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RHONDA'S READY TO RAGE

Rhonda (yep, just Rhonda) is another performer utterly convinced of her beauty, fabulousness, and imminent stardom. This Floridian's website, filled with amateur glamour snapshots of Miss Thing, modestly separates her musical and dramatic sides into "Grammy," "Oscar," and "Tony" categories. And you can get this for only $125! A seven-song CD entitled "Fairy Tale Lost" boasts such reputation-boosters as "Rowdy Girl," "Equally Manic," and an ode to wearing trashy clothes called "My Dress Code." Look out world!

As far as her music goes, I'm not sure what style or sound she's trying for - it's low-tech, but not in a cool indie-rock way, more like one guy with a Casio trying to play slick, commercial pop diva stuff. Some songs are quite short, and end so abruptly I had to check to make sure they weren't getting cut off. And her singing? Well, as Alexis from West Virginia says, "Rhonda sounds like your average tipsy off-key karaoke participant... if your average tipsy off-key karaoke participant was a voice actor for a PBS puppet show."

Rhonda - "Rage" Alanis Morissette, step off!

Big thanks to Alexis.

BAD RELIGION pt3: DAVID KORESH

David Koresh, the Texas cult leader who went out in a blaze of glory, was a struggling singer-songwriter before he not only found Jesus, he thought he was Jesus. (Not the first musician who thought he was god, har har). Presumably there are other tapes of his recordings around, but all that seems to be available are two songs that Maniac Martin from Germany kindly sent our way, taken from the rare and usually expensive album "Voice of Fire":

"Book Of Daniel" - starts off with what sounds like a UFO landing...and a "mellow" California singer-songwriter steps out

"Sheshonahim"

and a big danke to Martin!

UPDATE 10/25/09: Looking for the "Mad Man in Waco"? Go HERE!

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GHOULS WITH ATTITUDE

It ain't all "Monster Mash" out there, folks. Horror-rock novelty records were quite common during The Golden Age of Sleaze (mid-'50s to mid-'60s). Case in point:

"Ghouls With Attitude"

2 disks-worth of '60s horror-rock downloads, spiced with campy monster movie trailers and some tunes more on the jazzy side. Originally compiled last year by Otis Fodder, available again this year thanks to net-album overlords Oddio Overplay. It would take years of thrift-store record spelunking to find all these ghastly gems, so grab 'em now before the sun comes up...

SON OF MONSTER MASH-UP

"Son of Monster Mash-up", the follow-up to last years' "Monster Mash-up" (duh), is another various-artists on-line collection of old songs rising from their musical graves to haunt the living, usually pieced together with other recordings in Frankenstein-like fashion: DJBC has Tom Waits backing old-skool rappers Whodini's "Haunted House of Rock," The Beegees take Tom Jones to a New Orleans voodoo disco, both "The Raven" and "JuxtaPoeCreature" set Edgar Allen Poe to music, DJ John's "Devil Mix" invokes The Horned One via The Charlie Daniels Band, Don Loves You actually makes "Ghostbusters" seem like a great song, and doesn't "Halloween With Morrissey" say it all?

Vincent Price, The Sex Pistols, Bauhaus, Radiohead, and a crypt-full of sound effects and horror movie samples also loom menacingly near your ears. I did track #12 and you are absolutely under no obligation to listen to it or like it. I'll just feast on your still-steaming entrails if you don't. Enjoy!

A SYNTHESIZER NAMED SERGE

Theremin...Moog...Serge?

Yup, The Serge, named after it's inventor Serge Tcherepnin (pronounced "Cher - epp - nin"), was an innovative synthesizer built in the early '70s capable of producing, according to it's proponents, a wide, and wild, variety of sounds its competitors could only dream of.

Tcherepnin, born of Russian-Chinese parents and raised in France, developed his modular creation while teaching at the Los Angeles-area California Institute of the Arts (call it "CalArts" for short, please, not "CIA"). He started a synthesizer company, was selling nearly nothing by the mid-'80s, sold it, and, ever the adventurer, moved to Europe where he helps Jews move to Israel.

Costing tens of thousands of dollars, difficult to program (it uses the old telephone-switchboard style modular setup like the early Moogs), the Serge has always been rather obscure. But a sampling of the wonderous array of sounds it makes possible is now available thanks to Serge-player m/n/m/l: a demo tape released by the Serge company in 1983, though some of the music goes back years before.

From The Serge's Musicians Tape:

Easy Teeth: "Her Blade" - some raucous techno-punk rock from 1980
Scot Gresham-Lancaster: "Suburban Dream Music" - haunting minimalism, beautiful melody

It's a tad hissy sometimes, but aren't we all?

BAD RELIGION prt2: APOLOGETIX

Although they claim they get some criticism from Christians who think all rock music is the devil's, The ApologetiX nonetheless take secular pop songs and inject a Christian message into them, with sometimes amusing results, as in this reworking of the Beatles' "Love Me Do":

ApologetiX: "Love The Jews" Don't be surprised if you find yourself walking around singing this. Though you may get odd looks.

Other titles: "Baa! We're Lambs" (The Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann"), "The Real Sin Saviour" (eminem's "The Real Slim Shady"), and - one of my faves - The Romantic's "What I Like About You" becomes..."God I Like About You." And guess which Guns'n'Roses song became "Verynice City."

BAD RELIGION prt 1: LI'L MARKIE LIVE!

Early '90s video footage of Li'l Markie, the funny/disturbing man/child of Christian children's music, has been unearthed. I'd like to offer Bomarr a thank-you as big as Li'l Markie himself for the tip. Watch the video, read all about it, and BE SAVED, brothers and sisters, by going to Bomarr's groovy site here:

Li'l Markie: "I WIll Praise You" (live in Miami)

BOSS HOSS: UPDATE

Back in June I wrote:

"Combining two recent trends here at m4m - country/hip-hop fusion, and weird covers, may I now present Boss Hoss, a German (!) country band that covers rap & pop hits. Their album "Internashville Urban Hymns," debuted at No. 11 on the German charts, so it's not all Hasselhoff over there. It's not such a stretch when they render The White Stripes, Hendrix, or Elvis hits into country corn, but, improbably, Outkast's "Hey Ya," eminem's "Without Me,' The Beasties Boys' "Sabatoge," even Beck's "Loser" get the twangy gee-tars/foot-tappin' treatment. Now here's where it gets scary: they also do Billy Idol's "Eyes Without A Face," just as Paul Anka released his lounge version. When did that song become a standard? Did I not get that memo?"

But I only had a link to the band's website with a snippet of a very clever and jes' plum hee-larious Britney Spears cover. Here's the whole tune:

Boss Hoss: "Toxic" - Replete with absurd Western-movie sound effects, and a singer with a thick pseudo-Texas drawl asking, "Do ya feel me now"?

TOR HERSHMAN: ATHEISM, SAMUEL BECKETT, AND FART JOKES

A loyal Maniac, The Bobo, writes, "...I want to tell you about a very strange fellow by the name of Tor Hershman. I discovered this guy about three years ago on a Yahoo Group devoted to horror films. Every so often he would post a link to a song he wrote and sang. Bizarre stuff that ranged from sophomoric parodies to songs devoted to atheism (which he strongly advocates)."

Remember how much fun it was as a child to play with tape-recorders? Making funny/rude noises and jokes, creating fake radio shows, uninhibited singing and clowning around. Upon nearing adulthood, most of us either give that up entirely, or become "serious" musicians, disk jockeys, etc. Not Tor, whose hissy, crude (in every sense of the word) recordings blend his adult philosophical concerns and avant-garde art aspirations with the sub-Howard Stern sense of humor and pause-button editing technique of a fifth-grader's basement variety show.

Typical of "outsiders", Tor seems utterly oblivious to the accepted rules of proper musician behaviour, performing with the passion and enthusiasm of guy who sounds like he has no other show-biz career aspirations then simply to have a helluva great time. The third track on his website, "Radio TOR," is a medley of song parodies, such as John Lennon's "The Ballad of John and Yoko" perfomed in a Donald Duck voice (?!), interspersed with Tor's spoken asides, introductions, and goofy jokes. Elsewhere he waxes more experimental/philosphical, saying about one track, "If you enjoy the works of Samuel Beckett you may be delighted by my lil' opus." Although, really, it's no more strange or funny then his other stuff.

Big thanks to The Bobo!

I LOVE EGG

Here's a real head-scratcher: from the land that gave us Hello Kitty and vending machines dispensing used school-girl panties comes a Japanese animation site call
I Love Egg. [EDIT: or Korean, according to reader Cooper.]

Quothe the site, "[The eggs] act like characters of fairy tales. They always attempt to change, since they feel that they cannot stay in the refrigerator like normal eggs."

Sing along with:

"I Love Egg"

GEORGE BUSH DOES WHITE LINES

Here's a newie from rx's website, ThePartyParty.com. All the songs feature hilarious, ingenious cut-ups of Bush and his cronies set to toe-tappin' tunes, and "White Lines" is no exception - yup, the old Grandmaster Melle Mel rap classic gets a juiced-up arrangment, as dubya rocks the mic, adding some startling new lyrics about Kate Moss in the process. As always, one has to wonder how many hours went into sifting through GW's speechs, isolating words, and pasting them together.

rx: "White Lines"

DON ADAMS R.I.P.

I had one of those "awwww, that's too bad" moments the other day when I heard about the death of Don Adams. Growing up, I loved watching him play the bumbling spy Maxwell Smart, a character he played off and on in movies and tv shows for several decades. But Adams was more than Smart - he had a very succesful comedy and stand-up career before "Get Smart," recording albums like "Don Adams Meets The Roving Reporter."

Don Adams: "The Finkston Trio" - would you believe...a funny, strange parody of early Sixties musical styles like folk, doo-wop and "Monster-Mash"-type Halloween novelties, all rolled into one.

MUSIC FROM FOOD

Matthew Herbert, veteran electronic music producer and remixer going back to the early '90s house days, has a new album, "Plat de Jour," whose sounds are largely made using food - quothe this BBC article: "Sugar" is made entirely from sounds generated from a can of Coke...while "The Final Meal Of Stacey Lawton" is made from the sound of his pal, Heston Blumenthal, recreating the last meal of a death row prisoner (a jar of pickles)." I'm not exactly sure how these items were used to make the music, but it has something to do with the wonders of sampling struck objects.

We've already covered other groups that use food here, like The Wyld Men and The Vienna Vegetable Orchestra. Y'know how first there was hardcore, then other terms like cuddle-core, lounge-core, etc? This stuff could be called "apple-core."

Or not. Anyway...

Matthew Herbert: "Esme’s Waltz" made from the following ingredients:
- Dry coconut
- Eden organic grape juice in a glass bottle (Germany)
- Organic peanuts in a plastic bag
- Mount Hagen decaffeinated, organic coffee in a glass jar with a plastic top (Germany)
- Two out-of-season apples

SINGING SADIE

Singing Sadie sounds crazy. This Australian one-woman-show sings in an out-of-control voice that doesn't always hit the "right" notes (but they're usually close enough) humorously dirty lyrics over old big-band records. And then, maybe half-way thru each tune...she tap dances. Well, she tries. It's kind of the dancing equivalent of her singing, like someone randomly dropping silverware on a hard floor. Her debut 4-song EP is called "Songs For Swingers." And she's finally swung her way here to America, where she'll be performing live on Irwin's show on WFMU next week (Wed., 2:00pm Eastern Time). Prepare thyself for:

Singing Sadie "Let's Call Her Lil"

Hey, I Got A Theremin For My Birthday

I actually did, a Moog Ethervox, to be exact. Doesn't get any cooler then that. Makes me wanna listen to stuff like Project: Pimento, "...a five-piece band from San Francisco, with a repertoire of toe-tapping lounge favorites from the 40s, 50s, and 60s," fronted by sulty singer Miss Lola Bombay and featuring thereminist Dr. Robby Virus.

"Star Trek"
"Call Me"

From their album, "Magical Moods of the Theremin."

The Return of Dictionaraoke

In 2001, Chicago's Jima had an interesting idea. On-line dictionaries, like, say, Merriam-Webster's website, have audio pronunciation guides - look up a word and you can click on a sound file of an announcer actually pronouncing the word. What if you sampled lots of these words and strung them together in a song? The result was dictionaraoke: "Audio clips from online dictionaries sing the hits of yesterday and today," over instrumental music often provided by cheezy karaoke backing tracks. The contributors were mainly members of the Negativland mailing list.

Over the years, many of the links were broken, but the entire project has been revived and hosted by archive.org. The result is hours of deadpan, robotic amusement like:

pimpdaddysupreme: Cameo's "Word Up"

Animals Within Animals: "Nuthin' But a 'G' Thang" - Who knows how many hours (days?) it took to make this remarkable remake of Dr Dre and Snoop Doggy Woggy's hip-hop hit.

GAMEBOY MUSIC prt. 3

Thanks to reader Slapdash for pointing us towards yet another band that uses hand-held video games. This time it's German combo Pornophonique, mixing acoustic guitar and vocals with Gameboys to nice effect.

Pornophonique: "Sad Robot"

FEMA For Kidz Rap!

Hey kids! You know about FEMA, right? Yes, America's Federal Emergency Management Agency, the one that's supposed to be taking care of the Hurricane Katrina disaster! Well, they've got a funky-fresh rap song on the FEMA For Kids section of their website. Remember now, gang, "Disaster prep is your responsibility/And mitigation is important to our agency."

"Mommy, what's "mitigation" mean...?"

FEMA For Kidz Rap

That's some hi-fi sound quality, eh? Blame budget cuts...

WILLIE NELSON: THE REGGAE YEARS

Further evidence of the random nature of the universe: Country music legend Willie Nelson has recently released...a reggae album. The entire album, "Countryman," is reggae, complete with dub effects, a guest appearance by the legendary Toots Hibbert (of Maytalls fame) and covers of reggae classics like "The Harder They Come". But Willie's mainly singing his usual heart-breakin' country stuff, complete with traditional instrumentation (like the lonely cry of a steel guitar) alongside the Jamaican sidemen dropping their riddems. It all sounds like some wacky dj's country/reggae mashups - the dichotomy between the two styles is funny and bewildering. But, hey, Willie does partake of the sacred herb. So maybe the two cultures have more in common then we think...

Willie Nelson "How Long Is Forever"

Speaking of the ganja, America's biggest (and most conservative) retailer Wal-Mart didn't appreciate Willie's artworK - an alternate cover had to be created just so the Kansas housewives wouldn't be offended. But Willie's feeling too irie to get upset:
" "They're covering all the bases," Nelson joked."