Share a song II

SO hot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMd9eYXT0mM"]XXYYXX - Alone - YouTube

 

I had this album with the exact same weird packaging...Lost it when I had to sell all my cds - hundreds - to pay a bill.

 

Are you familiar with Todd Terje's solo work?
He has yet to release an LP but his several EPs that I've heard are pretty good; a bit more on the house/techno side by comparison with Lindstrøm which is not typically my preference. I was introduced to him by his 'It's The Arps EP' from 2012 released on Smalltown Supersound (the same Oslo based label that released all of Lindstrøm's LP releases and a handful of the EPs) and went on to pick-up copies of the 2010 'Remaster of the Universe EP' and 2011 'Ragysh'.

He has a relatively new one out from last June called Strandbar that has cool cover art and seems interesting, as well as a collaboration with Lindstrøm from earlier in the year (early Spring) called Lanzarote, both of which were released on Terje's own label Olsen. I haven't gotten around to listening to either EP yet, which is something I'll have to remedy.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEhge2_L9tI


Although I am a huge fan of Lindstrøm, he pulled a very bad move back in 2012 that I still haven't wrapped my head around. I'm talking about his release 'Six Cups of Rebel', a double LP on his own Feedelity and then a few months later the apparently instant-release of yet another full length LP, 'Smalhans' and this from a guy who has released a total of 4 full length LPs in the decade of producing, the last of which was a collaboration with Christabelle from 2009. I don't follow him much anymore and was only retaining a passing interest at the time when 'Smalhans' dropped due to my disappointment at paying full price for 'Six Cups of Rebel' and so I'm not familiar with the whole story but it certainly seemed to me as if Lind'y dropped Six Cups with the assumption that it would sell no matter what and it was an experimental disaster, then turned around and dropped Smalhans as fast as humanely possible in order to recover his reputation by treading familiar territory and giving his fans what they had hoped Six Cups was, rather than waiting another 3 - 4 years to produce another masterpiece (like Where You Go I Go Too) and see if his fans stuck around patiently. Like I said, I could be wrong, for all I know he may have even produced Smalhans first and released them out of order, but Six Cups was so terribly awful and irritating that I assume it to be the case. I'm into some pretty bizarre and psychotic music so it was not a matter of not getting 'it', Government Alpha consistently releases better material than that atrocity; in fact it was offensive, shameful even, a disgrace to the art form. I've tried listening to Six Cups at 33 1/3rpm, 45rpm, with numerous variables altered by mixing board and stereo setup, by CD (I preordered and so got the first pressing which included the CD as a bonus) both in the home and in the car, on headphones both sober and intoxicated &c, and never once could I find more than a fleeting moment of enjoyable music out of it. The final track 'Hina' has a few decent seconds, but what really destroyed all possibility of salvaging the record was the way the opening track falls flat moving into the second track; the record starts off with a 5+ minute organ build-up called 'No Release' and it's one of his most intense moments across his career outside of Where You Go, and then it suddenly grinds to a halt and switches tempo, making for one of the truly ugliest sonic experiences I've ever encountered. He was one of my all time favorite artists and it took me months to accept the fact that the album was a monstrous embarrassment, but ultimately I had to admit this to myself and after 30 or so listening attempts I finally just gave it up. What happened to 'I Feel Space', 'Breakfast in Heaven', 'Arp She Said', 'Music (In My Mind)', 'Another Station', 'There's A Drink In My Bedroom And I Need A Hot Lady', 'Kontroll', and 'Jodleknappen'? It's not just that I am primarily interested in him for his space disco influences (I know that as an electronic musician he was basically new to the stuff from the getgo, his background is in prog rock essentially and he discovered electronic music at the same time as he began recording his own), because I enjoy electrofunk, synthpop, italo, and all the rest of the retro origins for his sound. It's odd but I guess it's just a very rare example of a master musician trying to switch styles out of the blue and failing miserable, then jumping right back to what was making him money.

 

I like the steel pans in this.Not much heard in rock.I used to play them in school.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfheTkgO7N0"]Matthew Sweet - The Big Cats of Shambala - YouTube

 

No I'm not familiar with his solo work.

My only Todd Terje experience is listening to his Lindstrom edits, none of which I've ever liked more than the original.

And although that generally goes without saying, his name only truly became blacklisted in my mind upon hearing his edit of Another Station for the first time.

The original Lindstrom version is without hyperbole some of the most profoundly meaningful and emotionally moving music I've ever heard.
When I heard Terje's version, I felt as though I had heard everything I ever needed to from him.

I want to talk shit about it but I don't even know what to say. It's impossible to find words with which to express the blasphemy of that edit. It's that bad to me. The only thing I can liken it to is a heavy metal version of Bach's prelude in C major.

 

And yea, Six Cups of Rebel is the worst thing I've ever heard in my whole life.

 

I thought you'd agree, Josh.
I can't find a way to make sense of that album, because he clearly put a lot of effort and time into producing it and if you were making an assumption based on his experimental work like Where You Go, it would be imagined that an experimental genre crossing funky disco retro romp would be amazing, and yet it is utterly atrocious. Everything from the layered slow motioned vocal samples to the Chic guitar strumming to the synth bass is terrible and it almost never catches a sincere groove, but forget about profundity in emotion, because that is never even attempted outside of the opening No Release (and as already mentioned, it's dropped, which brings to mind a comparison of listening to a drawn out version of the opening movement to Beethoven's 5th).

I guess this is more common than I'd like to acknowledge, however I think it more rare when the musician is producing albums on their own; I think of Steve Howe making some horrible music with Yes in the 80's, Genesis after Peter Gabriel quit, Pink Floyd after Roger Waters left, Gary Numan after his first three works (the second of which, and his first 'solo', was brilliant), and so on. Suppose the difference with Lind'y is that he rebounded, and relatively quickly, it was literally a matter of months before Smalhans was released and I recall a ton of self-advertising with several countdowns on his official channels and electronic-oriented music news outlets. What I considered shameful was the way that he refused to stand by his own art, I mean instead of giving it a few years to be digested and properly re-reviewed in hindsight, he abandoned it, didn't schedule any remarkable touring, and whipped up Smalhans to, what appears to be in my eyes, recover his reputation and satisfy his fans desire to have something proper before they in turn abandoned him. For this reason, I refused to purchase a copy of Smalhas, despite how desirous I was to have a new full length LP of space disco by him. There are even people who actually like Six Cups, supposedly, judging by Youtube comments and the odd blog review.

One thing is for certain, none of that erases the power of his earlier music and detracts from my opinion of his ability to produce some heart breaking gorgeous disco music, and I anticipate more brilliant work from him in the future. I suppose that because he was figuring his own persona out as he went along, being brand new to electronic music in general at the outset of his recording career, this was a stumble that should have been expected, and perhaps it will cause him to grow even more, but that being said, I get the idea that a lot of these retro-futurist musicians are considering italo and space disco a sort of dead-end approach with little to no room to grow, and they are beginning to switch genres as the hipness of the movement wanes. I got 'hip' to this stuff by Swedish dj Albion years before it became fashionable again, and continue to be a total nerd about the seventies and early eighties stuff, not because of style but because of the palpable sense of progression and excitement that these musicians tendered by growing in understanding analog synthesis. I think what Lindstrøm brought to the table that many of these Norwegian and Swedish musicians lack was the progressive-rock element which went out of fashion decades ago and has never actually recovered, but he buries it deep down behind layers of house and more modern electronic sounds. Listening to something like Where You Go, or his initial release of I Feel Space, brings up immediately the sounds of late seventies Berlin School and French Barclay label space disco, while his later stuff resounds with elements of Italo but even the inspired French musicians like J.P. Massiera, on something like Grand Prix - Mach 1 from 1983, for example. Look:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7_edU9T2Ho"]Lindstrom - I Feel Space (Original Version) - YouTube


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGWzq6QDdaY"]Grand Prix - Mach 1 - YouTube

 

Dutch folk music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_PMEt8NmLU"]PATER MOESKROEN Joost de "voorlopige" videoclip - YouTube

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-WMbP1RcC4"]Neil Young - Like A Hurricane - YouTube

 

This sounds even more beautiful after smoking cannabis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nevnq7MvVTI"]Aphex Twin - Xtal - YouTube

Those synths are just incredible.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZQL22xOmUM"]Robert Plant - Big Log - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2G7Kq9UBUGA"]Robert Plant - Little By Little (Long Version) - YouTube
limited zepplin fan, but these plants I always loved..

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBOOLFV4LZM"]Spooky Tooth - I've Got Enough Heartaches - YouTube

 

This song is so good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX1W7T0ySSo"]13th Floor Elevators - Dust - YouTube

 

From one of my favorite hip-hop albums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTDgapcahJQ"]Gang Starr ft. Inspectah Deck - "Above The Clouds" - YouTube

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEdStORJRPQ"]Lindstrom - Fāār-i-kāāl - YouTube

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0x6B5eVK7VQ"]Grass Roots - Midnight Confessions (Rare clip, 1972) - YouTube

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpLDkzOWOvM"]Kopecky Family Band - Are You Listening - YouTube

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1RySX5qyb0"]08. Raging Lung - YouTube

 

End of Innocence was on by Don Henley, but I cannot find a decent version of it on u-tube of him singing it...Many other people singing it....Strange.....Operator by Jim Croce is on now....see if I can get that one for here in a second....

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV__vRQ8fC0"]Jim Croce - Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels) - YouTube