Heavy Summer Rock Mix: Duende

A little late for the summer haze, but here's a rocking mix I made for the annual Waxidermy mix swap... Accents on despair, ghosts, and Latin rock! Some of my all time favorites here, and also some new friends too. Check it out... Talk soon, J

Technical Difficulties...

It's been brought to my attention - that, for whatever reason a lot of my old embedded div-share players are dying out... In lieu of that, and my extremely basic tech-savvy I'm wondering if anyone could help me out with an alternative to this crappy file-sharing service and tacky looking embedded player... I spent the better part of an hour trying how to figure out the classy Java-script one upon realizing that I don't actually have any kind of server space to link this up to. Any suggestions? Ideally I'd like to have this stuff stored somewhere reliable, and be able to have a track or two up for alot of the albums too, for a sample once the album link expires... Please let me know what you think!

Turiiya - Waiting

Here's a very special LP that quickly crept into being one of my favorite new spins of 2010... My friend Callum mentioned this Kiwi folk-psych long-player in an e-mail exchange a few months ago as being a true delight, and so I immediately tracked down a copy to check it out. I was quickly sucked into their lush cosmos of nocturnal vocalizations, looming cello runs, and odd drawn out song structures. The record in a sense seems born out of some loose stage of new age phenomenon, hailing from the late date of 1986, and the band being annointed with a Hindu word meaning, "pure conciousness," in turn much of the lyrical flavor comes through on this level: gorgeous female vocals intoning the depths of the forest, the Aboriginal "Dreaming," vantages onto island travel and living a small life in the bounds of Anglo Oceania - calling to mind at times Campion's wonderful film, Sweetie, as well a host of other celestial and earthly energy fields. Musically the group is indeed first and foremost a kind of loose aggregate of spirituality born to sound. Sonically I can't help but flash on things like Comus or the Christ Tree... yet Turiiya are of their own place and time, and it would be reductive to just tag them with the much overused folk-psych tag and be done with it. They seem formed within some kind of a far flung indie rock scene, but simultaneously orbiting well beyond the identity politics and catch-phrase jingo-ism that usually inform those kinds of records. I know New Zealand had its share of shambolic forthright female outfits in this time period, yet Turiiya still seems to be beckoning from a mistier clime... In any case, being hard to pin is one of my favorite aspects in sound, so I'll let my hypotheses rest here. The record is a mash of organic, strange, illuminated ideas and it really should just be enjoyed. I can find virtually no references to the LP online, so any further info is much appreciated. Talk soon - J

The Mysterious Women of Turiiya

Ringing Endorsement: The Exotica Project

If you're anything like me, you can't help slipping deep inside the prehistoric womb of Yma, Denny, or Ahbez whenever the needle happens to drop on a side... Exotica is and has been a timeless genre for all kinds of music freaks, but fairly unknown to me, and I think others, was how deep the genre ran on 45s... no one who's ever gone looking for records hasn't picked up a Denny or Baxter LP at some point, and they're great - don't get me wrong, but thanks to a wildly in depth new site spearheaded by a friend, Dan Shiman, the parameters seemed to open on all kinds of things I had never encountered before once the speed was set to 45 RPM! Accompanied with some great writing on the topic, side-length mp3 clips, and beautiful hi-res scans of over 100 45s the site is truly something worth taking the time to explore. I'll quote from Dan, as to why if you dig lost music, generally speaking, the site may really gel with your view:

"A wide variety of artists from a wide variety of backgrounds populates exotica's back pages: established jazz musicians and Latin congueros, landlocked surf guitar combos, forgotten actresses-turned-thrush and cruise ship combos, hinterlands nightclub singers, frustrated session musicians and studio arrangers, for-hire African percussionists, R&B vocal groups and chitlin circuit B3 wranglers. The genre-spanning diversity of exotica is reflected here.

The role of the 45 format must not be overlooked, either. Exotica abounds on 45, the best examples wilder, looser, stranger, more eccentric, more ambitious - more experimental, even - than their album track counterparts."

Seriously! Check it out, already!