MUSIC I AIN'T HEARD COMMUTE WEEK PART II
I enjoy ambient music and space music and that kind of good stuff. And I really enjoyed this--another Mojo find. I enjoyed it on my commute and while scraping and priming the garage door. At the time I was trying to decide whether to go see the Dead Boys on a school night and mulling over various reports that rock is dead.
This is some good time fusion-y stuff that will help you party and forget being a crapped out zombie for a minute, and/or (see above) finish scraping and priming the garage door. This reminded me of a Burning Man afficionado I know back in Eugene, and I could imagine him blasting it on the playa between The Meters and the trancy funk jam stuff he likes.
This is a beautiful record from 2011 that Fatoumata Diawara just followed up. We really do live in a golden age of great music available from all over the world and African music is a big part of that wave. It's great that Western production techniques don't give records like this the Blues Hammer Baby Boomer treatment the way they used to do in the 90's with certain things you'd hear on the local NPR feed. The album that kicked it off for me was The Source by Ali Farka Toure and Ry Cooder.
I am little bit new to Dr. Octagon and Kool Keith but I can say that of stuff I've explored lately, this jumped out at me as totally nuts, the kind of music that establishes an imaginative worldview (mega weird) the way Sun Ra, Mark E. Smith, or Robert Pollard's music can--in a single phrase. The soundscape is pretty spare and has a nice acoustic drum feel with some butt to it and none of the hyper-ricky-ticky-tacky density du jour. I caught myself thinking, I wish Lou Reed was still around, he'd get a major kick out of this and the way the human body is mapped and referenced in these crazy songs. William S. Burroughs would blast paint cans with his shotgun to this record.
I was writing Octagon in an Octagon-hat
With Octagon-underwear, taking an Octagon-bath
With Octagon-soap, my Octagon-motorcycle made by Octagon Bikes
Stand up late in Octagon Heights living that Octagon-life
Wiping the girls off with Octagon-baby-wipes
Using the Octagon-washing-machine to dry
Octagon-coats on Octagon-hangers
Octagon-posters made Octagon famous
The Octagon-germ became quite contagious
Left people upside-down, taking Octagon-painkillers
Octagon, to everybody so familiar
Octagon-condoms, with Octagon-tampons for women
Became a frenzy
Octagon-gasoline, people use it when their motors go empty
Octagon-dog food with Octagon-cat food
Did ya'll read Octagon News? People going Octagon, fool
With Octagon-girls and Octagon-dudes
With strippers even dancing with G-strings in Octagon-boots
I discovered Time Is A Mountain because they are on the label founded by Mariam The Believer, an artist I really admire. It's kind of Euro-spacey instrumental ambient jazz something something, pretty modal and kind of kraut rock at times. I really like it, weird vintage synth and key sounds treated to great effect.
The Takeshi Kitano feature series on Filmstruck is cool, I watched Violent Cop last night.
Well, the week is almost up and I have enjoyed these plunges into new sonic soundscapes. We are currently in a boil-o-dome of humidity and I have had to wait to walk the dogs.