Yet another mp3 blog, online since October 6th, 2008!
(And here's the origin of this blog's name.)
Of course, I don't link directly to anything but mp3s that have been made available for free by authors or their labels, or that were digitised from public domain recordings.
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Zak Sally – “Why We Hide”
From the tasty Cybersex (!) sampler released by Sub Pop. All tracks are top-notch indie.
Jay Reatard - “You’re Gonna Lose”
If you visit Reatard’s website and subscribe to his mailing list, you’ll get this wonderful little ditty for free.
Raiding Secretly Canadian’s downloads page for interesting reissues.
Swell Maps - “Midget Submarines”
Roots of punk.
Zero Boys - “Livin’ in the 80s”
Zero Boys - “Drive In”
Zero Boys - “Civilization’s Dying”
Hardcore orthodoxy.
Los Fancy Free - “Beatle Suit & Purple Boot”
There was always a strong Chicano garage rock subculture in California, but it sounds like they sure can boogie too across the border.
Panthers - “Goblin City (Holy Ghost! Disco Dub)”
Since we’re late enough for pagan / consumerist fest Haloween as to be nearing Christian / consumerist fest Xmas, I can share this 9-minute monster of groove. The only elements from the original that remain, floating as ghosts(!) above the beat, are the chorus and shards of lead guitars.
Wire - “23 Years Too Late (Radio Edit)”
The much-lauded start-stop aesthetic, the tightness and subtlety of Wire’s playing appear marvelously in these 2 tracks. As the title of the first track suggests, listening to a Wire song is all about getting into the rhythm, about following the beating of the narrator’s heart, even when what he says is pure stream-of-consciousness.
The second track is a radio-formatted edit of a 9-minute beauty of a song, that you should track down. It’s on the Read & Burn 03 EP released in 2007.
(Plus I love how Graham Lewis utters his curt “We don’t play requests” at the end of the first live track: right from the start, even in their twenties, these guys never made any attempt to please or coax their audience into loving them.)
Duchess Says - “Black Flag (The Juan Maclean Remix)”
The band’s name makes me think of that eerie female character, the Duchess, in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, at once “funny ha ha” and “funny peculiar”, strangely threatening even though she behaves amiably. Well, as often, the band’s name tells you a bit about their “character” and music: the Québec band (especially its frontwoman A-Claude) seem the coolest of dudes until you see how much noise and power they can unleash onstage. Their obsession with birds also puzzles.
“Black Flag” is a minor masterpiece (I say “minor” simply because I don’t really expect the band to ever cross over from their Canadian underground to mainstream fame). To be honest, I prefer the original to Juan Maclean’s dancefloor-oriented remix, but even so, the song retains its power of attraction, its anthemic sweep. That keyboard intro is simply arresting, too.
The Mob - “Witch Hunt (JD Twitch Re-Edit)”
Strange but true: quantized and extended anarcho-punk sounds a lot like Can. Well maybe it isn’t all that strange, since those hairy Germans used to sit around in an empty Schloss and improvise endlessly, just as this underground punk scene of the late 70s used to sit around in London squats and play until their hands were too cold to play any longer.
Optimo’s JD Twitch is a trusted digger of lost, often dark works from all genres and periods, and his re-edits (i.e. a form of remixing that mainly consists in making a record fit for DJ use by extending / looping interesting rhythmic elements or breaks) are often challenging and danceable at the same time.
Liars - “It Fit When I Was a Kid (Crystal Castles Remix)”
Liars’ experiment in drones and drums is made all the lanker and leaner, thus all the more striking and danceable, by 8-bit snobs Crystal Castles.
