Yoko Ono - Fly (1971)

^Screenshot from the Fly short

The second album by Yoko Ono. Her first was 'Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band' with the fluctuating supergroup that included John Lennon, and at variously Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Phil Spector, etc. It was a companion piece to what is considered Lennon's most accomplished solo album 'John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band'.

'Fly' is definitely up there with the debut, a record that is variously avant-garde and jam-oriented - groovy even - but always experimental in it's approach. For the most part it sounds like nothing else from the period, the only music that came close was the budding 'krautrock' scene, and this was unfortunately lacking in Ono's kabuki-theatre wailing (which is like Marmite, except if you don't appreciate the spectrum of it's abrasive/beautiful range then you're a dick).

Unlike 'Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band', which was at times loud and fast and today is still hailed as proto-punk, 'Fly' is more spaced-out, much longer and more of an all-round Fluxus (the Japanese Dada-inspired art collective Yoko represented) statement.
Not only was the gatefold sleeve stuffed with sublime frames from the 'Fly' art film and instructions for performance taken from Yoko's 'Grapefruit' book; tracks were culled from various installation pieces (Telephone Piece, Toilet Piece, Airmale is the soundtrack to Lennon's 'Erection' film). On record you will also hear the use of mysterious, specialist 'instruments' custom-built by Joe Jones, a Fluxus artist whose idea it was to evoke emotions yet to be illuminated by sound vibrations.

^ From Grapefruit, to be performed by the reader. Ono's background in conceptual and performance art is all but evident on 'Fly'

Also, if you're a Beatles fan it's interesting to hear the rhythm section of Klaus Voorman (the man responsible for several iconic Beatles record covers) and Ringo thrashing out weird jams with Clapton and Lennon atonally banging away in the background. It feels like they have all been infected with the Yoko virus, and the results are electric.

So this is a must-have, as everybody from Sonic Youth to David Bowie would testify (if that's the kind of convincing you need). Lennon and Yoko's later musical collaborations would get a lot more direct and conventional, the feminist themes a lot less oblique; and in the singularly idiotic 'Yoko Vs. Beatles' debate these great records and Ono's light-hearted and accessible take on the avant-garde have all too often been forgotten. For shame, as you will hear.

This upload is at 320, and it's one of the recent Rykodisc remasters with two bonus tracks and artwork included. Needless to say, if you really, really like it go out and buy the CD - the packaging of the reissue is special.

Ichi
Ni
San

The Mops - Psychedelic Sounds In Japan (1968)

Recycled from an old MeineSpace post, this needs sharing. I'm not the only person to post it but if it helps them get more listeners on Last.fm then what the hell...

Link - ripped@320kbps

Here we have an album that at it's worst is a historical curio and a comedy album; at it's best a world-class garage romp.

The Mops were, from what I've heard, the rawest and weirdest of Japan's sanitized 'Group Sounds' era. Group Sounds was a fusion of Western rock and Japanese popular music - which for the most part was melodramatic tripe and pretty much all manufactured, with creative control going to the record executives.

As with most Group Sounds bands they began as a Ventures-esque instrumental rock group, before taking on the mantle of drug-influenced blues and rock music emanating from overseas to become Japan's first bona fide psychedelic band. This was not the idea of the Yardbirds/Stones influenced group of course, it was the Mops' management who molded them into hippies as stipulated in their new record contract (see album cover).

However LSD was impossible to procure in Japan at the time and as well as putting on the most dazzling light shows to cement their psychedelic credentials (the other Group Sounds were catching on fast), the Mops would often play blindfolded to disorientate themselves.

So as well as being trippy dippy and lyrically darker than any Group Sounds band at the time ('please kill me' in the 6/8 time 'Blind Bird'), what does this alien interpretation of 60's vogue have to offer?

For a start I was struck by the garage influence, there's a lot of fuzzboxed guitar and it certainly packs a wallop; and when the Mops are in full swing (playing their own songs) the vibe is great too: Masaru Hoshi's perpetual, trebled guitar solos coming from somewhere off in space and the band keeping a frenetic groove under some brilliant freewheeling blues-psych.

^ Vintage pop cameo. Dig those ponchos!

All sounds good so far, non? But now I have to address the infamous cover versions of psych standards and the all-English vocals.

When the Mops are attacking these songs in their extremely bloken Engrish and their own inimitable style, it can work ('Somebody To Love' sounds great, singer/guitarist Yoshiro Hayakawa must have spent days getting the 'L' on 'love'); but the rest of the time you just can't help but giggle, and there are certainly a few comedy moments on the album such as the adorable ode 'San Franciscan Night'.

There is an element of humour when listening to this strange record, being as it is a heartfelt tribute to/cash-in on a Western pop culture... just totally naive and a lot of fun. None of this would matter if the songs weren't great.
On the whole it's magnificently done, they manage to work in everything from harpsichords to a Misunderstood-style sense of doom - but there are some flaws. See: the inept sitar racket of 'Unforgettable Memory' and the musically competent but slightly comical covers of 'White Rabbit' and 'Light My Fire'.
The pros far outweigh the cons though and it definitely belongs in your 60's collection.

Unfortunately when the album surfaced, Group Sounds was on it's last legs - Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin were beginning to catch the attention of Japanese youth... The Mops were dropped =(

And this is where we leave our (magnificently named) heroes, who would cunningly move with the times and re-brand themselves 'New Rock'. It was left up to other, hairier bands to make history in this area...

Sources:
Cope, Julian, 2007. Japrocksampler: How The Post-War Japanese Blew Their Minds On Rock 'n' Roll. 1st ed. London: Bloomsbury

Film: Japanese Nouvelle Vague

^ Sunna no Onna (1964)

You may or may not be aware of a thriving underground on Youtube (i.e. videos cheekily given irrelevant or coded titles) of uploading collections of non-English and experimental films - much to the delight of at least a couple of thousand souls that are lucky enough to stumble upon these playlists.

I've encountered several users out on a mission to educate and save you and I the high prices of British Film Institute or Criterion Collection DVDs... Here's one of them: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=memoirevisuelle&view=playlists
From that page scroll down a bit to the video entitled 'HS' for Hadaka no Shima (Naked Island) - it's probably the best of early Japanese new wave from Kaneto Shindô. Or at least the best in this particular style - Shindô sticks to an old school Japanese film technique which to more impatient viewers might just be equivalent to 'not a whole lot happening for a long time'.
If you are one such viewer, please, just sit back to appreciate the framing, the mise en scene, the heartbreaking events depicted, the breathtaking beauty of the damned locations and shut up.

Right now I am living out my most sacred Japanese New Wave (nuberu bagu) fantasies and binging on films that haven't even secured a PAL DVD release as of yet (Europe always comes last, which is ironic because we probably watch the most foreign films).
There are of course plenty of sources for streaming full-length videos, but the majority of these seemed to be filmed on a mobile phone camera, tilted to one side and peeking out from under somebody's coat. So long live Youtube and 10+ intermissions per film!

However, if you've got a free evening and want something a bit more 'eventful', have this definitive industrial/cyberpunk body-horror film instead. Don't argue, just watch (and bemoan the soulessness of CGI):

Chris Morris - The Chris Morris Music Show (1994)

^'On The Hour' - groundbreaking news satire with yet another exposure of the sadistic British
right-wing tabloid institution (the tape is obviously fake, I believe 'Neil Kinnock' is played
by Steve Coogan)

Satirical genius (a word I never use lightly) Chris Morris: if you're a Brit you probably know him better for his one-off TV shows that send up a moral panic-prone society, and it's po-faced news media which stokes the fires of PC/reactionary paranoia. But he's also had a long and fractious association with BBC radio - The Chris Morris Music Show was one of many live broadcasts he produced and presented (credit has to go to him for being great with mash-up sound editing and pastiche songwriting too).
Like 1992's innovative serial 'On The Hour', the Chris Morris Music Show features all manner of controversial stunts often with none-the-wiser interviewees; and Morris presenting us a warped, but depressingly familiar, version of reality.

Apart from going out of his way to bait any listeners without a sense of humour, his taste in music is also delectable; the playlist is a great mixture of classic funk/soul and prime cuts of indie rock and hip-hop from the early-to-mid 90's era (although they don't all escape mockery and 'embellishments'). One song he plays is below - I totally forgot about this, frankly amazing promo from everyone's favourite giant baby. Reminds one of 'Eraserhead' slightly (Pixies actually covered the Lady in the Radiator song, available from this post)

Highlights of the show so far include Chris getting a blowjob from the producer over Beefheart's 'Tropical Hot Dog Night' and offering students a GCSE exam hotline, where he reveals exam questions to callers.
You can stream and download all the radio rips from those (comparatively) golden 1990's right here. It's a long-running and unrivalled fansite for all things Morris, and it's got bloody everything.
Each show is an hour long, I've done three and cracked a rib.

Morris' last project proper: if you hate scenesters and think Shoreditch in London (or just all of London) should be reduced to a smoking crater littered with student guts, WATCH 'Nathan Barley'

Jake Thackray - La-Di-Dah (1991 collection)

A real treat for yuz here. To celebrate my purchasing of the Jake In A Box retrospective, I present here a 22-track compilation of Jake Thackray recordings, taken from his tenure at EMI in the late 60's and early 70's with a couple of live tracks from later in the 70's. To my mind he's at his best as you see him on stage: solo with an acoustic guitar; but I was pleasantly surprised by the producers' restraint in embellishing his songs in the studio - all of them are gold. So - no flies on me!

Thackray's bawdy, verbose and often hilarious folk songs don't at all betray his reputed stage fright, a fear which eventually led to his premature retirement from performing. However this wasn't before he completed many sessions for the BBC, played the Royal Variety show and recorded his debut in 1967, a door down from the Beatles at Abbey Road... (although he's not always exactly wholesome family entertainment).

'So, what makes him so damn great?', I hear the voices in my head cackle.

Over an idiosyncratic finger-picking style, Jake tells quirky and satirical stories with whimsy, wit, raunch (always in good taste) and the occasional dash of absurdism, all in an exquisite Yorkshire brogue. Not unlike Nick Drake with a sense of humour (Nick was a fan apparently). He's been called 'the North Country Noel Coward', but this doesn't do him justice at all. Thackray taught in France for many years, and was essentially responsible for introducing the chansonnier tradition to these shores. The video below is his translation of George Brassens' 'Le gorille'.

I was introduced to the songs of Jake Thackray after seeing a 2006 BBC Four documentary aired to mark the revival of interest following his death in 2002. Shamefully, it's taken me this long to properly exploit my curiosity. He is all the more appealing for his detatchment from that contemporaneous music scene of psychotropics and Eastern mysticism; right up there with 60's traditionalists like Ivor Cutler and the Kinks circa 'the Village Green Preservation Society'.

'The Thack' just wrote great down-to-earth songs with a mastery of the English language we don't often see in this day and age; his pastoral songs always put me in a rustic frame of mind and almost make me proud to live in the countryside (see: 'North Country Bus', probably the most impenetrably colloquial song on here, or not? Non-Brits leave yer feedback!).

Ripped@320 mit artwerk
Supplement the first
Supplement the second

Sergei Rachmaninov - Piano Concertos No.2 & No.3

No fancy-pants titles here, just a clearly-labelled tin from one of the great composers (and one of the greatest pianists the world has ever seen). These pieces come from classical's late Romantic era - right at the turn of the century; so it's like armies of butterflies waging war in your gut, with the benefit of centuries of musical development and compositional trends. The perfect access point into classical music if ever there was any.

It's not my intention to patronise in the slightest, but here is the wikipedia definition of 'concerto' if you can't quite put your finger on it:
The term Concerto (from the Italian: concerto, plural concerti or the anglicised form concertos) usually refers to a three-part musical work in which one solo instrument is accompanied by an orchestra.

This recording is performed by Bernd Glemser and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. But don't worry if that sounds dodgy, this is from the Naxos label, which always comes up trumps with a no-nonsense approach, it's like the industry standard.
Rachmaninov completed No.2 in 1900, No.3 about a decade later:

Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
&
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30
('Op.' stands for 'opus', or 'work')
Ripped@320kbps

Resurrection

Oh, sorry - I mean REBOOT. The 'rebooting' of the Substix franchise is still being shot by a fat-arse Hollywood sycophant, except now the lighting director has been dismissed and we are officially DARK and GROAN'D-UP.


The blog fell in to quiet disrepair because I was saying nothing to nobody. It was a dead duck.
So the new remit is just the music - with links to streaming movies and other dribs and drabs. All the files will be hosted on another server blablabla, but more importantly it's all 320kbps all the way (No FLAC, my connection is shit) and artwork where possible. There will be genre tags, there will be no-nonsense titles... Why, I can hardly contain myself!

Why should you download or watch what I post without question? Because I have maintained a near-jobless existence for at least three years, let 'friends' fall by the wayside and at times attained reclusive status; but in all this time I've been listening to shit, reading shit and watching shit. Most of it was good shit. Now I will share the best of it.