RADIO MISTERIOSO 3/01/09

Here's my most recent guest-dj appearance on "Radio Misterioso," that crucial exploration into the world of weird, hosted by writer Greg "Spacebrother" Bishop, of Flying Saucer Music and Music/Not Music fame. Actually, I just contributed a song to "Flying Saucer Music," a lovely little outsider ditty written by a priest in the '50s called "Those Funny Little Saucers in The Sky."

Featured: early electronica, true sounds of UUOs (Unidentified Underwater Objects), American Indians singing kid's show themes, robots, outsiders, lounge crooners, thrift-store atrocities, mashups, '70s glam for children, and most of a UFO-cult record.

For your listening or downloading pleasure:

Radio Misterioso, March 01, 2009 - WARNING, the audio starts playing when you click the link.

"Plan Nine From Outer Space" intro
talk break
"Psychedelic Circus" ad
Thelonious Moog "Misterioso"
Sun Ra "Message To The Earth Man"
DJ Lobsterdust "It's Fun To Smoke Dust"
Forrest J. Ackerman "Music For Robots" (music)

talk break

"Head" ad
Synthesizers Unlimited "Forgotten World"
Forrest J. Ackerman "Music For Robots" (narration)
Yma Sumac "Kuyaway (Inca Love Song)"
James Last "Mr Giant Man"
Shirley & Squirrely: "Hey Shirley"
[some Moog thing; Jean-Jacques Perrey, maybe?]
Unidentified undersea sounds
Black Lodge Singers "SpongeBob SquarePants"
Black Lodge Singers "Kid's Pow-Wow Songs Medley"
Phyllis & Art (The Hollywood Sweethearts) and their horrible singing child "Something's Happened To Daddy"
DJ NoNo "Stripper Jackson"
MadMixMustang "Sweet Sledgehammer"
People Like Us & Ergo Phizmiz "Social Dance"
Roger Roger "Gags A-Go-Go"

talk break, with Rodd Keith "That Martian Jubilee"

Troy Cory "Rinki Rura"
Uge "Mad Charles"
Pornophonic "Sad Robot"
The Scientific Peace Builders Foundation "The Celestial Visitor From Planet Wisdom," mixed with:
Oskar Sala "Five Improvisations On Magnetic Tape"
Annette Funicello "The Maid & The Martian"
Sir Anthony Lanza Cocozza "How Could I Forget You"
Rodd Keith "The Astronauts"
Space Alphabet "A - Astronomy and Astronomer"
Contessa Elaine Lanza "I Love You I Love You"

talk break

Arthur 'One Man Band' Nakane "Band On The Run"
The Jose Maria Band "Light My Fire"
Wing "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"
In Touch "Nights On Broadway"
Wing "Yesterday"
In Touch "Love To Love You Baby"
Arthur 'One Man Band' Nakane "Secret Asian Man"

talk break

Lothar & The Hand People "Machines"

Thanks again, 'brother!

NONO YOYO

It's been a good week for circa-1970 bubblegum remix revivals. No sooner does Go Home Productions hit us with his take on the "Banana Splits" theme, then that rascally red robot DJ NoNo goes and serves The Osmonds over party-rockin' boom-bap beatz, seamlessly integrating '60s swingers Hugo Montenegro and The Swingle Singers into the mix.

DJ NoNo - YoYo Roll

Good robot! Hope your buddy Tim from Radio Clash gives you a coupla extra squirts of oil tonight.

GHP GOES BANANAS

"Paying homage to the greatest ever kids tv show and the first 7"single that I bought way back in 1979. Created under the influence of The Jamms / KLF / Coldcut / Steinski. Contains too many illegal samples to mention."

So sayeth Go Home Productions, a guy who may be remixer to the stars (Bowie, Gang of Four) now, but who started out in the inter-webular mashup underground. He has returned to his roots with a new free download featuring Cali-punk legends The Dickies' classic remake of the "Banana Splits" theme that is the funniest, most riotous, exhilarating, superbly produced...er, maybe I should just describe my reaction when I play it: "Ha ha ha, YES!" /turns the volume up louder and louder/grins maniacally/spazmodically lurches around the room...

Go Home Productions "GHP GOES BANANAS"

He also has an entire album of original (no samples) music called "The Future, The Past & The Present Tension" now up.

GOOD REVIEWS FOR BAD REVIEWS

It's getting harder to tell outsider music from lo-fi indie stuff. Well, whatever Bad Reviews is, it's acoustic guitars, sometimes distorted (more due to recording quality then a fuzz box), down 'n' depressed, but with occasional high-pitched vocals - Jandek & the Chipmunks?

No info whatsoever, just a 5 song on-line EP featuring a sad, gorgeous, dirty waltz. The title, near as I can tell, has nothing to do with the song itself.

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Bad Reviews: news.bbc.co.uk

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Want to irritate your roommate? Have house guests who won't leave? The song "(re-do vocal)" is as creepy as anything I've heard lately.

ROBOT ROCK

Well, since we seem to be the only blog reporting on the Robot Invasion:

bd594: Bohemian Rhapsody (video)
bd594: Bohemian Rhapsody (mp3)

'Tis Queen covered with the help of singing office equipment (an Atari 800XL - "piano," Texas Instruments TI-99/4a - "electric guitar," 8 Inch Floppy Disk - "bass," 3.5 inch Harddrive - "gong," HP ScanJet 3C - all "vocals").

Absolutely spectacular.

From the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, a soon-to-be-obsolete human plays jazz piano, as a robot marimba player responds with astonishing quickness:

Guy Hoffman & Shimon The Robot (video)
Guy Hoffman & Shimon The Robot (mp3)

Thanks to Emily Pseudonym, and solcofn!
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Authentic Music From Another Planet

Our celebration of Moon Day continues with one of the oddest outsider-music artifacts I've ever come across - an entire album of music and narration from 1956 by someone claiming to be a UFO contactee. And I stumbled across it while perusing my local library.

In the 1950's, at the height of the flying saucer scare, a New Jersey sign-painter named Howard Menger not only had an abduction experience, but he claims that he later came across a remote building housing a piano with more keys then found on Earth pianos, and that he began to play music guided by alien hands.

Our resident expert in such matters, Greg "Spacebrother" Bishop, notes that "an attractive young woman named Connie Weber appeared at one of Menger’s gatherings. He thought that she was the reincarnation of a blond spacewoman that he had known (in the biblical sense) in a previous life on Venus. He soon left his first wife and family to begin a new life of lectures and touring on the Contactee circuit....Connie wrote a book entitled My Saturnian Lover about her previous interplanetary relationship with Menger." Gotta find that book!

Apparently the aliens were from The Planet Of Crappy Music, judging by the snoozy piano/accordion instrumentals found on this big 28-minute file. There's nothing spacey or futuristic about it, except for all the echo that drenches everything - music and narration. And despite his description of the alien piano, there's no microtonal sounds here. Maybe that's why the aliens came - to get better tuneage for those long interstellar road trips. The narration is priceless, however. Now I know what The Bran Flakes sampled on the first song on their "Hey Won't Somebody Come And Play?" album.

Howard Menger - "Authentic Music From Another Planet"

Sorry for the sound quality, and for the size of the file - I got this from a cd I found in the Los Angeles Central Library while looking for something else entirely. Much to my surprise, there's a whole shelf of UFO/conspiracy-related audio documentation. This track is from a collection called "Saucerology: Tales of Giant Rock (Contactees Vol. 2)," compiled by Wendy Connors as part of her Audio History of Ufology Series. She apparently used to have her own label, but the website's gone. I checked out a number of these Conners compilation disks from the Library Shelf O' Mystery, but there's little music to be found on them. Mostly just inaudible interviews and news reports.
Menger just died earlier this year.

LIFE ON REGGAE PLANET

Classic ska/early reggae about space flight - that's how we celebrate the 40th anniversary of man's first walk on the Moon around here. None of that slow Rasta stuff - this collection of obscure oldies (many recorded off vinyl) is pure summery dance fun fun fun, from a culture that, in the 1960s, was developing along with America's space program. There's also one (very surreal) calypso thrown in. I wish I knew of more.

Some of the tracks are instrumentals , including - yes! - a version of the Joe Meek/Tornadoes classic "Telstar." Have no idea who Colonel Elliott And The Lunatics are, but the cartoonishly Moogy "Plutonian Pogo Stick" is as nutty as its title. Some of the names here are unknown, and some, like pioneering dj U-Roy, ska legend Prince Buster, and the Upsetters, a project of madman/studio genius Lee "Scratch" Perry, are well known, at least in Carib music circles. (most American's knowledge of Jamaican music seems to begin and end with Bob Whatsisface.)

This might seem heretical, but was the Moon landing really humanity's greatest engineering accomplishment? The Apollo missions were essentially blasting a rocket out of the atmosphere using a controlled explosion. As the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki could tell you (the ones still alive, at least), we got good at making really big booms. And getting there could be (theoretically) worked out with paper and pencil using Newton's Laws. I know I'm oversimplifying, but it all seems a bit...crude. Of course, it's still way up there on the list, but above the Egyptian Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China? Maybe some of you techies can set me straight.

Life On Reggae Planet

01 U Roy - space flight
02 Derrick Morgan - Man 'Pon Moon
03 Moon Boys - Apollo 11
04 Owen Gray - Apollo 12
05 Colonel Elliott And The Lunatics - Telstar
06 Derrick Morgan - Moon Hop
07 The Vulcans - Star Trek
08 Don Drummond - Rocket Ship
09 Joe Mansano - Life On Reggae Planet
10 S. S. Binns - Moon Beat
11 The Fabion - V Rocket
12 Lord Christo - Trip To Mars
13 Prince Buster - Trip to Mars
14 Colonel Elliott And The Lunatics - Plutonian Pogo Stick
15 Symarip - Skinhead Moonstomp
16 The Upsetters - Outer Space

I've made some great discoveries at You and Me on a Jamboree. Check 'em out - it should keep you fans of obscure Carribean music busy for weeks.
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CHRISTMAS IN JULY

No stress! No shopping! No snow! Just an accordian-driven Tex-Mex polka zydeco kinda thing played at punk intensity level from a veteran group who put on a mega-fun live show. Not only will you Chicken dance, you'll Hokey-Pokey.

Brave Combo - Christmas in July
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EXPERIMENTAL KID'S MUSIC

8 year old kids playing microtonal music on their invented instruments? This - THIS - is what this blog's all about. Composer/musician Paul "Ubertar" Rubenstein teaches New York kids how to build one-string guitars, and play in African and Indonesian-inspired scales. Then they jam. Not just a novelty, this is some seriously good, unique unclassifiable music, whose contents are only hinted at by their song titles:

Ubertar + kids: Psychedelic Free Jazz
Ubertar + kids: Heavy Drone Rock - Sonic Youth, step off.
Ubertar + kids: This Is So Great - singing!

And how would you, yes you! like to get in on the action? Why should kids have all the fun? Paul sez: "I'm about to start microtonal music workshops at my music studio in Ridgewood, Queens (Dekalb stop on the L train). The first session will be Wednesday, 7/15 at 6:30 pm, and the cost is $12. People can reserve a spot by emailing me at paul@ubertar.com. It's for all levels-- total beginners through advanced."

DISCO SUICIDE

The Disco Demolition event was 30 years ago tomorrow, so here's a sequel to "Disco Sickness," one of my 365 Project contributions and, actually, one of the most popular internet projects I've done. This fascinating 8 minute video of various Chicago news clips details the anarchic event that put the stake in disco's heart (in America at least).

These tunes are funny, awful, sometimes both. Mad Magazine's "It's A Gas" is downright disgusting. Whether they're humorous parodies, kitschy thrift-store atrocities, foreign interpretations, or downright strange outsider oddities, these tunes are never less then highly entertaining. Some I got off the web, such as a couple of other 365 Project contributions, but they make sense in the context of a big sick disco party. And if you liked Myron Floren's disco polka or the Brazilian disco samba from the first collection (or even if you didn't), there's more here - leftovers I recorded off my vinyl but didn't have room for. Lots of covers, even a Kate Bush tune sung by a Japanese group - a true "wtf" moment. I got the sound off the video (that I can no longer find on YouTube) so audio's a little poopy. But it must be witnessed.

Disco Suicide

Disco Suicide - MAD Magazine (Norm Blagman, Dick DeBartolo)
Get Up And Boogie - Marimba Orquesta Virreynal De Hugo Reyes
Star Wars Theme - The Wonderball Disco Orchestra
R2D2_C3PO_Disco - Music for Children's Disco
Popeye Disco - Pam Todd & Love Exchange
Disco Hotline - National Lampoon
Disco Charlie Brown - Springbok Hits
Disco Communist - Semi-Not
Rolling The Ball (Them Heavy People cover) - Yukari Itô and Hatsumi Shibata
Pinball Playboy (Playboy Theme) - Cook County
Things We Said Today - Joah Valley
Yiddishco - National Lampoon
Barbeque - Joe Cutajar
Love Is Blue-Lovers Concerto - Myron Floren
Height Report Disco - National Lampoon
I Was Born To Disco - Strawberry Shortcake
It's a Gas (disco version) - MAD Disco
Disco samba2 - Freddy Ventura
Disco's in the Garbage - the Incinerators

I'll Keep Writing About Him Until He's Famous...

Introducing the forgotten madcap brilliance of Paul Lowry to the world is one of the things I'm most proud of here at M4M. Thanks to a kind soul named Dok, all four tracks are back up, with additional info about one of songs:

HERE (my original post: Paul Lowry-Unknown Genius)
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THE EVIL HOODOO OF SKY SAXON

Not since Darby Crash died around the same time as John Lennon has a great musician's death been so overshadowed - this time Sky Saxon's death happening on the day as Michael Jackson's. Fitting I guess, since his crucial '60s garage/psych/punk band The Seeds is always overlooked every time Los Angeles' Sunset Strip scene is discussed. Everyone always talks about The Doors, The Buffalo Springfield, The Mamas & The Papas, Love, etc. Some of those bands certainly did some great stuff, but for some of us, it's all about bands like The Leaves, The Standells, and The Seeds. Wild 'n' crazy garage punk at it's finest, all fuzzed-out three chord raunch, hyper tempos, sleazy electric organ, some guy yellin' about puttin' his baby down.

Even in this wiggy world, Saxon stood out. After The Seed's demise, he realized that his initials (S.S.) were the same as Hitler's secret police so he added the middle name "Sunlight." He joined forces with the The Source Family cult, who were headed by a guy named Father Yod who led a band called Ya Ho Wa 13. Their numerous private-press recordings of free-form psychedelia were released by Saxon. I remember listening to an interview with Saxon on the Rodney On The ROQ show in the '80s were he announced he was a "fruitarian." Not a vegetarian, a fruitarian.

In the '60s when fellow Cali garage-punks the Chocolate Watch Band opened for The Seeds one night, they played The Seeds latest album in it's entirety. It was such simple, basic 3-chord stuff, they learned it all in one day. They just thought this stunt would be funny, but The Seeds, fuming, had no choice but to go out after them, play all the songs everyone had just heard, and get booed. Totally fucked-up, wrong, indefensible...but so damn funny.

Nothing funny about their music. Songs like "Pushin' Too Hard" were big hits, but my fave tune of theirs is "Evil Hoodoo," an awesome 3-note fuzz-bass (no doubt played by Sky himself) trippy rocker. It builds momentum so well it's not too long even at a five-plus minute length. Psychedelic in the best possible sense - no meandering mellowness here. This tune is available on this comp, but I have the vinyl:

The Seeds: "Evil Hoodoo"

Turn out the lights, put on a strobe light, crank this up, and dance like a spazz.
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MID-YEAR MASHUP MARATHON

2009 has been a good year for illegally re-arranged music. On the top of my list so far: Muppet Mashup, a various artists collection by Boston's djBC and friends saluting "The Muppets" and "Sesame Street." It's start-to-finish solid. Fun for the whole family! Martinn (from The Netherlands) kicks things off with a brilliant combo of the Stray Cats and the "Muppet Show" theme, but I think this one from da man himself might be my fave:

dj BC: "I'm Happy On Sesame Street" featuring Edwin Starr, Lou Rawls, numerous Muppets and (sez bc) "The lead vocal is an acapella done by a little girl and her friends in a playground or schoolyard. Freaking genius stuff to work with!"

And DJ NoNo would like to remind you that HE is the king of Muppet mashes.

Three strange, surreal, super-fun surf-music mashups for the summer:

g3rst: "Surfbusters" (Ray Parker Jr vs The Tornadoes)
Zo0m: "What'd The Bulldog Say" (Ray Charles vs the Ventures, remembering the recently deceased guitar genius Bob Bogle)
MadMixMustang: "Dizz and The Boyz Getz To The Beach" ('50s bebop jazz vs The Beach Boys - how the hell does this work so well?!)

Foolklegs II comes to us from France, mixing mostly European folk music with some rather unlikely pop sounds. This various-artists collection is, like much great avant-pop, simultaneously both utterly alien and accessible. It's not all computer-made mashups either. Dig this bagpiped take on the Gorillaz:

DJ Zebra: "Dirty Harry"

Zebra's tunes on this collection are performed live. Album organizer Funky Belek sez: "The children's chorus is played on turntables, but it's a real bagad (a traditional band from Brittany / France) and Zebra plays guitar."

Also from France, Totom's excellent Bob Dylan mashup album just dropped. The Pixies vs "Blowin In The Wind" track in particular confirms that Totom is one of the best sound hackers we've got.

DIG THOSE CRAZY BERMUDAS

Rodd Keith was one of the giants of the weird world of song-poems, but his son Ellery Eskelin is no slouch either, carving out a career for himself as one of the primo sax masters to have emerged on the Downtown NY avant scene.

On his 1996 album "Green Bermudas" it's a father and son reunion, with recordings of his late dad popping up via Andrea Parkins' sampler, while Junior blows mad jazz over it. The title song is summer vacation music for maniacs:

Ellery Eskelin & Andrea Parkins: "Green Bermudas"

One of the most hilariously sexist song poems ever, "Yummy Dum Dum" also gets the treatment. But even the non-song poem tracks make for fine listening. Eskelin is at home with both high-energy blowouts, and emotional ballads. The sax/sampler lineup creates all kinds of unpredictable and unique combos (Parkins even samples one of Eskelin's old records on one track), making this one of the best jazz-for-people-who-don't-like jazz albums I've heard lately. (Actually, this album's so crazy, jazzbos might not like it.)

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