German Joys

Ghastly Beck, Groovy Beck

People have complained. I admit it, drawing attention to that Beck ganked you, my noble readers. I apologize. Nothing can excuse my lapse, but to help cleanse your palate, here's another, much more socially-redeeming Beck:

'It's the Blood[thirst]y Beatles!'

A positively Kienholzian Beatles album cover you never got a chance to be outraged/titillated by:

Attention Brussels, Montpellier, Salamanca, Great Britain

Ojos de Brujo, a Spanish band I saw last night in Duesseldorf, is coming to your cities soon (see tour dates here). They put on the most viscerally exciting concert I've ever seen. If they're coming to your neck of the woods, do anything to see them. Anything.

Wednesday Music Blogging

For some reason, virtually every German can sing John Denver's Country Roads by heart. But do they know this version?

And now, en revanche, New Worlders cover a song precious to Old Worlders:

Celebrate Space with Somafm!

The indispensable somafm.com has added a new channel just for the anniversary of the moon landing. Astronaut chatter has, of course, been a stable of dub and trip-hop for decades. Here's an example of the genre, Tranquility Bass' 'They Came in Peace', whose already-hypnotic effect can be even further potentiated by large doses of  ∆-9 tetrahydrocanabinol (g):

Somafm's Mission Control mixes rebroadcasts of Apollo 11 and Shuttle missions with new-fangled drone and trance. History mashed-up and remixed! Oddly soothing.

The link to the firewall/proxy stream is here.

And the page for donations to somafm, an entirely non-commercial service, is here. Donate early and often!

Friday Music Blogging

'The Illking' from Mouse on Mars:

A Wonderful New Norwegian Band!

While doing a research-related search for the term "up the asspipe", I stumbled upon the MySpace page for F**khole, a delicious new Norwegian snark-punk ensemble. Visit them here. (note: "up the asspipe" is filed under the myspace category "sounds like").

And in case you're put off by the charmingly passe "punk" sounds emanating from the website, I can assure you that, like almost all Norwegian punk bands, F**hole are almost certainly composed of kind, patient, self-effacing young men, most of whom probably still live with their parents.

Rhineland Swing

I was at a wedding over the weekend at which the Dee Band (g) played. Harry Heib and the Dee Band, that is.

This was much more than wedding entertainment: the Dee Band has been an established combo for nearly a decade, and they are tight. Heib and the band focus on the Great American Songbook, which Heib's creamy tenor (along with a varying roster of female co-leads and backup singers) caresses with uncannily authentic timing and intonation. But the Dee Band also dips into many other songbooks, including bossa nova and Neue Deutsche Welle (including a toe-tapping lounge version of Skandal im Sperrbezirk). They dazzled everybody and played with undiminished gusto into the very wee hours...

All in all, they're a classy bunch of kids. And I'm pretty sure you can hire them...

On the Road Music Blogging: Boulez's Sur Incises

Listening to Boulez's 'Sur Incises' (on my .mp3 player) in Hartsfield Airport in Atlanta. It's kind of like taking an uptempo Prokofiev piece and playing it at 45 rpm instead of 33. It makes everything I'm looking at seem shiny and exciting. Judge for yourself here:

Saturday Music Blogging: Ruy Grudi's 'Amor'

It's always a gamble to visit the countries where the 80% or so of the human race that doesn't have white skin lives. Because of the risk of musical disappointment, that is.

Living in a place like Germany, you're used to the musical exports from these countries: the sophisticated, syncretistic 'world-music' that catches the attention of listeners worldwide. When you actually visit the countries in question, you realize that real people in the country you're visiting almost never listen to this music. The acts from country X that get heard abroad is just the tip of a very large Country-X iceberg whose base reaches far into the chill depths of musical mediocrity.

Yes, there's no sugarcoating it: the sort of music average citizens of country X really listen to is screechy, repetitive, and clumsily produced. Further, it's hopelessly formulaic. According to my careful prosthesis, 90% of the lyrics of all the music produced in the entire world fall into one of these categories:

1. The rugged beauty of Mountainous/Seacoast/Plains Region where the singer comes from.
2. The rugged beauty of girls that come from Mountainous Region.
3. The unusual qualities of Mountainous Region's local liquor.
4. Simple country boys from Mountainous Region who fall in love. 
5. Simple country boys from Mountainous Region who move to the big city and fail to find work, and pine for the simple life in Mountainous Region.
6. Folk festivals celebrated in Mountainous Region, and the singer's plans to dance/get drunk/score with a ruggedly beautiful girl at said festival.
7. Adultery, including hiding from spouse/being caught in the act and killed.
8. The heroism of local independence fighters who fought off the British/French/Spanish colonists.

What's worse, you're usually introduced to this music by hearing it through decaying loudspeakers in passing cars, or in markets where the locals buy the ingredients of their harrowing cuisine. Negotiating the price of a cheap duffel bag is hard enough; doing it while hearing 'Chee Funga Doop Gloy' by the Neerungathan Boychockno All-Stars -- blasting through a visibly blown 1970-vintage AR-5 speaker dangling 5 inches from your head -- is barely survivable. Which is probably exactly why the music is played; Rich Westerner will happily leave an extra $5 on the table just to escape the speaker's fateful sonic penumbra.

Which brings us to today's music video. Brazil is, I would say, one of the only exceptions to the above rule. Pretty much all music Brazilians make is listenable, and much of it is enchanting. Such as this clip from Ruy Grudi, the "Apache of the Northeast," who comes from Pernambuco, in arid Northeast Brazil [H/t JR]. If this don't turn you on, as Wayne Newton was fond of saying, you ain't got no switches: 

In fact, Brazilian music gets progressively worse the more local performers try to ape non-Brazilian genres (stadium rock, soft jazz, etc.). As we see in this video from 'McGill in Brazil', which shows us that Ruy's still at it, and is now (unfortunately) singing in a form of English: