spacek_vintagehitech

Shake your funky exoskeleton.

Purchase this anthology: Amazon

THE SCENE: In 2001 the London-based electronica grouping Spacek released their showtime album of restrained and futurist R&B called Curvatia. Championed by a small but feverish lot they returned in 2003 with an even more subtle and skeletal recording, the click'n'blissed Vintage Hi-Tech.

Ever see shapes in the clouds and wonder how long before the wind dismantles them? That'southward the fragile audio of Spacek. Using clicks for snares and clacks for kick drums, Spacek'due south production technique is to record every bit few instruments as possible while using almost no sounds that one would associate with music.

Hums from escalators, taps from a cell phone, the modern sounds of a highly wired urban gild invade the tones, much every bit a wooden flute reinterpreted the sounds of a singing bird way dorsum in the 24-hour interval of the hunter-gatherers.

Offsetting this foundation of quiet inorganicness is the burgundy smooth voice of leader Steve Spacek. Barely singing above the volume of a golf game commentator, his delicate soul crooning is the anchor that gives the songs their barest wisp of shape.

The tunes don't ebb and flow as much equally they fade in and out. The syncopated swing beats of "Motility Control" bob and weave similar a street baller, with barely aural woodpecker percussion. Information technology'south clinical and sexy, similar a forensics lab with a singles bar.

"Fourth dimension" flows smoothly like the weightless movement of a glass elevator, every floor revealing new gorgeous vocal layers and funky deep ends. On the jagged side, "Amazing" sounds like monkeys firing zap guns during a tango in a Chinatown dry goods shop.

The shuffling "Light Up My Life" orbits around mirrored audio puddles of electric pianoforte. Bass shows its face at present and again like a hot air airship that occasionally hits the footing, bouncing off doo-wop vocals and synthetic craven clucks.

Over an accompaniment of toy piano and thump, "123 Magic" distills the childhood glow of sensation into a wafer-thin mint of perception:

I'm gonna disappear
right earlier your eyes
And then I'grand gonna reappear
brand you lot feel surprised
123 I'1000 gone
you know I won't be long
Gone to another place
spend a little time in space
All in a zone
you lot wanna come with me
I can take you in that location
yous can false it in that location
I'll notice ways for you
Crusade I tin can run into correct through

A song nigh beingness barely there, performed as if it was barely there. Clever.

THE FALLOUT: Turns out the sales were barely there as well. Vintage Hi-Tech was well-received in dance circles but pretty much ignored everywhere else. They have still to tape a follow-up, merely Steve Spacek released a solo album in 2005.

Vintage Hi-Tech is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:

Romantic trip the light fantastic tunes for pumping out of your hovercraft, Vintage How-do-you-do-Tech gently dropkicks soul music into the side by side century.

See you next Wed.

NEXT Calendar week: Muddy Waters' sells out to the young'uns.

kidcreole_wiseguy

Where your mai-tai is always refreshed.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: Oh Europe! You lover of American culture you! How thankful we are that you support jazz and techno and comic books and interpretive trip the light fantastic crusade we here in America need a helping hand to validate our own greatness! Nosotros love us some Hendrix merely damn if he didn't take to go to England to get a leg up.

This outright dismissal of homemade brilliance happens less in New York, and its downtown music scene of the early '80s is where the zoot-suited Child Creole and The Coconuts fabricated their marker. Their revelatory blend of swinging salsa, corybantic funk and large band Broadway prove tunes populated their 1981 anthology Fresh Fruit in Strange Places, which establish just a tiny audience. For their adjacent anthology they turned upward the gloss without losing the crunch, resulting in the dazzling Wise Guy.

An sound vacation prowl to exotic unknown locales, each cut shimmers and shakes with brawny carelessness. Much similar the Kid himself all the songs are danceable, humorous, nuanced and oh-then-precipitous. The calypso and soca-fueled "Annie, I'g Non Your Daddy" cleverly shows off the lighter side of pre-DNA paternity testing ("cause if I was in your blood, and so you wouldn't be so ugly").

The romantic and dangerous "The Love We Have" mixes cold strings and warm horns into a frothy jungle beverage of icy confusion. "I'm A Wonderful Thing, Baby" features a subdued swagger, its rippling muted guitars supporting a laundry list of the Kids' liaisons.

Direct outta the speakeasy slides "Stool Pigeon", a gangster-hard cautionary tale of ratting out to the Feds:

If you wanna squeal, said the FBI
We can make a deal, make information technology worth your while
So he told it all and in return
He got a credit menu and a Thunderbird
He got a spanking new identity
And a condo down in Miami
He bought a plane, a boat and jewelry
But he couldn't buy any company

Deep grooves with nighttime themes cloaked in confectionary coat, how could anyone resist?

THE FALLOUT: Like Jimi Hendrix and James Baldwin, Kid Creole and the Coconuts blew upwards in England big fourth dimension. Retitled Tropical Gangsters, information technology was a summit five anthology, produced iii hit singles and stayed on the charts for nine months. But back in u.s.a. it savage off the chart faster than a baby bird out of a malformed nest. Except for the rare dance hit, Child Creole and the Coconuts never broke through to near of America.

Wise Guy is available from Amazon and you tin can sample tracks here:

Groundbreaking in its world music synthesis, Wise Guy dances lonely.

Encounter you side by side Wednesday.

NEXT WEEK: Click into the future with Spacek.

cody_theheadphonemasterpiece

The Low Fidelity Theory.

Buy this anthology:

THE SCENE: In 2000 Cody ChesnuTT'south ring The Crosswalk were dropped from their label without ever releasing an anthology. Where many folks would respond by shutting themselves off in their room for a good long sulk, ChesnuTT went to his room with a 4-rail recorder and cut the thirty-half dozen tracks that make upwardly the exuberant The Headphone Masterpiece.

Back in the day (and by this I mean before computers came with free audio software) inexpensive four-track recorders were the must-have item for all working musicians. No matter where inspiration struck, within seconds you could capture your musical ramblings for posterity. Eventually many a musician would get the urge to recreate their intimate demos by shelling out thousands of dollars for a proper studio recording, where the unfamiliar environs would ensure a soulless, sterile facsimile of a in one case great performance.

ChesnuTT'south brilliant move was to completely ignore this urge and release his recordings as is, complete with tape hiss, background noise and the occasional bum note. Headphone has xc minutes of songs as tricky as a nutrient-borne virus, its length providing an extra-large visit with ChesnuTT's extra-large love and sex-fueled persona.

Like a friendly waiter at a down-home diner he provides comfort-food helpings of '60s style rockers (the surf garage-y "Upstarts in a Blowout" and "Await Practiced in Leather), soul-man electronica ( the ominous "The Globe is Coming To My Party") and folk-gospel ballads (the sad organ pleading of "She'southward Yet Hither"). With his unfeasibly large ego, flexible tenor and dark sense of humour he begs for forgiveness in the nicotine withdrawal canticle "Somebody's Parent", and gets jealous of his infant son in his own damn lullaby (No worries/No stress/You lucky motherfucker) in "Daddy'southward Infant".

In the original, shambling version of "The Seed", ChestnuTT compares musical genre-breaking to primal infidelity:

I don't beg
FROM no rich homo
And I don't scream, and kick,
when his shit don't fall in my hands, human being
Cuz I know how to STEAL
Fertilize another against my lover's will
I lick the opposition cuz she don't take no pill
Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-no love
You'll be keeping my legend alive
I push my seed in her button for life
Its gonna work considering I'yard pushin' information technology right
If Mary drops my babe girl tonight
I would name her Rock-N-Curl

Even his indulgences are interesting, such as the way-besides-short "Batman vs. Blackman", the never-really started "Setting the System" and the warped-in-progress " And so Much Beauty in the Subculture".

Aggressive? Oh heck yeah.

THE FALLOUT: Cody ChesnuTT was a media sensation in 2003, appearing in an unprecedented corporeality of loftier-contour media outlets normally out of reach for such an unknown and unclassifiable musician. He besides had a minor radio hit with "The Seed 2.0", an muscular re-recording with The Roots. Oddly, The Headphone Masterpiece never sold as well every bit his notoriety would lead ane to believe, and in 2006 I had a difficult fourth dimension finding a store that stocked it. And I alive in a college town.

Cody ChesnuTT has however to record a followup.

The Headphone Masterpiece is available from Amazon and you can sample tracks here:

In a modern world where nearly every musical note we hear has been placed and contradistinct with diamond-cutting precision, an album that ignores 30 years of recording advancements is downright heretical. Merely tiptop-notch songwriting and performances trump sonic clarity whatsoever day of the twelvemonth, and The Headphone Masterpiece proves that point admirably.

Come across y'all next Wed.

NEXT Calendar week: Kid Creole and The Coconuts get wise.

pablo_kingtubbys

The Low End Reality.

Purchase this album: Amazon

THE SCENE: To my xvi-twelvemonth onetime nephew Star Wars has always existed, whereas I distinctly recollect life earlier Darth Vader. By the same token I don't remember a time when dub music didn't exist, as its melted beat-eat-eat-EAT-EAT-EAT has always been a part of my listening feel.

Dub was created in the late '60s by Jamaican producer King Tubby, who daringly dropped lead singers in and out of their own recordings while bathing instruments in milky delays and boxy distortion. It was an instant, massive hit and much pillaged sound.

Meanwhile, Jamaican producer and musician Augustus Pablo was gaining major international respect due to his mastery of the melodica, a kid's musical instrument that looks like the beloved child of a plastic flute and a toy piano. In 1975 he paired with King Tubby to record and remix tracks that became the landmark King Tubbys meets Rockers Uptown.

Like a jungle predator, Rockers Uptown gives the listener heightened sensory powers. The bass is ALL bass, no high-terminate, no mid-range, simply strong, sweetness deep bass. Cymbals are ALL treble, sneaky and clicky. Every other sound is time shifted, dissolving at the moment of recognition, like the faded memory of a dead loved one.

"Go along On Dubbing" has a watery drunken piano and a smoky horn section gait that'south akin to traveling forth the island, onward and inward, hot like the Jamaican sun. The slow rubbery vibe continues in the scratch percussion of "555 Dub St". and the slo-mo dishwasher drums of "Satta Dub".

Pablo's melodica notes bladder similar bubbles through the air in "Male monarch Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown", its childlike innocence wafting along the ominous rhythms. Hollow drums ping-pong double time into infinity, guitars are delayyyyyed and pop up similar muscle tremors.

The ghost vocals of reggae singer Jacob Miller haunt "Each One Dub". His refrain "Tomorrow will not be the same same same same…" dissipates into a wall of wet organ notes.

Since all of these songs started with such strong compositions, the dub versions manage to create their seductive druggy magic with a minimum of gimmickry, and a maximum of head-bopness.

THE FALLOUT: Rockers Uptown was a watershed album upon its release, catapulting Augustus Pablo into 1 of the leading lights of reggae music. Alas he was overshadowed past Bob Marley internationally, and this album had little presence outside of reggae circles.

King Tubbys meets Rockers Uptown is available worldwide from Amazon and you tin sample tracks here:

An art course that only could be with the appearance of multitracking, dub is the get-go mail service-modern music genre and is the godfather of hip-hop, electronica and ambient music. King Tubbys meets Rockers Uptown is mayhap its finest hour.

See you next Wednesday.

Adjacent Week: A masterpiece for your headphones.