I wondered which person in Beverly Hills I wanted to be today, and I decided Luke Perry. And as we were speaking of Luke Perry (Ozan was here too, speaking), I remembered this obscure electronic act by the name Luke Perry. He describes his album Terminator Ecstacy () by way of a sexy catch-line: “Feel the ecstasy of terminating your identity. Treat yourself to burger king dinner on a stolen credit card.” No point saying how much I love this stuff, so let’s just get to it:
If “irresistible suburbanoid emergencies in cul de sac terraform” sounds like a delicious dish, you might want to go download his digitalized casette called Midnight Perry too.
Things doesn’t stop for Perry’s word lingo. On a blog called “There is no agency”, he provides us with an anti-capitalist analysis of tourism, spouting beautiful and concise sentences like this one: “Tourism supplies the traveller with a sacred image of the world. The figure of the traveller is defined by the mere accumulation of these images.” Reminds me of CrimethInc’s (anti-)traveller book Off the Map.
… and we’re not done! I thought you should have this one too:)
Man Ooman (Man Woman) is a docuentary about dancehall dance culture seen through the gender relations of Jamaica (or the other way around: gender relations through dance culture). I really would like to see this documentary somewhere. Anyone got a clue? It seemed to go on a number of film festivals in 2008, and the idea was to distribute it for free online afterwards, but so far I have not found it. No torrents, no streams.
Rosforth has made a number of other interesting documentaries: e.g. “Good Copy Bad Copy” (on copying and copyright) and “Mr Catra the Faithful” (on the raw kind of baile funk played in the brazilian favelas)
SATURDAY, PART 5: Bob to the bling. Bobbing your shoulders to the staccato drum loops, bobbing your neck and head to the bass, bobbing whatever maaaaaaan… It doesn’t matter so much where you are, you can bob at home as much as you can bob at a sweaty club. As long as you bob something.
I have no idea who Gucci Mane is. Actually, I have no interest in the Usheresque club-soul he seems to be doing. But that Memory Tapes / Weird Tapes / Memory Cassette-dude is cherning out some delicious remixes, making this stuff very edible for me. Thank you Memory Tapes / Weird Tapes / Memory Cassette.
This track does many of the things I want from a typical saturday, at this time of the day: a soft milky introduction to a new state of being (the hypnotic drums sound like you they are transporting or moving you to a new place), the darkening and narrowing of our senses, not quite for the dancefloor, but for the kind of subtle dancing you do sitting (bobbing your body gently), and the mysterious atmosphere of the entire track anticipates something to come.
SATURDAY, PART 3: Silence. Simply don’t play music or make sounds. Only the accidental musique concréte of you and your environment.
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A sensory detox: Getting rid of your sensory and affective toxins, fleeing time-directed apathy and longing, struggling with auditory absence by corporeal abstinence, but preparing your awareness.
SATURDAY, PART 2: Indulgence in longing. Repeating the mood and behavior of last part, now in a slighty more intense state of vulnerability. For the scandinavians: the lyrics are quite good in shaping the mood we took up in the last part, although now in a bit wider general sense.
Föddes på gator och torg
Noga med nycklar och jargong
Skogen från något nära håll
har jag väl sett,
nån enstaka gång.
Längtar jag längtar på tå
längtar till allting som är gott
havet den vill jag se nångång
någongång
från nära håll
Ibland så blundar man hårt
kanske man bett om något gott
jag vet då inte hur man ber
men var det en bön så
bad jag för oss
Längtar till allt.
Ta mig från allt hitte-på
längtar till allting som består
från trädena stammar upp till topp
lär mig om
lär mig om…
Ta mig från allt hitte-på
längtar till allting som består
från trädena stammar upp till topp
lär mig om
lär mig om…
So, how the fuck will we survive this saturday, with our likely pathetic hangovers and sleep deprevation. My advice is to read this rapid series of posts as the day goes by. The concept is this: I guide your day in audio, shape your mood, and dictate your behavior through sounds and their mattering. Do you understand the general concept? I hope it will do something interesting to you, and not just fiddle with your iTunes playlist, but in some way transform the actual matter of your day. If it does, I would like to do it again some other day, okay? So have a great saturday you fuckers. Here it begins:
SATURDAY, PART 1: Scottish singer-songwriter folk for your post-happiness-apathies.
Hungover. Euggghhing your way out of warm bed sheets, looking out the window with gentle self-pity, feeling a bit melancholy, feeling a bit thankful for feeling in it in an ambivalent way (for feeling it, for feeling it in that way), while reminiscing sweetness of yesterday: post-sweetness-apathy
My external hard drive is dead. I lost the adaptor. All my music is on the external hard drive. Argh! Technical collapse. Involuntary musical ascesis. Since I have been to lazy to find new stuff, I have just listened to the same single band the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, my limitations were good company. Sometimes it can be healthy to be limited! The band I was lucky to still have on my internal hard drive is called The Radio Dept. and come from Malmö, southern Sweden. They play soft shoegaze, and by some reason they remind me entirely of other scandinavian bands (even though the sound is not particularly scandinavian, or what do you think?). I would say something between norwegian singer-songwriters Kings of Convenience and danish shoegaze-poppers Epo-555 (recommended listening too). I went to a concert with The Radio Dept. in Stockholm some weeks ago, which dissapointed me a lot. My friend was there with me, and she is such an extraordinary fan that she didn’t even notice that the PA-system sucked and sounded like somebody pucking on overdrive. Testifies to the power of Radio Dept. fandom.
Music to walk alone in the snow to. Music to stay home and feel winter sentimental with. The time is not for jingle bells, and already worn out carols that you forgot what meant, or sexist crooner tunes from the 50s for that matter. Whatever, if you want to hear that, just have a stroll down shopping street and get bombarded. Here’s what I would rather listen to when white snow covers the city, candles are lit in the windows, you walk in silent winter evenings or sit at home cuddling up with all your winter sentimentality (which is perfectly nice and good).
Bibio not only made one of my favourite albums this year, he has a back catalogue of delicious guitar meditations, well worth diving into and exploring. Contrary to his most recent album, which is far more complex and genre eclectic, the old stuff revolves around the same focus on electro-acoustic guitar patterns and simple drum loops. Some call it laptop folk. Whatever it is I love it.
In the 60s, Jan Johanson made a stunning interpretation of old swedish folk tunes by adding jazz. They are intrinsically tied to my feelings and perception of Sweden, and always make me long for natural landscapes and hiking trips, or simply say “fuck it all, I’m becoming a primitivist and I’ll move out into the wild and eat lingon berries and chant sad polka tunes by the mountain rivers”
I have already mentioned Pat Metheny once before in relation to the turning of music into muzak through use in commercial advertisements. Luckily, this part of Metheny has not been distorted by that, so we can go straight to it. Album is One Quiet Night. Playing on a baritone guitar gives Metheny the sound of expansive, grand thickness, like he’s painting yet vaster winter landscapes with every guitar stroke, I mean strum.
MP3s posted here is for sampling purposes only. If you are the artist/producer of a track that is available on the blog, and want to have the track taken down, please email me and I will be happy to oblige. The same goes for the pictures.
maltelunden [at] gmail [dot] com
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