ (meant to resemble part of a ship), and of course on-stage, and on record covers, they wore stripey shirts and sailors hats.
- the dude is playing a harp
- the dude playing the harp has a tattoo of an anchor on his cheek
all this and the song is incredible. it was originally the b-side to a single of theirs called “girls, girls, girls” - admittedly a lot of their pop singles were pretty disposable, but there are some absolute gem instrumentals, including this track which i think may have been some kind of cult hit in germany.
click
here to watch a couple of more clips from this 1976 performance in southend, and click
here to learn more about sailor and their
nickolodeon.
LYRICS: “Faux pas” means “Wrong move” or “Wrong act”
A song of Tabu Ley Rochereau, sang by the queen Mbilia Bel:
[Verse] Stay there where you are, I’ve heard that you are requesting my address
So you are being send by my rival
I want you to forget my man now. I can’t fight you because I’m peaceful
I’ve been hearing about you quite for some time. You’re being send to take my man away from me.
Go back to where you are coming from. Ask to those who know about me when I go crazy.
I’ve been hearing about you quite for some time. Where ever I would go you would inquire about my whereabout. You’re being sent by my rival. But the one sending you is fooling herself. Now she’s sending you to get my man for her, but at the same time, you yourself start to fall in love with him. “You can not leave a goat along with kassava leaves”.
there’s still so much i don’t understand. like for example, the fact that in congo a 9 minute song about guy troubles can be a pop hit. actually, at the end of this clip it just kind of cuts out, so for all i know there’s another 9 minutes coming. its a nice groove though. “you can not leave a goat along with kassava leaves”
this video is currently the first thing that comes up when you
search for faux pas in youtube. the third video is a woman grabbing her boobs. when is it a good time to change your band name, or does someone have to sue you first?
local fidelity continues their series of local artist q&a’s by interviewing sydney soundscaper tommy mcsmith aka
cleptoclectics. asked to describe his music, he responds with “swinging interval meditations” and “syncopated granulation edits”, and mentions that his dream collaborator would be rahsaan roland kirk. he also reveals:
I find Sydney isolates people a little, I’ve found it easier so far to get gigs in other cities. I’ve played almost as much in Melbourne, without really trying, even though I hardly knew anyone down there when I started. So my music isn’t made with much consideration for my immediate context, which is I think something that a lot of music from Sydney has in common, a kind of spatial dislocation, which paradoxically comes from the city perhaps.
read more
here. local fidelity has also recently posted q&a sessions with catcall, firekites and me too.
tom from cleptoclectics recently put together a mix of jazz and downbeat sounds for our radio show - including faust, tarentel and sun ra - which we’re hosting over at the
to and fro website. its a thoughtful mix that will probably make your brain expand a little. also, something you may have missed - a cleptoclectics remix features exclusively on the itunes release of my “changes” ep, which is available
here. its his remix of an unreleased faux pas track called “live shine see.”
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and speaking of the
radio show - tomorrow night dave and i speak to evan mast from new york’s
ratatat about the recording of their new album LP3. i think that the new ratatat album is basically the greatest thing i’ve heard all year, so i had to do my best to avoid completely slobbering all over evan during our pre-recorded interview. it goes to air at midnight australian eastern standard time, tomorrow (tuesday) night, on
3RRR 102.7 FM.
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i’ve noticed some way off the mark reviews of this new ratatat album. the
pitchfork review starts off by linking the album in with the concept of production music - on the one hand an interesting way of trying to put ratatat in context (as instrumental composers with a history of commercial placements for their music) - but on the other hand a potentially really lazy way of engaging with instrumental music in general. more worrying for me is the dismissal of the album as merely “a solid instrumental record…” -
“Aside from what visual or informational stimulus someone else augments Ratatat’s music with, there isn’t really that much content there - or, conversely, there’s potential for the music to be and sound like anything but no one discernable identity… Even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. There’s nothing intrinsically flawed about what’s otherwise a solid instrumental record, but so much of it feels so close to many of the things happening on the radio and the pop charts right now that, 90 seconds into a song, the mind might start wandering and wondering what this kind of stuff would sound like with Wale or Rihanna on top of it.”
Even the best beats on this album feel unfinished without vocals. as someone who has heard more than once the recommendation that i should get some vocals happening on my primarily instrumental music, i find this kind of approach to evaluating ratatat’s music, well, a little offensive. i have no beef with rihanna… mmm, beef with rihanna… but one of the reasons why this album is so captivating, to me anyway, is because of its overwhelming ‘musical-ness’. no vocals required. i know that a lot of people struggle to appreciate instrumental music on its own terms - but, believe it or not, there’s a lot of things to appreciate about music even after lyrics and vocals are removed from the equation (melody, rhythm, ambience, structure, texture, wow its like a whole world of sound)… even saying “removed from the equation” unnerves me a little because it implies that music without vocals is somehow lacking, somehow minus something. anyway, i understand some people don’t get that, but i’d expect more from a reviewer. i think its a credit to ratatat that their music is so laden with melody, structure and instrumentation that it can rival vocal-driven pop music in terms of holding a casual listener’s interest. for me at least, there’s more narrative, more dynamics, more fun in any of the tracks from the recent ratatat album than on most of the fawning indie pop that i hear championed on the radio recently. but of course, i am biased.
for a truly wayward review of the ratatat record, check out the one over at
popmatters. i’ve always had a soft spot for the pseudo- (and, in fact, often very non-pseudo, but on-the-money “for-real” booksmarts) academia of the popmatters music reviews, slightly nerdy and bookish, much more likely to light a fire of cultural analysis in your hedgerow than, perhaps like pitchfork, simply try to establish markers of whats cool or not. but their LP3 review is really not so hot. i mean, only in a popmatters review will you have a reviewer attacking an album for not “establishing a leitmotiv or achieving cultural transcendence or musical syntheses.”
leitmotiv? at least with popmatters reviews, i’m always learning.
more troubling than leitmotiv is this perhaps very casually thought-through idea of “cultural transcendence” - i’m not entirely sure whats being hinted at here, but i think the implication is that the “international” instrumentation of the album (his word, not mine) is some kind of tokenistic grab at exotica… and thats definitely not what i hear when i listen to the album. i think the use of “international” instrumentation is much more a case of them using what instruments they had at hand to create melody and rhythm. in fact, where other albums maybe falter by too overtly tagging their non-western (or read non-”rock”) elements as ‘ethnic’ or exotic elements - i’m reminded of some of the issues raised in the comment boxes of cyclic defrost last year over emmy hennings’ review of
unkle ho’s self-consciously ‘exotic’ album - i think ratatat astutely avoid engaging with that by keeping the focus on ‘musicality.’
i mean, if this dude hears a tabla and immediately starts making assumptions about cultural transcendence or lack there of, it says maybe more about his hang-ups about “western vs exotic” instrumentation than any kind of cultural short-sightedness on the part of ratatat. and well, when he criticises the album for being “culturally amorphous”, i mean… welcome to the 21st century! in this grand paint-bucket blend of culture and globalisation, i’m not sure an album can be criticised for blurring the lines, if thats even what ratatat had in mind. its a shame that he doesn’t hear the album for what it is - a celebration of melody and sound - and instead takes to, in one particularly jarring paragraph, cataloguing the various “international” influences (Middle-Eastern, Japanese, Turkish…. Rasta!) like some kind of dirty laundry list.
anyway, thats just one way in which the review rubs me wrongly. he criticises “Flynn” for not having a beat (! - ); he concedes that “Imperials” succeeds in generating a carousel atmosphere but bemoans its lack of “allegorical motif”; his musical reference point for “Shempi” is, somehow, Justice; and he wraps it up with what reads like a punchline: “After peaking with their tried and true formulas, the group—unintentionally reaching predictability and mediocrity—should look to evolve their sound beyond the arcade and into the dance clubs, and one’s soul.” now thats either criminally misguided music writing or an elaborate and hilarious music-reviewer in-joke.
man it feels good to be a fanboy and come out swinging for one of your favourite bands, on one of the most inconsequential forums for doing such a thing, the goddamn internet! but yeah. they are not the only two “damning with faint praise” reviews i’ve read of LP3, and its just kind of shocked me because i think its one of the better things i’ve heard in ages. it reminds me a little of some of the reviews of the last few air albums - do a bit of googling and try and gauge the critical response to every air record since “moon safari” and you just get a lot of confused people writing reviews that seem to heavily praise them but at the same time kind of slap them with the back of a glove, like, “yeah air, they’re doing what they do, its really amazing, but, um, how boring”. i don’t know. i wonder if ratatat and air both fall into that category of bands who are actually way left of the norm, but accidentally hit upon some kind of wider level of awareness.. celebrated at first and then kind of ignored or castigated later. another example: some of the poor reviews of the last hot chip record. their sound and approach didn’t change much - but reviewers’ reaction to them did. anyway.
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and now, to lighten the mood… here is rahsaan roland kirk, live in 1969. i don’t know what that thing he’s playing right at the start is - before he gets into his trademark, playing five saxophones at once, including two with his nose and one with his ear - but i have a feeling it may be a very early hacked nintendo DS synth controller prototype… i’m happy to stand corrected if someone can tell me what that thing is (i ain’t no expert on these things)
3. the whole idea of doing it fills me with paralysing despair. this is what it looks like when i try to imagine how i could possibly translate my music into an enjoyable form of live performance:
there, its official. i have never ever intended for my music to be performed. if i ever implied otherwise, i’m sorry but i was lying. my music is not performance, it is production. there is much value in both forms of music - hooray for those blessed with the ability to align the two. to whoever it may concern - may you enjoy my recorded output for the years to come!
