WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Battle of the Rubber Bands (mp3s)

The Christmas records were recently forklifted out of the WFMU pit and put into the record library. Well, not that recently - they've actually been out since last July. (Program Director Brian is on the Committee to Reclaim Ownership of Christmas.) Fortunately, most of our DJs are able to resist the powerfull pull of Christmas music until the blessed day is a little closer. But there's one Xmas CD that's become close to my heart, if ony because I love office supplies so damn much - A Rubber Band Christmas. Perhaps by posting these here, I'll be better able to resist the urge to play them on the air.

Rubber Bells  |  Rudolph The Rubber Nosed Reindeer  |  Ring Rubber Bells
Little Rubber Boy  |  Deck The Halls With Rubber  |  Feliz Rubberdad 
Rubber  |  Oh Rubber Tree  |  God Rest Ye Merry Rubbermen  |  Rubber Ride
Rubber Clause is Coming To Town  |  Rubber To the World  |  Rubber Bell Rock  |  Rubber Night

Ed Shepp Podcast In Effect

Just added to our growing roster of podcasts: The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment! Have the podcast version of Ed's weekly thematic misadventures, glitched-out interviews, and A.D.D.-ridden pop euphoria automatically zapped to your MP3 player by visiting our recently revamped podcast page.

Special thanks to Volunteer Ed Word for p-castifizing the show!

All the Presidents' Words

Since my edit of Dubya's "Night Before Christmas" got included in this month's Download Dinner Bell, I thought I'd point out a site where listeners can download plenty more political edit pieces: the "Truthful Translations" section of DIYmedia.net, which has collected more than 400 audio collages of not just the current occupant of the White House, but of plenty of other politicians. You'll find corrections of the speeches of Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Richard Nixon, Tony Blair, and of course Ronald Reagan, who is the subject of two of the best cut-up pieces you can find on the site: Doug Kahn's "Reagan Speaks For Himself" and Cliff Roth's "The Reagans Speak Out on Drugs" (an excerpt of the video is available for downloading). Kenny G linked to the Reagan MP3s back in February, but there's so many more politicians to explore.

Don't neglect the other areas of the DIYmedia site, though. They've been keeping tabs on the FCC's crackdowns on unlicensed radio broadcasters and the struggles of low-powered FM stations. Check out the site's homepage for their news archives, as well as links to the other collage-laden sections of the site.

My personal favorite political cut-up of the moment, not currently on the DIYmedia site, would be Jonathan Coulton's "W's Duty", which I first heard on Irwin's program. An MP3 of the song is downloadable from Jonathan's site. Also of note for Reaganologists: Ken's Reagan memorial broadcast from last year, which featured more Reagan-themed songs than you can shake a can of poisoned meat at.

NYC Radio The Night John Lennon Died (mp3)

Here's a dial scan of New York City's FM band from 25 years ago (MP3). It was recorded shortly after the news of John Lennon's murder broke. The recording was made by an unknown listener, and it was included on our CD compilation, Radio Archival Oddities, Vol. 2.

Benjamin, Wild Man of Hypnosis (mp3)

Here's an audio letter from Benjamin, Wild Man of Hypnosis to his friend Don, trying to convince Don to book his X-Rated Hypnosis act into his Las Vegas club (MP3). It appears that Benjamin never got that gig, as he subsequently followed the career path of all failed Vegas hypnotists, growing a goatee, and reinventing himself as Kevin Stone, Hypnotist to the Stars. All that remains online of Benjamin's failed career as a Vegas entertainer is this website, and memories of a magical evening at the Vegas Ho-Jos, with Benjamin and his trusty sidekick Trixie, spewing confetti from her nether regions. Ah, the memories. At least we can all have our collective asses back now. Thanks, Irwin!

Still More Nazi Swing Music (MP3s)

Last March, I posted what I thought was the first volume of music by Charlie and His Orchestra, a Nazi big band assembled by Hitler's minister of propaganda, Joseph Goebbels. You can find that post and all 22 tracks from it here. It turns out that what I posted was actually the second volume of this material, so here are the 22 tracks from volume one.

Charlie and His Orchestra was led by Karl Schwendler, an English speaking German who broadcast Nazi-themed swing and big-band hits every night on the medium-wave and short-wave bands throughout the 1930s to Canada, the US and Britain. Leave it to Goebbels to take the music of The Andrews Sisters, Paul Whiteman and Irving Berlin and fill it with venomous rants against Jews, America and the British. The man took his propaganda seriously. But at least he admitted it was propaganda, unlike the current crop of spin-meisters.

In a 1928 speech, Goebbels expounded on his then-radical theories of manipulation. What he said then seems today to be cutting edge meme-ology, and provides an insight into why he favored using the most popular music of the day to spread his message of hate:

"An idea always lives in individuals. It seeks an individual to transmit its great intellectual force. It becomes alive in a brain, and seeks escape through the mouth. The idea is preached by individuals, individuals who will never be satisfied to have the knowledge remain theirs alone. You know that from experience. When one knows something one does not keep it hidden like a buried treasure, rather one seeks to tell others. One looks for people who should know it. One feels that everyone else should know to, for one feels alone when no one else knows. For example, if I see a beautiful painting in an art gallery, I have the need to tell others. I meet a good friend and say to him: "I have found a wonderful picture. I have to show it to you." The same is true of ideas. If an idea lives in an individual, he has the urge to tell others. There is some mysterious force in us that drives us to tell others. The greater and simpler the idea is, the more it relates to daily life, the more one has the desire to tell everyone about it."

The full text of this speech is here. Follow the link below for the MP3s of Charlie and His Orchestra.

Adventures In Amplitude Modulation - Part 1

This is the first post in a series inspired by my personal radio listening habits. However, you can relax. I won’t be offering up a “connoisseur’s” list of my favorite radio stations or bragging about my personal taste in music. At least, not exactly. Often I listen to radio as an explorer of sorts. and occasionally I record some of these aural ventures. In this post (and others that may follow) I’ll offer a taste of where I go and what I hear on these radio hikes, such as they are.

Other than the Internet and my occasional purchases of the New York Times, my main source of information & entertainment comes from radio. However, what makes my media intake more esoteric than most is that I exclusively listen to AM radio and shortwave broadcasts. I don’t watch television and almost never listen to the FM band. Generally, the TV content I do take in, I now gather from the Internet. And to be honest, I occasionally do hear WFMU in the car, but at home I pick up WFMU on the computer. With 128K MP3 stereo streaming, it’s far better than the reception I muster with my radios here in north Brooklyn.

I suppose if I didn’t have all these albums, CD’s and cassettes laying around I might listen to FM more often, or even subscribe to (god forbid) satellite radio. For now, when I want music I listen to my own. When I turn on a radio I want something else. I want novelty, mystery, and most importantly something human. Every commercial music station on FM feels like it’s programmed by a committee of consultants. And even NPR sounds safe and tested these days. On AM and shortwave you're more likely to hear ad libs, idiosyncrasies, mistakes and raw conspiracy & rumor that isn’t always processed for pure potential profit. Oh sure, there ARE agendas and ulterior motives everywhere, probably just like where you work. Bottom line, most of U.S. FM radio is all about mindless listening and shameless profiteering, (Oh, and there's usually a few interesting non-profit stations at the end of the dial.) But AM and shortwave is about power, language, and cultural & ethnic identity. The “word,” whatever that’s worth these days still holds power on the traditional static-ridden bands that carry signals far distances. I like that.

Work Song From Postal Employees in Ghana (MP3)

Here's a beautiful little work song created by four postal employees who were recorded as they canceled stamps at the University of Ghana post office in 1975 (MP3). Their whistle-and-stamp song was recorded by James Koetting and appeared in the book/CD-Rom Worlds of Music: An Introduction to the Music of the World's Peoples. For more information on the recording, check out Elise's homework assignment on the recording. I hope she got a good grade. Ain't the internet grand? Thanks to listener Nick for sending this in; he's already booked the next flight to Ghana. If you want to see some of the stamps these postal workers might've been canceling, check here.

Einstürzende Dead Mosquitos

I hear the Germans have a good chuckle at the American tendency to view Blixa Bargeld as some mysterious, dark and dangerous creature.  The man we know best as the firestarting sledgehammer-wielding Einstürzende Neubauten shriek'n howling Bad Seed with S&M themed performance & fashion aesthetic is better known to his country volks as a national institution: Movie Star, Urbane Gentleman, Celebrity Chef, and now, the face of the German equivalent of Home Depot.

Fabio Roberti, aka Our Fobsie, host of Strength Through Failure, shows us the following award-winning German television commercials, starring our hero:

• Blixa recommends a strong mosquito killer.
• Blixa can't get enough of these new paving stones.
• Blixa not love a power drill?  Pshaw!
• Blixa on paint.

You're invited to further nosh on Neubauten.  Herewith, my interview with Blixa (RM link) on April 28, 2000.  I was scared shitless.  It was my first radio interview ever, I was intimidated, and it was my birthday.  I desperately needed to smoke cigarettes and drink beer. We did, and it went fine, though I'm sure I'd be humiliated to hear it now.

And here once again is Our Fobsie, hosting (RM link) another Neubauten, Alexander Haacke.

And finally, here's an mp3 download of the song you hear playing in all those commercials --
12305 Te Nacht (5.7m), from the album Tabula Rasa.  Yippee ya-ya yippee yippee yay.

Genius Is Pain: John Lennon Interview, National Lampoon MP3

On Saturday at 2pm New York time, BBC4 will broadcast the unreleased audio of Jann Wenner's 1970 interview with John Lennon. You can hear the interview in realaudio from this page when it airs, or if you can't wait, you can just download this MP3 of the National Lampoon's parody based on the interview, in which Lennon bitched about Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger and declared that "Genius Is Pain." Several times, in several different ways. BBC article. Thanks Fabio and Douglas!

We Suck, But We're Free! More Scare Tactics From the NAB

With Howard Stern moving to Sirius Satellite Radio in less than a month, the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) is stepping up its scare tactics to keep people away from alternatives to broadcast radio. Here is another spot the NAB recently released to commercial stations all over the country (MP3), including the NAB introduction. It doesn't mention Sirius or XM by name, but you know who they're talking about. (Here's a previous post about the NAB's last scare-spot.)

In this spot, the NAB paints an absolute nightmare scenario for its core constituency of male radio listeners: during a baseball broadcast, it's two out, bottom of the ninth inning with the bases loaded, when a hit is headed out of the park - it's going, going, when suddenly the broadcast is interrupted by an a long distance operator requesting 25 cents for the remainder of the broadcast. The horror! What more proof do you need that the good Lord ordained that radio should be free?

The spot is remniscent of the famous Heidi incident in 1968, when NBC cut off a New York Jets game during the critical game-deciding moment so they could cut start the TV version of the movie Heidi on time. The ensuing outcry changed the nature of sports television in the US forever.

Clearly, the NAB sees Sirius as a huge threat. My colleagues in non-commercial radio see podcasting as a bigger threat than Sirius or XM. People who work in radio are running scared, which makes sense, if you see new technologies as a threat instead of the opportunities they could be.

This Week in Sex: Baby, It's Cold Inside

Station manager Ken forwarded me an email from the Netherlands which said: "Could you slip this to Amanda?"

Sounded great, until I found out "this" was a giant icy penis with its own parking space. Cold, people, cold.

The email continued:  "I think this one will fit nicely in her most informative blog."

(Editor's note: The pic purportedly ran in a leading Dutch newspaper, and blog is the Dutch word for...something giant penises fit nicely into.)

Grandmaster of Iron Crotch Tu Jin-Sheng pulled a rental truck around a parking lot a couple times with his penis. I don't know why it is important that the truck was a rental.

There oughta be a law. There is, and it is the best law ever. A judge in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, makes guys who get busted for peeing in public apologize in public--in a letter to the editor in the Fond du Lac Reporter. For example, Michael Huebner of Madison, Wisconsin, wrote: "I am so terribly sorry for urinating outside of a public place in your city. It was not a very intelligent thing to do." Amen! You could revitalize certain dormant political parties with this stuff.

Things you didn't know you needed to worry about. Your labia should be tan, but your anus should not, especially if you want to "keep your bum-hole looking younger." If I could see it, maybe I would care more.

mp3s of radio commercials for schlocksploitation movies. This is the best thing I am slipping you this week, so go check it out at toestubber.

Stiles On Your Dials

Intro (MP3)

On Monday December 5, the Dean of Deja Vu, your Vicar of Vintage Vinyl, the mighty KAT MAN! celebrates 58 years on the airways of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.  Tune in to an aircheck here (MP3) from WEVD in 1966.  Danny Stiles will be appearing at John's Pizzeria in New York City to meet and greet all his fans like Joe Costanzo from Queens, NY.  The hardest working DJ in the biz can still be heard every Saturday night from 8 to 10 PM on AM 820 WNYC.  As well as WPAT-the Gaslight Staion-AND- WNSW-AM 1430 during the week.  You'll hear classic American standards of the '30's and '40's including the Big Bands and swing era, novelty tunes, v-discs, nightclub entertainers and vaudevillians and soundtracks from movies, television and Broadway shows.  Danny also mixes in his own personal stories of the music which is what really makes his show a can't miss Saturday night swing party.  WFMU's Glen Jones interviewed the Kat Man on April 4th of 2005.  Archive here.  Happy Anniversary, Danny, and many more.

Outro (MP3)
 

MP3 Download Dinner Bell for December

Olde Frothingslosh  (MP3's)
In the 1970's my brother was an avid collector of independently brewed beer, he belonged to a club that sent monthly samples of the stuff. Well, having read in a book about Olde Frothingslosh, the "Pale Stale Ale" and proudly-self-proclaimed worst beer in the world, 8-year old me was hopping up and down at the prospect of it arriving in the mail like Ralphie in A Christmas Story waiting for his Red Ryder BB Gun. And sure enough, a can of this stuff did arrive for my brother, and I set upon drinking it immediately. The company claimed the "foam was on the bottom", which I didn't quite see, but I was in awe of the picture on the can, a photo of an enormous woman in a bathing suit lying on top of a bear, who had clearly been crushed by her. Turns out the stuff was just really a joke repackaging of Iron City Beer for holidays/collectability, but still, was like Mad Magazine crossing over into real life. Here's a "plea" (MP3) from the company spokesman, and also an excerpt (MP3) from an "official" Olde Frothingslosh newscast, chronicled from a site dedicated to Pittsburgh DJ Rege Cordic who wrote this history of the beer and sort of was the point man of steamrolling the "foam on the bottom" myth.

Worst Audition Ever (MP3)
Tyler and Perry-in-waiting going over their mutual repertoire. 25 goddamn minutes. Thanks to Listener Greg.

Leland Stanford University Marching Band "White Punks On Dope" (MP3)
From Scott Soriano's great Crud Crud blog of vinyl lost treasures comes this stab at the Tubes from an 1979 self-released LP titled Starting Salary $22,275.00. These guys apparently were somewhat of the Animal House of marching bands, though as Scott eloquently explains, they were more or less a "scatter band": "A scatter band is different from a marching band in that it spells out words or makes shapes, instead of marching in formation. In the Stanford Band's case, that meant doing a tribute to the recently kidnapped, Cal student Patty Hearst at the Big Game against Cal (UC Berkeley) by making a formation of a hamburger bun which was missing a patty. During the 1971 Rose Bowl game half time show, the band first spelled out OHIO STATE and then quickly rearranged themselves to spell OH SHIT. This was broadcast on NBC to a national audience. They were banned from the next year's bowl game. In another spelling fiasco, the band first formed HI FOLKS and then shifted the top of the O to the top of the L to spell HI FUCKS. This, too, made it on TV and got them banned." 

DJ Compilation Of The Month: Songs From The Midnight Matinee

MP3s: 26 of them below the jump.

Long before the the great convergence of all media into one, John Schnall was remixing movies for the radio on his WFMU program The Midnight Matinee. The show combined dialogue from movies with music in various ways, and turning such cinematic classics as Jerry Lewis' feel-good Nazi flick The Day The Clown Cried into hour-long radio programs. In the process of remixing, songs were sometimes created out of the dialogue and musical snippets. Many of the the full shows are archived in realaudio on this page. Here are 26 of John's Midnight Matinee songs, along with the title of the episode each song came from, which often suggests the film that provided the original source material.

How Does It Stinkin' Feel? (MP3s)

MP3s: Ten of them below the jump.

"Give me a throw pillow and a crowbar; I'll show you how to hit it with a nine iron." — Anonymous

A couple contributors to this blog have mentioned before how great the wild early days of Napster were, mostly because you could search for home recordings made by (and inadvertently offered by) the users sharing their Britney Spears and Eminem MP3s. However, the example Napster/Mic In Track recordings that have been presented have been few and far between. I would like to correct this oversight by presenting for the first time a comprehensive review of the recordings made by one specific person that produced some surprisingly entertaining songs.

This kid wrote his own material and performed the songs with accompanying percussion. It sounds like his drum kit consists of one (1) cardboard box and one (1) unknown metal object (pan lid? lamp shade? metal colander?). And as if that wasn't enough, this kid hit on the bright idea of overdubbing his recordings so that he could lay down backing vocals on his songs, a technique that's pretty obvious, yet I don't think I've ever encountered it elsewhere in the Mic In Track field. Les Paul would be proud.

Some of the songs he wrote are love songs or about relationships, but the more interesting ones are the ones about food. He sings about trying to get some ice cream from a fat ice cream man, about buying soft pretzels and hot dogs, and about chicken wings. Lots of chicken wings. Stinking chicken wings, even.

I found these songs to be extremely funny and charming, so I ended up downloading all the Mic In Tracks that I could by this artist. What follows is my complete collection of this anonymous kid's original songs. These files were untitled, so I have taken the liberty of providing them with names. A couple cover songs, alternate takes, and false starts are not included here, but will be included as bonus tracks in the inevitable CD release of this material in 2018.

Oh My God, You Don't Know What You TOOK?

I was watching the Brian Turner / WFMU-curated episode of NY Noise the other night, and up comes this Public Service Announcement from the Bad Council (who've actually done some cool things - remember The Crying Indian (RM video link)? One of theirs).  Two little kids are having diner dinner with Dad, who's clearly got a scar on his ear where once hung an earring.  The announcer says something to the effect of "your dad had an earring back in the day when only bikers and hippies had earrings" (the dude's only like 30, but whatever).  "And you know what bikers and hippies had in common?  The Drugs."  The remainder of the hour was filled with similarly snarky anti-drug messages from the same source, like the dad who rolls himself up in the rug and tells his daughter he's a joint.  Relating, you know.  A bunch of grownups desperately trying to convince their kids they're hip to the now scene, while maintaining a just-say-no message. 

One of my duties here at the so-called Magic Factory is serving as Public Service Announcement Director, so if some organization's got an anti-drug campaign, they're sending their material to me.  Mostly it's dreadful.  Mostly it's the former mayor of Hillsborough or some such place politely suggesting the kids find something else to do: "Hey kids, my anti-drug is politics!" - in astoundingly low fidelity.  But not the Bad Council!  They're F-U-N!  Sometimes.  No, mostly not.  Here's all the fun ones, enjoy.

(mp3s) A-B-C-D-PCP...  |  Baa Baa Black Sheep  |  Humpty Dumpty

These here all cleverly update some of your favorite nursery rhymes, while the ones that follow get a little more "very special episode" on you:

(mp3s) You Wanna... y'know?  |  You Don't Know What You Took?!

Now let's go back to 1973, when Bill Cosby actually did this kind of thing pretty well (RM link to Kenny G's show). "The Dopepusher" (alright, the chorus blows -- but those shouted verses are great!)

And finally, don't forget: Daddy drinks because you cry.  (mp3)

Long Live Lassiter

While it wouldn’t be accurate to call Bob Lassiter the best talk radio host of all time, it would be fair to say that he’s probably the least famous great one. In the metro areas where he took calls on the radio (Miami, Tampa and Chicago) he’s still loved and loathed by those who remember his work, but everywhere else he’s mostly known by those who collect and trade tapes of arcane and unusual radio. That is, except for some lucky WFMU listeners who have heard us rebroadcast some of Bob’s radio shenanigans (and yes, there are archives).

So, why am I writing about a local Florida talk host who hasn’t been on the air for six years? And what would make recordings of a talk show collectable in the first place? And more significantly, why in the world would we play portions of his show on WFMU? Simple. When Lassiter was good, he was REALLY good. He could make your jaw drop, make you curse the radio, or maybe just pee your pants.

Unlike other talk hosts who hope to change the world (assert an agenda) or want to be liked, Lassiter's was always driven to simply grab and hold the listener's attention. And he would do whatever he could get away with (or whatever amused HIM at the time) to shock or awe listeners into becoming addicted to his program.

A key element to what made Lassiter’s radio work mind-blowing was how he consistently generated confrontational calls and turned them into compelling radio theater.  Every other talk host I’ve ever heard usually gets off on like-minded callers, but not Bob. In fact, he was often quite impatient with callers who agreed with him. As a master contrarian, phone-in fans and callers on his side merely bored him. They were just getting in the way of the pissed off listeners who were steaming on hold, waiting for their chance to take on “The Mad Dog.”

¡Sho' Nuff Beeyotch! (WFMU record fair crack Part 1 of 69)

'Sho' Nuff' by the group Sly, Slick and Wicked.  Nice little super duper sweet soul rarity on JB's People label.  Not to be confused with the excellent track called The Sly, the Slick, The Wicked by the Lost Generation on Brunswick.  Copped from dealer/collector/DJ Jordan, whose doubles put my shit to shame.  Man is no joke.  Thanks cousin!  Czeck it here... (MP3)

Pop music covers on an 8-bit Nintendo synthesizer

Radiohead, Queen, Survivor, Led Zeppelin, R.E.M., Slayer, and more, rocked out in NES 8-bit glory.

Download the whole NESCover collection here (68mb, at SomethingAwful.com, and requires a RAR extractor).

If you can't manage that, here's Survivor - Eye of the Tiger (MP3), as arranged by kalocin.

MP3 of Singing Iceberg

Here's an MP3 of the sounds made by Iceberg B-09A in Antarctica. It was recorded by scientists from Germany's Alfred Wegener institute for polar and marine research, as they recorded seismic signals to measure earthquakes and tectonic movements on the Ekstroem ice shelf on Antarctica's South Atlantic coast.

From the Wegener Institute press release:

Tracking the signal, the scientists found a 50 by 20 kilometer iceberg that had collided with an underwater peninsula and was slowly scraping around it.

"Once the iceberg stuck fast on the seabed it was like a rock in a river," said scientist Vera Schlindwein. "The water pushes through its crevasses and tunnels at high pressure and the iceberg starts singing.

The iceberg sounds were originally recorded at 0.5 hertz, far below the range of human hearing. The MP3 here is speeded up many times to bring the sounds into the audible range. The full Wegener Institute press release is here. Thanks Monica!

If you enjoyed hearing an iceberg sing, here's Pseu's post on the sounds of Saturn, complete with MP3s.

Cleaning Out My Inbox, Covered Face Edition

Did you know that it's a bad idea to give powerful hallucinogens to soldiers? Who woulda thunk it?  But here's a British newsreel film that proves it (downloadable mpg video). via undercurrents from a UK newsreel about British Army drug experiments.

How not to display rare records (downloadable wmv video). Maybe he can replace that cylinder here. Thanks, Listener Tom via Nata2

Touchradio has created the longest language removal exercise yet, of our own Vicki Bennet, from her program Do or D.I.Y. You can download all of Vicki's tongue flaps, uhms and ah's here.

Another creepy classic from Mr. and Mrs. Wheatley: Horrorclown (streaming Quicktime video, nsfw)

Feeling too productive at work? The bouncing girl will change all that.

A truly creepy tale of serial rape by telephone, reminiscent of the famous Milgram obediance experiment. Thanks? Listener Mike

The great Bush-Blair swear-off and Anti-drug Russian waxworks, via b3ta

Six Degrees of Smoking.

Heidi Barack's musical portraits.

incriminating photos via Happy Palace and the LA Public Library:

Jesus Christ Superstar in Japanese (MP3s)

What better way to kick off Christ's month-long birthday bash than with the Japanese version of Jesus Christ Superstar? Here it is in its entirety, featuring a great Judas, a lame Pilate (a shame, since Pilate has many of the best songs), the needless knockoff song Can't We Start Again Please, inappropriate livestock sound effects and inexpicable excursions back into English.

Overture  |  Heaven On Their Minds  |  What's The Buzz  |  Everything's Alright  |  This Jesus Must Die  |  Hosanna  |  Simon Zealots - Poor Jerusalem  |  Pilate's Dream  |  The Temple  |  Everything's Alright - I Dont Know How To Love Him  |  Damned For All Time - Blood Money  |  The Last Supper  |  Gethsemane - I Only Want To Say  |  The Arrest  |  Peter's Denial  |  Pilate and Christ  |  King Herod's Song  |  Could We Start Again Please  |  Judas' Death  |  Trial Before Pilate  |  Superstar  |  Crucifixion  |  John Nineteen Forty One

If you enjoyed these, don't forget The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack in Norwegian. Lots of other MP3 posts from Beware of the Blog here.

Mother(s) Rage

Jesus, what's up Internet?  I know you go through your phases, but what's with this white-ladies-of-the-American-south-flipping-their-lids kick you've been on lately?  What?  You've always been obsessed by them?!  Hmmm... so you have.  And it's not just you?  I guess you're right.  Well, TV may have started it, but you've gotta admit you're sort of harvesting them.

Exhibits:

Margaret Perrin She's the one that seems to have started all this. Click to view a gag-reel of her show-saving turn on Fox's "Trading Spouses".  (Oh please, no booing, you're better than that!) Margaret is what you might call a "Good Christian Woman from Louisiana".  You are what Margaret would call a "Gargoyle from the dark side". 

Parking Lot Pariah (NSFW): And over here we've got the potty-mouthed secular (also southern) version of Mrs. Perrin.  (both of these vids via break.com)

"You should've asked me nicely, Mom" (link to clean Realaudio version, or download the totally choad-licking obscene mp3).  This is some unhinged Mom (from the south) and her dickwad 16-yr old kid, which I found on The Internet someplace.  She started screaming at him to let her use his car, so he turned on his webcam.  You only need to hear the audio.  I hear some of our DJs have tried this tactic, only to fail when the parental ass-whupping commenced.

Speaking of parental ass-whuppings, here's a thing someone wrote back in 1998, and it's all about being a mom and raging at your kid - way back in 1998!  What's more, she says all mothers got rage -- so this kinda thing's been going on since 1998, and The Internet is just now catching on? Shame on you Internet!  Tho I grant, it's not really your territory until it becomes porn -- hey, what's that?! A site that fetishizes that movie "Locked Up: A Mothers Rage" starring Cheryl Ladd as a raging mom who smokes cigarettes!!  (For what it's worth, here's Realaudio of my kid Lila flipping the tables and raging at her mother, accompanied by Nurse With Wound.)

Of course, one need not be an actual mother to be in possession of Mother Rage; no, mother rage makes plenty of allowance for human complexity.  We celebrate (flip) now with two versions of the "Dyketactic" classic from Kathy Fire, "Mother Rage".

The $4000 Dead Turkey Complaint

The FCC may have stopped fining stations for indecency, but they've never let up on another favorite area of enforcement: their rules against putting people on the air without their knowledge (the reason why all on-air phone calls start with "you're on the air").

Just in time to establish their pro-Turkey Thanksgiving stance, the FCC has fined a station in Montana $4,000 for putting a turkey-rights activist (not pictured at left) on the air without her permission. But this wasn't a morning zoo situation. The station (KZMN in Kalispell) was conducting a Thanksgiving food drive in November 2003, and they had hung a dead turkey (or a replica thereof) outside the station's studios. During a program which was soliciting pledges of food, a caller was put on the air with the host, Paul Gray. Gray dutifully told the caller that she was on the air, and she proceeded to complain about the dead turkey hanging outside KZMN's building. The trouble started when the first caller handed the phone to a co-worker, and Gray neglected to notify the caller's co-worker that she was also being broadcast. Gray told the caller's co-worker to "quit complaining, and listen to the station." She filed a complaint with the FCC, who originally fined KZMN $6,000, then lowered the fine to $4,000. Still no word on whether the turkey was real or rubber. via FMBQ

All media outlets, WFMU included, get their share of crackpots complaining about all sorts of things. Since I can't share the complaints that we receive, here is a voice-mail reeived by a TV station that had aired a program which dared to question the true nature of crop circles. MP3 for download via del.icio.us/tag/audio

Power Pop MP3s From The Yellow Pills Compilations

I'm sure I'm not the only WFMU DJ who'll be including the Numero Group's Yellow Pills: Prefill compilation on my 2005 top ten list. The two-disc set, put together by Yellow Pills fanzine scribe Jordan Oakes, is chock full of incredible and ultra-rare power pop singles from the late 70s and early 80s. This week, I was thrilled to discover that a friend of mine had accidentally tracked down the original Yellow Pills compilations--also curated by Mr. Oakes--which were released throughout the 90s by the now defunct Big Deal label.

Click the links below to listen to a sort of "Best Of Yellow Pills" collection, comprised of my 10 favorite tracks from the original four volumes in the series.

Devin Hill "Stars"
The Spongetones "Skinny"
Brian Stevens And The Flip "A Little Bird Told Me So"
The Nicoteens "You're Gonna Save Me"
Martin Luther Lennon "Nobody I Know"
Finns "Sky Vue"
Blow Pops "Pt. 1"
Wonderboy "Skidmarks"
David Grahame "I Love You Better"
The Nines "I Would Never"

Erotic Aerobics MP3s

I figured I would complete today's triumvirate of smut here on the FMU Blog by posting MP3s for my favorite exercise record, Erotic Aerobics. But don't get the wrong idea about this material- just because these tracks have titles like  Fan Dance or Pelvic Pleasures (mp3s), and contains lines like "Get down on all fours" and "Open your thighs wide," this ain't no collection of audio pornography. This is classy stuff! For one thing, our Aerobics Caller here is Pierre Raymonde, who is French or at least pretends to be. And French is classy, (or at least it was when this LP came out, in 1982). And Pierre's not exhorting over some cheap wikka-wikka-wikka porno music, he's using classical music! Need I say more? I will anyway. Rull yooor eeps.

Breathing Warm Ups  |  Body Manipulations  |  Kinky Chorus Kick and Flash  |

Turn And Tease Me  |  The Strippers Strut  |  Sensual Warmups  |  Pelvic Pleasures

Lover's Lunge  |  The Shameless Shake  |  Fan Dance

YOU! You're The One! - McDonald's Memories

When I was younger I had quite a germ phobia. I was very paranoid about McDonald’s workers doing awful things to my Quarter Pounders. If I developed a cold I always blamed it on the McDonald’s I ate a few days prior, convinced that if it wasn’t a booger wiped upon my burger then someone must have sneezed on it.

I was already in the habit of checking for foreign matter hidden in my food before eating it and it came as no surprise to me when I found a great scraggly tuft of pubic hair between bun and burger, congealed with ketchup and diced onions. Disgusted, I did not eat McDonalds for quite a while.

Peggy Lee - McDonald's Theme Song (mp3)

April was the month that the carnival came to town. It was the best week of the year. It was the first breath of warm weather and the first opportunity to roam around, talk to girls and vandalize property with pentagrams and anarchy signs.

The carnival was held in the park across the street from McDonald’s. We made frequent trips there for hamburgers and vanilla shakes. Around this time, all of my friends liked to try to regurgitate on command…but I did it the best. In an attempt to be funny and impress a girl, I puked up the whole $2 I just spent on fries and a milkshake, spattering it on the parking lot in a frothy white mess. She wasn’t impressed.

Main Street Singers - McDonald's Theme Song (fries version) (mp3)

A Fatal Exception

Relax.  Relax.  Have a chicory.

MP3 by Jim

"On a clear day you can see... um..."

The Association of International Glaucoma Societies presented an operatic hymn about glaucoma in June of 2005 at the Imperial Viennese Glaucoma Ball. Written and composed by Erik Greve and performed by the lovely soprano Melanie Greve (left, squint... oops, I mean click to enlarge). You can download an MP3 of the song here, or hear the song and read the lyrics at the AIGS home page here.

61 Versions of Tico Tico

MP3s: 61 versions of Tico Tico below the jump

Maybe the reason I keep playing single-chord songs on my show lately is because at one time, I couldn't get enough of the song Tico Tico, the tune that packs in more notes per measure than a scat singer on Dexedrine. I stumbled onto my cassette cache of Tico Tico's the other day, and without someone nearby to slap some sense into me, I ripped all of them. Then I came to the station and proceeded to find even more versions. Then I stupidly searched online and.. and...and... just go below the jump for all 61 versions.

Tico Tico was written in 1917 by Zequinha de Abreu. The song's first title was actually Tico Tico no Farelo, and in the 40's it became Tico Tico no Fuba. The song was imported to the US by Disney via their animated piece of World War Two-era Happy Latinos propaganda, "Saludos Amigos," in which Donald Duck introduces the song. That version is below. Do I want more versions? No. Unless you have the Captain Beefheart version. I gave up my Tico Tico obsession on the air years ago because I quickly discovered it was a bottomless pit of wants, desires and notes. Lots of notes. Three hour's worth (note to Kenny G: don't do it!)

Next song to get this treatement, The Internationale. It has fewer notes.

Gertrude Stein MP3s

Gertrude Stein MP3s

A bunch of audio recordings by Gertrude Stein made during the years of 1934-1935. Selections include: "The Making of Americans: Parts 1 & 2", "Matisse", "A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson", "If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso", "Portrait of Christian Bérard", "Madame Recamier: An Opera", "How She Bowed To Her Brother" and "Interview (1934)." via UbuWeb

Criswell Predicts MP3

For your listening and sampling pleasure, here's a 44-minute-long MP3 of the legendary Criswell predicting what he predicts best - the future, which is where you and I will spend the rest of our lives. I know that some of you will write off Criswell as another Ed Wood boy toy, but listen to the predictions he makes here, and you will be astounded by his accuracy. Among Criswell's 1970 predictions that have come to pass:

• The political rise of the American south
• The red versus blue state culture wars
• Genital piercing and ornamentation
• Jennifer Beals and the leg-warmer epidemic
• The great caf-tunic contagion of 2005
• The backlash against liberal Hollywood entertainers
• Homosexual Cities and the Contented Discontents!

And that's just in the first few minutes of this MP3! Eventually, the great Criswell predicts the end of the world for August 18, 1999, which, unless I'm seriously mistaken, also came to pass.

The Family Guy's FCC Song

Last Sunday night's episode of The Family Guy was all about the FCC's (now dormant) language crackdown. It included a brief song and dance number about our favorite regulatory agency. Here's the MP3 of the song, and here's a link to the streaming video of it, via devilducky.

Audible Hiss

Came across this great site which made my heart and ears ache for my bygone days as a cassette enthusiast. It's an alphabetical photo montage of... keeee-rist... seemingly every make and model of blank cassette manufactured from then 'til now, and given that they're all the exact same shape and size, the sheer diversity of design is pretty head spinning. Gazing down the list, my eyes fell on a few that even reminded me of old tapes from my personal collection that either bit the dust eons ago, never made it out from under the seat of my '81 VW Rabbit, got left at parties, were simply tossed to make way for other obsessions, or perhaps still lurk in some dark corner of my apartment, waiting to be uncovered and reprimanded for wasting precious storage space.

For example, this little jobby here was a bit of an industry standard of the late 80s. But it's also the exact make and model of the corny mixtape I made the year before I finished high school and was subsequently carted around from punk rock shows in Trenton, to parties of older friends who'd trotted off to art school in the city, to secret skateboard spots in Pennsylvania, and then back again several thousand times over. I know this tape still resides in a bag of crap in my closet and is sun-bleached and warbled from years and years of abuse. The tracklisting is way too embarrassing to include here, but I will admit that it includes a plainly retarded segueway from the Jesus & Mary Chain into 7 Seconds. (Links to Real Audio.)

This one here had a Buzzcocks (Real Audio) mix that someone made for me. Or maybe it was just a dub from a vinyl copy of "Singles Going Steady", which probably gave the above mixtape some fierce competition for play in the boombox at some point or another. Sadly, side two of this tape featured a dub of Joni Mitchell's "Blue" album, (stop laughing) which is a great example of the classic mis-step of tape making, especially when precious boombox battery power is at risk: Don't put something you're only in the mood to hear once a year on the flipside of something you consider part of your daily personal hygiene. To this day, I can not listen to the Buzzcocks without fashioning my hair into a tidy bun and pretending to be a librarian 45 minutes later.

Purchased at Topp's Appliances in East Brunswick, NJ for the explicit purpose of making a mixtape for the pasty-faced punky maiden I was madly in love with during senior year of high school. This tape was twice as expensive as the garden variety Maxell/TDK models in regular circulation at the time, but I figured it was important to spend a little cash on the lady. She was obsessed with Depeche Mode, (Real Audio) whom I pretended to like for a little while in the hopes of earning her sympathy. Instead, after graciously accepting the mixtape from me just prior to Christmas break, she never again spoke to or made eye contact with me, having been obviously disturbed by something on the tape. (Note to current teenagers attempting to win hearts of pasty-faced punky maidens by making them mixtapes: Reconsider the inclusion of any lengthy Hubert Selby spoken word pieces as "dramatic" conclusion to side one. Though fashionable at one time, this is now widely regarded as a fiercely stupid idea.)

The Hits of 1966, With a Lisp (MP3s)

A few weeks ago, I posted 21 versions of They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha Ha, including one by Teddy and Darrel. Little did I know that the WFMU library included the entire Teddy and Darrel LP, These are The Hits, You Silly Savage, which I post here in its entirety. I found these on a collection called Queer To The Core. The original album came out in 1966, and featured Teddy and Darrel lisping and swishing their way through the hits of the day:

I'm Hungry  |  Wild Thing  |  Gary Ghoul Boy  |  Little Red Riding Hood  | 

The Hollywood Agent  |  These Boots Are Made For Walking  | 

Strangers In The Night  |  Say There  |  Hanky Panky  |

Hollywood Swings  |  They Took You Away, I'm Glad, I'm Glad  | 

Hold On, I'm Coming

Wealthy Geek Pays $20 Million to Wear Cartoon Helmet in Outer Space

Daisuke Enomoto (aka Dice-K) will soon become the fourth space tourist of all time, paying $20 Million to the extra-terrestrial travel agency Space Adventures for the privilege of spending ten fun-filled days in the International Space Station. Enomoto dreams not only of gazing down at the earth from the heavens, but to do so decked out in the costume of Char Aznable, his favorite character from the popular anime series Gundam. Enomoto is already entertaining bids from Japanese companies to build him a working red space suit based on the blond-haired, blue-eyed Char Aznable, whose name is derived from Charles Aznavour, but who is better known in the anime universe as The Red Comet.

While wearing his cartoon helmet and space epaulets, Enomoto will also be trying to convince the various ETs he encounters that he is friend, not foe. So the costume had better be good. Here is Enomoto's SETI at home page. Don't you wish you had $20 million to follow your dreams, too? Article here.

UPDATE: Listener Nick send us Char's theme song, Hori Kouichiro's Char ga Kuru (MP3)

Record Related MP3s

As a way of thanking everybody who came to the WFMU record fair this weekend, and also in an effor to engender cross-format peace and understanding, here are a few record-related MP3s:

John Lennon - Tower Records Ad
John does a great job as a guest DJ on Los Angeles station KHJ as he hawks Tower Records.

Althea and the Memories - Worst Record Ever Made
Kim Fowley pulled some pre-pubescent fans into the studio for the backing squeals.

Akaten - Suite USA Record Company
Atsushi Tsuyama (Acid Mothers Temple) and Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins) provide a muscial recitation of the major record labels.

Vernon Oxford - Turn The Record Over

Tom Tall - Stack of Records

Playmates - While The Record Goes Around

Moose Jackson - Big Ten Inch Record

Dinah Washington - Record Ban Blues

Bob and Ray - Columbia Phonograph Spot

Chinese Rocks

What has Wm. Berger been doing since he left the WFMU airwaves in 1999?  Well, a lot of things.  Among them, amassing a collection of great Chinese pop and rock music.  Mostly by way of recommendations from online friends in China and Taiwan, I've collected a handful of great, contemporary Chinese rock albums, and I have to assume that this is just the tip of the iceberg.

China has emerged in recent years as an economic giant, also seemingly in the midst of some dramatic cultural changes.  The children of upscale Americans are learning Mandarin, a language that may soon be as common here as Spanish if the Chinese have their way with the global marketplace.  Chinese hit movies like Hero and House of Flying Daggers play here (undubbed) to massive box office response.  There's no time like the present, then, to get acquainted with some of the Republic's rock underground.

Anthony Wong / Anodize - Hong Kong cinema star Anthony Wong Chau-Sang has acted in over 130 films since 1985. He made a name for himself playing opposite Yun-Fat Chow in blockbusters like Hard Boiled and Full Contact, and won awards for his portrayal of Wong Chi Hang in the notorious Bunman film.  I watch every Anthony Wong film I can get my hands on; he's a wonderful actor of great range and depth, bringing humanity and a dark, personal humor to even the seediest of roles.  He's also a musician, having released several CDs of idiosyncratic punk/new wave-inspired rock, sometimes accompanied by the metalpunk band Anodize.  His album of covers, Bad Taste-But I Smell Good (2002), is perhaps the most well recognized internationally.  Here's a nifty Anthony Wong page with some good photos, a (Japanese) fan page, and links to my IMDb comments for two of his films [1] [2].  (He should not be confused Anthony Wong Yiu-Ming, another very successful Hong Kong singer and actor, whose music is more the syrupy radio-pop variety.)  [mp3]  [mp3]  [mp3]  Anodize - [mp3]

Second Hand Rose Band - Part of the Beijing scene, Second Hand Rose derive part of their sound from traditional "Northeastern" music, blending Chinese folk instruments into a standard rock format.  Vocalist Liang Long always performs in drag, often in traditional garments.  Musically, they bring to mind 70s glam pop, especially Roxy Music.  Second Hand Rose have also made a splash in Switzerland for some reason, performing at several cultural festivals there.  Here are some Web pages about the band, in German and English.  [mp3]  [mp3]

"Fat Gal" by Merle Travis, now in Visual Form on WFMU's Comics Page

WFMU's Comics Page has a new addition!

Listener-artist Ken Struck created this comic based on Merle Travis' 1947 song "Fat Gal" (mp3, 1.8mb).  He submitted it to us many moons ago and has given his kind permission for us to make it available for your funny-pages pleasure.  He has other "cool comix" for sale and you can email him at Kennethstruck at aol dot com if you have any inquiries.

Ken's comic joins works by Mary Fleener, Chris Worden, and John McLeod, who were inspired by the songs of Captain Beefheart, The Angry Samoans, Arthur Lee and Love, Earl Bostic and Pastor John Rygden. 

The Comics Page also features Jim Ryan's 1989 strip "Among the Vinyl People", which serves as an amusing preview of what's in store at the WFMU Record Fair, coming this weekend. 

Enjoy the funnies, and if you are a cartoon artist who has a song-based comic you would like to submit for consideration, please drop me a line!

MP3 Download Dinner Bell for November

Detsorgsekalf - "The Embers of Your Church Burn So Bright" (MP3) / "Keyboard Solo" (MP3) Grimness from the frostbitten land of...Canada. There was some spirited debate on a recent show of mine with Andee Connors and Allan Horrocks (both who work at Aquarius Records, the former here is putting out an album by this band on his tUMULt label) over whether this band should be considered "Joke Black Metal." While the in-your-face growling and subject matter going on here is ridiculous without doubt, there is still some real vision and an amazing, crusty lo-fi sound of guitar gristle and drum blast beats that could rank this band up with the likes of Striborg, Bathory, and Darkthrone at times. Then again, their EP is solely conceptualized about being a Black Metal band hated and threatened by other Black Metal bands. Wasn't the spirit of the genre to be truly outsiders living by their own musical blueprint in the first place? Is it not within reason for this step to be taken? Who can say for sure, I surely ain't the keeper of the Rule Book. But I can easily remain in awe of Detsorgsekalf. and you will too. See their brutal video here.

Pyha "A Tale From the Haunted House" (MP3) Andee also kindly gives us this, an MP3 of a seventh grader living in South Korea, making the most tortured music I've heard in ages. It's certainly playing by the same game plan of such soul destroyers as Abruptum and Burzum (the latter especially in the complete blanket of home-made buzz that envelops this music), but whereas those artists drag you down into a dark place and infiltrate your very being, this kid is not content to just do that. He takes you there then smashes you to pieces by maximizing every single recording channel used to utterly destroy everything in sight. The idea of a mild-mannered person sitting in his bedroom on the computer (which is the likely scenario) to make music that sounds like it is a total upheavel in Hell itself is really an odd juxtaposition of images. I mean, at that age, I was upset if cartoons weren't on as scheduled. There is something far more nefarious than that at play. Or maybe not. Apparently this kid sent a demo to bible-of-metal mag Terrorizer in the UK and got a 10 out of 10.

Charles Bernstein "1 to 100" (MP3) A longtime staple on Kenny G's show, here's the infamous Charles Bernstein taking you to the top as only he can. Recorded in 1969.

Ween "Rejected Pizza Hut Jingle" (MP3) I've never been a big Ween fan, but I have to say that Pizza Hut would have gotten my respect if they had accepted this, the band's proposal to promote the company's then-recent "cheese hidden inside the crust" pizza.

DJ Compilation of the Month: The Incorrect Music Companion 2001

MP3s: 22 Incorrect Music artifacts below the jump.

This month's DJ compilation is the Incorrect Music Companion, a collection of Outsider Music compiled by Irwin Chusid and Michelle Boule. Irwin and Michelle did the weekly Incorrect Music hour from 1997 to 2002. You can still hear all their realaudio archives from this page. This collection was their fundraising marathon premium from the March 2001 fundraiser. It includes such Incorrect standard bearers as Mr. Snuggles (MP3), Mother Rage (MP3) as well as an early appearance by the Langley Schools Music Project (MP3). (Illustration by Michelle Boule)

Air America's Next Big Mistake?

It looks like Air America is about to lose one of their best on-air personalities, Marc Maron. There's been no official announcement, but on his show, Morning Sedition, Maron has repeatedly said he's probably on his way out. And yesterday he said it's unlikely he'll be part of the Morning Sedition air team (with radio veteran Mark Riley) after this month. And they're promoting their live remote at O'Neal's in the Upper West Side this Thursday as their "last live appearance."

Why would Maron leave? Or why would Air America let go of the funniest guy on their talent roster? Best guess-- deadlocked contract negotiations.

When Air America went on the air over a year and a half ago, a lot of us in radio were dismayed that a new talk network would go on the air with so many air personalities and writers who made their mark in television instead of radio. Not that media cross-pollination in general is such a bad idea, but just that when a start-up radio network was trying to do something SO new (a national liberal talk network) AND they were also attempting to reinvent the medium at the same time by leaning so heavily on TV talent instead of loading up the schedule with radio veterans.

The big exceptions were South Florida's leftist talk bulldog Randi Rhodes who's held down the late afternoon slot since the beginning, and then a few months later acerbic career talker Mike Malloy who was tacked onto the late night end of the schedule. Those programs were the only ones done in the traditional talk radio manner--  one host on the air brings up issues, vents, and takes calls. All the other shows were more experimental-- with multiple hosts, many guests, and only a few (if any) calls. And all these programs featured one or more hosts best known for their work in TV or film.

Kiss The Goat! Satanic Mass MP3

Go ahead and Kiss The Goat. You know you want to. Go ahead. I dare you. Kiss it. I double-dog dare you.

Don't know what I'm talking about? Download this MP3 of a Satanic Mass by the band Coven. You'll never hear the phrase "Kiss The Goat" the same way again.

OK, so you'll never hear the phrase "Kiss The Goat" again at all. It's still a great Satanic Mass, as Satanic Masses go. It came out on Coven's 1970 LP Witchcraft: Destroys Minds and Reaps Souls. For years, I though that this was the same Coven who had the hit with One Tin Soldier, but apparently, that was the British Coven, and this is the American Coven. To make matters even more confusing, the American Coven included a member named Oz Ozbourne. No relation. Just Kiss The Goat and shut up.

If this Satanic Mass doesn't fulfill your Halloween quotient for evil, don't forget about my 70 minute Satanic Halloween Mix, The Horror (MP3), which also includes portion's of Coven's Satanic Mass. (Careful, it's huge - clocking in at almost 100 Megs.)

Hail Satan. Over and out.

The Intimate Audio Gadget

Really portable music is a wonderful thing. It's both empowering and comforting to have a shiny music machine in your pocket that plays a variety of your favorite tunes at the whim of your finger on a little wheel. It's futuristic technology that has made listening an intimate experience... for over FIFTY years.

Back in the early 50's a company called Texas Instruments was making good money churning out piles of newfangled little transistors for military applications, but they envisioned a wider public marketplace for the little buggers. And in 1954 the TI engineers created a prototype transistor radio. It was small, it worked, and it seemed like a great idea. However, Texas Instruments wasn't in the business of manufacturing consumer products back then, so they shopped their concept around to several big radio makers of the day. Surprisingly, RCA, Sylvania, and Philco all said "no thanks" before a small outfit in Indiana (the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates) took the bait.

Within a matter of months the first commercial transistor radio was a reality. Besides being cute and colorful, the TR-1 was the very first mass-marketed transistorized gadget. It was made here in the U.S.A., and in that spirit the it was prominently on display in stores across America just in time for Christmas 1954. The price? A whopping $49.95. Adjust the cost for inflation and you're lookin at almost $350 in today's dollars, not far from the $399 price tag on that first iPod.

Before the TR-1, any portable radio you might buy had a "luggage" quality, with big top handles and a bit of heft. They just weren't all that portable thanks to the warm glowing vacuum tubes they contained. These days, audiophiles and technical stick-in-the-muds properly laud the aural beauty of the "tube" sound, but the glass casings and inner workings of vacuum tubes are rather fragile and they need a protective case, as well as some large batteries to power up. And of course, the tubes themselves aren't all that tiny either.

Rent is too Damn High

Damian at Stay Free! alerts us to the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, throwing a hat into the ring for the upcoming NYC mayoral race. Their campaign song (MP3) explains everything.

The party's mayoral candidate and mastermind is ex-postal worker/Vietnam vet/martial arts instructor Jimmy McMillan, who once climbed up a cable on the Brooklyn Bridge armed with a machete to demand press attention. McMillan is actually on the official NYC ballot, running against a few other goons who are far too deficient in entertainment value to be mentioned.

Unfortunately, McMillan blames his rent woes on Jews (he also accuses them of creating a state of apartheid in Brooklyn), which is sure to derail his campaign. However, his site is full of nuggets like this:

All Poor People Are Being Force Out OF New York
*** HELL NO ***
This Is Jimmy McMillan, Ain't Nobody Running Nobody Anywhere.

Although McMillan's campaign may appear ridiculous, at least he's earnest. Remember when Jello Biafra ran for mayor of SF in '79? His platform included forcing businessmen wear clown costumes and banning cars within the city limits.

Sing Along With JFK MP3s

The assassination of John F. Kennedy may have marked the end of American innocence, but it crowned Vaughn Meader's First Family LP as the king of the cut-out bins for decades, a position it still holds to this day. What a shame that this fate was not bestowed upon George Atkins and Hank Levine's Sing Along With JFK LP instead. In 1961, Atkins and Levine took snippets of JFK's early presidential speeches, added an accordian player and a chorus, and set Camelot to music. JFK's pal Frank Sinatra was good enough to put out a small pressing of the LP on his Reprise label.

Although the same technique has been applied by others (including the George W Bush Singers), the inspiration of the Sing Along With JFK record has never been equaled, even (and especially) by Atkins and Levine's RFK/LBJ-based followup, Washington Is For The Birds.

Here are all six musical tracks from the LP Sing Along With JFK:

Begin Anew For Two  |  Let Us Begin Beguine  |  Alliance For Progress Bossa Nova
Ask Not Waltz  |  The Trumpet  |  Let The Word Go Forth

Parade of the Damned (MP3s)

Spooky Movies-Roy Clark
Lookout Mountain-Chuck Miller
Screemin' Meemies-Merv Griffin
Soul Dracula-Hot Blood
Count Yorga
Dark Shadows
Midnight Monsters Hop-Jack and Jim
Beware-Bill Buchanan
Monster Man-Screaming Lord Sutch
Dinner With Drac-John Zacherle
Rockin' Zombie-Crewnecks   
Bo Meets The Monster-Bo Diddley
Igor's Party-Tony's Monstrosities
Intro Monstro Crescendo-Messer Chups
   
 

Step Right Up! The Art of the Sideshow Pitchman (MP3s)

MP3s: 18 spoken word tracks of sideshow pitchmen and pitchwomen below the jump.

Last August, I headed over to the New Jersey State Fair, minidisk in hand, ready to record the sideshow pitchmen and barkers I'd heard there the year before. The sideshow had a great fire-eating midget, but the pitchman mumbled a spiritless 30 second spiel, and then actually turned on a tape loop of another carnival barker. I had clearly waited a little too long to get recordings of a bonafide American pitchman.

Fortunately, the WFMU cassette library has a tape called American Talkers: The Art of the Pitchman, and I've posted all 18 tracks from it. This tape came out in the early Nineties, and even that was too late - half of these tracks are of career sideshow "talkers" who recreated their classic pitches (aka "ballys") as part of a festival at The Smithsonian Institution's American Talker's Project in 1980. But a few date from earlier than that, and all of the pitches from the early 80's are authentic, from the some of the greatest living pitchmen of the pre-war era like, Ward Hall and Fred Bloodgood.

The Shemp Meditation Tape

Back in the late 1980's as the New Age movement peaked, WFMU agonized over the fact that the station had absolutely nothing to offer the Windham Hill crowd, which was fleeing the station's membership rolls in droves. The solution was to place Dave the Spazz under house arrest until an appropriate audio solution could be assembled. The result was the Shemp Meditation Tape, which Dave described this way:

Recommended for new age nitwits and chucklefucks alike....scientifically mixed in Shemp-A-Rama for your enlightened casaba-banging pleasure.... Soar the Horwitz heavens and become one with Shemp's karma on the Heee Beee Beee Beee side... transhempify your mind and cook your chakras on the life-infirming Ahh Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha side.

The Shemp Meditation Tape went on to become the top selling item in WFMU's well intentioned but fatally flawed Catalog of Curiosities, which was in business from 1993-1997.

Heee Beee Beee Beee side (MP3)
Ahh Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha side (MP3)

(Produced under armed guard for WFMU by Mahavishnu Dave Thespazzyrama in the palatial Spazzintologist Compound.)

Bathtime in Clerkenwell MP3 and Video

Everytime I play the song Bathtime in Clerkenwell (MP3) on the air, I get calls and e-mails about it. It's by the band (The Real) Tuesday Weld, from the soundtrack to the book I, Lucifer by Glen Duncan. I haven't read the book, but the soundtrack is great. As is this cool black and white animated video of the song (wmv video file), by Alex Budovsky, which apparently won the best animated short award at Sundance last year.

What's On My Micro, Part 2

I'm back on the bus to NYC.  Off for a while, then on again.  Such is the life of a perpetually dissatisfied freelance worker.  The need arose, then, to refresh and revise the playlist on my Micro, resulting in the new inclusions below, though all but one of the artists are not terribly new (I must be at risk of High Luddite status; so few new artists impress me anymore.  With a few notable exceptions, new bands seem to often be just an amalgamation of older, better influences, unworthy of the sum of their parts.)

I also want to retract the statement made in my previous post about certain artists not qualifying as "music for being on the move."  Sooner or later, the complexity of moods triggered by commuting, and the city environment, will require a little Stockhausen or MB.

Apollo - Apollo (1970) - A gutsy Finnish rock act who were very much of their time, formed by members of the popular 60s group Topmost.  The album is evenly split between Beefheart-style screwy blues guitar numbers, and Aphrodite's Child-esque string-soaked prog ballads.  [mp3]  [mp3]

Association P.C. - Erna Morena (Live) (1973) - Pan-European improvisational rock band, with similarities to early Soft Machine.  Noodly psychedelic extrapolations, with some very rewarding emergent themes for the patient listener.  I wish more of their catalog were readily available.  A detailed information page about the band can be found here.  [mp3]

Bladder Flask - One Day I Was So Sad That the Corners of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling (1981) - Two sides of mind-warping sound collage created by the Rupenus brothers, aka The New Blockaders (see below).  The Rupenuses were also the masterminds behind the Mixed Band Philanthropist project and LP from 1986.  [mp3]

Haikara - Another great discovery in early 70s Finnish rock, Haikara were more progressive and complex than Apollo (above), with inventive song structures that sometimes incorporated Scandinavian folk themes.  Essential for fans of Arbete och Fritid and Panta Rei.  [mp3]
 

Aquarius Records: An appreciation

Lunches at WFMU are always a fun occasion. The last time I was at the station at lunchtime, one of the things that came up was the enormous glut of music that mp3 blogs and file sharing has made available to us and the resulting consequence of "music overload".  Nick Southall wrote a great piece on Stylus a few weeks ago that captured this feeling very nicely.

Amid all the chaos, however, you sometimes are fortunate enough to find like minded people out there who do your dirty work for you and help curate the countless new releases and re-issues that come out every month. Enter Aquarius Records who were guests on Brian Turner's show yesterday afternoon.

Robert Ashley's "Music With Roots in the Aether"

Robert Ashley's Music With Roots in the Aether (1975)

14 hours of video (.avi & realvideo) and audio (MP3) of Robert Ashley interviewing composers David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros and Terry Riley. The pieces are broken down into one-hour interviews and one-hour live performances, all from 1975. Check out the Robert Ashley files: they're chilling. Very rarely seen since its filming.

They Did The Mash, They Did The Climate Mash

Admit it, you thought Bobby "Boris" Pickett was dead, didn't you? Just in time for Halloween, the only recording artist to place the SAME song on the Billboard Top 100 THREE times (#1 in 1962, #91 in 1970 and #10 in 1972) is back with a global-warming parody of his own Monster Mash: Climate Mash.

Bern Porter: The Last Acts of St. Fuck You

The Last Acts of St. Fuck You (MP3)

A 9-minute vitriolic spew of enormous demonic proportions by the outsider visionary Bern Porter. If ya love it that much, you can download the entire text here. And if yr still interested, here's a gang of his found poems.

The Secret of Lil' Markie Revealed

Video: Quicktime file of Large Happy Man holding Lil' Markie captive inside his body.
MP3s: 17 Lil' Markie tracks below the jump.

Listeners to Kenny G's show or Irwin's old show Incorrect Music may recall the pleadings of a certain helium induced duck-child named Lil' Markie, as he begged his mother not to abort him (Diary of An Unborn Child MP3), or his drunken Daddy not to feel so bad about killing him (Story of An Alcoholic Father MP3). As bizarre Christian Kiddy records go, the Lil' Markie material stands alone.

But something never felt right to me about Lil' Markie. For one thing, he looked human, but he sounded suspiciously like a puppet. But there were no strings to be found. From the sound of it, Markie carried himself like a well respected leader of the  Christian Puppet community, but unlike Lil' Joey, Lil' Harry or Lil' Jackie, not only were there no strings, there were no hands up the back, no hinged dummy-jaws. Nothing to suggest puppetry. It didn't make sense. To my mind, the helium duck-child voice was not of human origin.

Now at last, the mystery is solved. The other day on the Bomarr blog, this video surfaced (Quicktime file). In it, you will see video footage of a Large, Happy Man singing the praises of Jesus. But that's not the strange thing. About halfway through the video, the voice of Lil' Markie emerges from The Large Happy Man.

This is visual proof that The Large, Happy Man swallowed Lil' Markie whole and is now exploiting him on tours of churches around the United States!! When Lil' Markie sang Use Me (MP3), he didn't mean this! The actual identity of the Large Happy Man has not been verified, but he claims to be one Mark Fox.

Ignore Mark Fox's preposterous claims and jump below the fold for Otis Fodder's MP3 collection of Lil' Markie tracks, plus other Lil' Markie links. Thanks to Otis, Bomarr, and Pea Hicks.

Have You Heard About The Lonesome Losers?

This post concerns the most utterly mediocre music ever made, and the earth-shatteringly banal (and interchangeable) "bands" that made it - and yet I'm doing you a favor.  Because I know you can't tell them apart, and it's been bugging you, as it's been bugging me, to match the SMOOTH HIGH-HARMONIED 1974-80 AM RADIO HIT to the ANONYMOUS WHITE, LIKELY MUSTACHIOED GUYS WITH THE LONG-FORGOTTEN NAME who made it.

Can you honestly tell the difference between Ambrosia and Pablo Cruise?  Ace and Pilot?  Have the words "whutchoo gonna do when she says goodbye? whutchoo gonna do when she is gone?" been permanently etched onto your ear, yet without the courtesy of an author to claim resposibility?  I'm here for YOU.  This is a PUBLIC SERVICE.  Honestly, I'm sure this'll do you some good.  (And I actually really like 2 of these songs!  .... OK, one and a half.)

Clickable mp3 song snippets on the left, bands on the right -- some bands have multiple entries, just so you can be shocked by how many fucking hits they had.  (And one giant yellow clue.)

Baby Come Back  ||  Biggest Partof Me  ||  Dance With Me  ||  Diamond Girl  ||  Get Closer  ||  How Long  ||  How Much I Feel || I Just Wanna Stop ||  Just Remember I Love You  ||  Kiss You All Over  || Lady  ||  Lonesome Loser  ||  Let Me Love You Tonight  ||  Love Will Find A Way ||  Magic  ||  Reminiscing  ||  Sad Eyes  ||  Sharing the Night Together  ||  Sky High  ||  Still The One  ||  Whatcha Gonna Do  ||  When You're In Love With A Beautiful Woman  ||  You Are The Woman  ||  I'd Really Love To See You Tonight.  (ALL mp3 SAMPLES)

Ace  ||  Ambrosia  ||  Dr. Hook  ||  England Dan & John Ford Coley  ||  Exile  ||  Firefall  ||  Gino Vanelli  ||  Jigsaw  ||  Little River Band  ||  Orleans  ||  Pablo Cruise  ||  Pilot  ||  Player  ||  Pure Prairie League  ||  Robert John  ||  Seals & Crofts

Jump the flip, solve the crime.

L.A. "Sunshine" Jefferson

This past weekend I was digging through the dusty record collection at Chicago's freeform radio station WZRD. Rotten Milk, a longtime WZRD DJ, foisted an odd cassette from the collection into my hands: L.A. "SUNSHINE" JEFFERSON - LIVE LONG, BE STRONG (DON'T DO DRUGS). I began to salivate as I scrutinized the bizarre cover of a headless torso with no hands rendered in an infantile scrawl.

The cassette contains one song, "LIVE LONG, BE STRONG (DON'T DO DRUGS)", a pretty catchy funk jam accompanied by a Casio, a pretty lady, and a bit of old-school rapping.

Google search on L.A. "SUNSHINE" Jefferson turns up nothing. The zip code on the cassette reveals it is from South Side Chicago.

L.A. "SUNSHINE" JEFFERSON - LIVE LONG, BE STRONG (DON'T DO DRUGS) (mp3)

I'm A Genius, Too! The Murry Wilson Tapes

MP3s: The Beach Boys Help Me Ronda Sessions - Full Version | Edited version
Flash Animations: Peter Bagge's Murry Wilson: Rock and Roll Dad - 1 | 2 | 3 | 4

January 8, 1965: The Beach Boys enter the studio to record what will become their second number one hit, Help Me Rhonda. Well into the session, a drunken Murry Wilson (Brian, Carl and Dennis' Dad) arrives and proceeds to commandeer the session with psychodrama, scat singing and weepy, abusive melodrama.

The session tape captured it all, and versions of these tapes have been floating around bootlegs for years. The fact that the tapes survived is itself surprising - you can hear Brian and Murry fighting over the tape recorder controls at the 35:30 mark of the full version, Murry wanting to stop the recording, with Brian ultimately keeping the tape rolling. And it's a good thing that Brian won out, because this audio verifies many of the Murry Wilson horror stories described in the Steven Gaines book, Heroes and Villains: The True Story of The Beach Boys.

Here's the full 40 minute version of the Help Me Ronda sessions for you completionists: (MP3), and here's a twelve minute edit I did for other attention-challenged people such as myself: (MP3). Recently, Listener Jeff alerted me to Peter Bagge's four-part animated Murry Wilson flash series, which Icebox put out in 2001. Here are all four installments as Shockwave 3.0 files: Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four

Listening back to the full Help Me Ronda sessions again, I'm struck by how sane Brian sounds when compared to Murry, and how mature and patient he is for a 22 old standing up to his abusive, alcoholic father. After listening in on this session, It's easy to see why the Beach Boys eventually purchased Murry a fake audio console for their sessions, so he could twiddle knobs to his heart's delight without destroying anything.

Our Millionth Hit!

Sometime in the last few hours, Beware of the Blog had it's one millionth hit!

If you were the millionth person to check us out, step forward and collect your free toaster. We're working on an honor system here people, so no false claims please. The toaster emits sparks while toasting, but other than that, it works really well.

Seriously, thanks to all of our authors, readers and commenters for helping us reach this milestone.

Here are MP3s of ten "million" songs as a way of showing our gratitude:

William S Burroughs - Millions of Images
The Homosexuals - A Million Keys
The Runaways - I'm A Million
The Raincoats - You're A Million
Public Enemy - One Million Bottlebags
Claude King - A Million Mistakes
Bel Larks - A Million And One Dreams
Jawbreaker - Million
National Lampoon - Land A Million
XTC - Millions

Adventures in the NWW List, Part 4

As we continue to approach the outer fringes of the Nurse With Wound List, information on releases becomes either scarce, or steeped in speculation and hearsay.  Since I know that I am, to a degree, facing an audience of fellow experts and enthusiasts, any further illumination (or correction) on these artists and their releases is always welcome.  I have acquired several of these titles as CD-Rs or as downloads, so in a few cases I don't even have the original LP sleeve in front of me to scour for what little information may have been available there.

For background information on the list, many other artists and links, please see this index of my previous posts.

Horrific Child - L'étrange Monsieur Whinster - The Horrific Child album is, to me at least, the jewel embedded in the forehead of the golden idol that is the NWW List.  Part rock album, part experimental album, part imaginary horror soundtrack, L'étrange Monsieur Whinster is a psychedelic pop audio show, flowing naturally from one surprising sequence to the next.  Horrific Child was the creation of one Jean-Pierre Massiera, also the composer behind the Les Maledictus Sound project from 1968.  Les Maledictus Sound were an inventive, high-brow concoction of Easy Tempo-style instrumental mod big band music, with heavy brass, plucky bass and fuzzbeat guitar.  Horrific Child is certainly the logical stylistic next step from that record, evidence of the composer's having survived several years beyond the psychedelic era.  A section from side 2 of L'étrange Monsieur Whinster was released in 1999 as a bonus track on the CD reissue of the Les Maledictus Sound album.  Originally released on the Eurodisc label in 1976. [L'étrange Monsieur Whinster - side 1 excerpt mp3]

Roberto Colombo - Sfogatevi Bestie (Ultima Spiaggia 1976) - Milanese composer, arranger and producer who worked with some of the giants of Italian rock and pop, like PFM and Patty Pravo.  Colombo recorded two solo albums in the latter 70s of this intense, tightly arranged Zappa-flavored progressive jazz rock. Here is a short biography in Italiano.  [Caccia Alla Volpe mp3]

David Cunningham - Grey Scale (1976) - Irish-born composer and producer David Cunningham is perhaps most well known for being in The Flying Lizards, and for their string of new wave hit singles ("Money," etc).  Cunningham is also a popular music producer in the UK, working with artists like This Heat and producing Peter Greenaway film scores with Michael Nyman.  He's also worked on countless projects with his long-time collaborators David Toop and Steve Beresford.  Grey Scale was Cunningham's first solo LP (released on Piano in 1977, predating the Flying Lizards by a few years), and remains a coveted collector's item.  It's an album of homespun minimalist themes for small ensembles, and quite cleverly conceived (make sure to read the sleeve notes at the following link.) Detailed information on the album can be found here. [Error System BAGFGAB mp3] [Error System C pulse solo recording mp3]

Bunnybrains, singing about WFMU listeners

When I was a tyke, I got a birthday present of a book about myself. That is, for $12.99, some publishing company writes a kids' book that inserts you as a character (in this case I was led by a talking giraffe whose name was mine backwards into a world dominated by giraffes), citing your family and friends as other characters, obviously culled from a data printout your own parents provided. Well, for the 2004 marathon, listeners who pledged a certain amount to my show (and wanted the prize) got the distinct honor of being the subject of a Bunnybrains song, mailed out to them on a CD compilation of all the winners' songs. The Bunnybrains have provided such amazing memories for me since the early 90's: seeing them all burst into tears during a set at Under Acme while my friends consoled them and took up instruments, holding Dan Bunny's baby at a WFMU benefit at the Westbeth Theater while the band played an hour longer than the theater's personnel were being paid to be around for (performing in front of a screen showing dog porn films nonetheless,  the Westbeth owners were thrilled about that needless to say), Dan breaking my borrowed guitar when my band played with them at the Cooler while their smoke machine belched so much smoke upstairs and out the door to 14th street that the NYFD came, and stayed to watch the set. But maybe the greatest moment was them opening for Hawkwind (!) at Coney Island High. The tiny place already had half the floor taken up by Hawkwind's tons of laser show/light gear, and was also overstuffed with psychedelic hermits just coming out of their homes for the first time since 1977. Many of them dosed, not a good idea during the Bunnybrains' set, lots of people were abusing the 'brains verbally for their ensuing "bad trips" and I saw at least 4 of 'em drop to the floor. Whoa. Anyway, I hope these songs warmed the winners' hearts, I especially love "Art Carlson" myself. (Not safe for work).

"Jeff Kling" (MP3)
"Martin Nieusteadt" (MP3)
"Chris Montoya" (MP3)
"Art Carlson" (MP3)
"Frank Scanlon" (MP3)
"David Slotnick" (MP3)

MP3 Download Dinner Bell For October

Los Punkrockers "Holiday In the Sun" / "Pretty Vacant" (MP3s)
If you recall the glory days of K-Tel hit compilations, there were always wanna-be K-Tel's out there (I want to say Ronco for one off the top of my head) that would also cram like 50 modern-day hits into the grooves of some cheaply-cut vinyl platter as thin as a potato chip. But since half of these fly-by-nights couldn't license the actual songs, you'd get some generic in-house band doing versions of them! I remember I had one with some definite Long Island accents buried within the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night." And of course such was the value of the commercials' catch-phrase "hits by the original artists". Well, someone in Spain seemed to think it was a good idea to have an entirely different band do the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks album in its entirety and slap some cheezy model in faux-punk garb on the cover. But I honestly have to say that this version of the record (titled Los Exitos De Sex Pistols) might be even better than anything the Pistols or McLaren could have produced! Thanks to Strange Reaction for posting.

Barbara Bush "Reflections" (Dirty Duck remix) (MP3)
Dirty Duck has been absent from the FMU Blue page as of late, and has been reported to have been hanging out at Teanie with Moby. This MP3 makes it obvious as to why; he has been soaking in production skills from the Mobe, and has become somewhat of a remix auteur. So, bravo, and the DFA may contact him via this radio station for that Janet Jackson project if they need him.

Kookie Cook "Workin' Man" (MP3)
A while back Station Manager Ken waxed poetic about the insane Dean Carter disc out last year; a compilation of 1960's psychobilly I picked up for the station on the recommend of Major Stars/Twisted Village impresario Wayne Rogers (a man who knows a thing or two about overloaded distortion used tactfully himself). Carter's sound was what might have happened if Elvis hooked up with Chrome stepping off a time-travel machine, totally zonked and unlike anything else in the genre (with possible comparisons to the Michael Yonkers 60's stuff). Thanks to Alec Palao, the roots of Dean have been dug into a bit more on another Big Beat UK reissue called the Midnite Sound of the Milky Way, which compiles more crude and overdriven sounds from the same midwest studio Carter did his dirty work in. In fact, Carter is credited with writing lots of this material under his real name Arlie Neaville with partner Arlie Miller (the two also co-owned the studio). The acts that came through dabbled in both rocking roots and Brit Invasion sounds, but the limited technology the Arlies were able to offer (refrigerator cardboard boxes nailed to walls for soundproof, souped-up two track recording machines) made for some primitive, crusty sounds. The Cobras were kids around 12 years old almost eclipsed in view by their guitars, and Kookie Cook was almost as wild as Carter in many ways cutting solo sides as well as with his band the Satalites (sic).

"King Diamond and Anton Lavey, They Were Tight Bros From Way Back" (excerpt, MP3)
The band Tight Bros from Way Back apparently got their name from this legendary tape floating around of two buddies on the phone together, one of which goes on for 10 minutes about his need to beat up a guy who owes him $20, but then gets deeply into his favorite topic, R.O.C.K. After animatedly explaining the degrees of evil of various metal acts (it's decided that Deicide are pure evil, but King Diamond and Anton Lavey were, as we mentioned "tight bros"), he then amazingly sums up the greatest guitar moments ever, and clearly they are ranked meticulously as you will hear by the MP3 excerpt above. Tom Scharpling provided me a dub of the tape, which I edited out the obscenity from to play part of on the air, and lo and behold and email drops in my inbox from a guy named Sean, the one who recorded his pal's rants, happily having heard it blare out of an office co-worker's WFMU stream. Sean assured us that this thing will get released someday, but for now, put your guitar down, shake your head, bow, and walk off the stage in the presence of this greatness.

The Dirtbombs "Sun Is Shining (live on WFMU)" (MP3)
The sockodelic sounds of Mick Collins and company have landed on Terre T's Cherry Blossom Clinic twice, once in 2003 and again in 2004. Detroit's finest purveyors of pure garage-punk soul have just released a long-awaited compilation of singles called If You Don't Have a Look (In the Red Records), and they cover ESG for crying out loud. In more exciting news, there's going to be a three-way love fest CD co-released by Birdman, In the Red, and WFMU in the near future to benefit musicians displaced by Hurricane Katrina; it's a disc comprised of all the bands on those labels' rosters who have done airtime in the mighty Moose Room here, including the Cuts, Brother JT, the Hospitals, and many more. Stay tuned for more details soon.

Roberto De Simone "Secondo Coro Delle Lavandaie" (MP3)
La Gatta Cenerentola was a radical reinterpretation of the Cinderella tale, done in Neopolitan dialect in 1976 by De Simone, who, since the 1960's, organized groups like Italy's NCCP to reinterpret and reinvent enduring folk tales from his country's (and Europe's) culture and history. What De Simone uncovered in his deep anthropological studies was a Neopolitan equivalent to the Wicker Man of sorts; a pagan culture unaffected by the vast reaches of Catholicism that would consume Italy later; a matriarch-based shepherd/farming community with complex ritual-based relationships with pure and unqiue musical communication, brought to life in this stage performance excerpted here. By far "Secondo Coro Delle Lavandaie" made for one of the wildest moments of the mini-opera, almost taking on the skeleton of some downtown NYC No-Wave, or comparable to the Slits or Kleenex in some ways This track was also featured on a premium a few years ago courtesy Fabio's Strength Through Failure
and recently a kind listener donated a copy of the entire album to the station's library.

Velvet Underground "I Can't Stand It" (from Rarities 66-93) (MP3)
Once when Lou Reed was on MTV in the 80's doing one of his patent freakout guitar solos (on a live version of "The Original Rapper" or something at Farm Aid), he got a snotty comment afterwards behind his back from vee-jay Dweezil Zappa, who demanded that someone must atone for the "worst guitar solo ever performed on MTV." No surprise, considering that Poppa Frank did some stinkbomb-lobbying himself when the Velvets hit the west coast in the late '60s on Mothers of Invention bills, but needless to say the glory of those kinds of solos is well encapsulated in this featured MP3, And Dweez will surely be aping that approach himself someday at the Viper Room, mark our words. Anyway, it's from the best Velvets boot by far I think called The Psychopath's Rolling Stones; besides featuring a haunting version of "Chelsea Girl" recorded with Lou on electric guitar and Nico on vox in her Chelsea hotel room, and a version of the "Star Spangled Banner"(!), it features some insanely great Lou guitar rampages at the height of the band's live power. "Run Run Run" goes beserk for ten minutes in a pure orgiastic feedback frenzy, and this live version of the great album outtake "I Can't Stand It" (which was eventually released in studio form on the legit odds-n-sods collection VU in the 80's) has one of the best Reed-invoking-Ornette on electric guitar moments in any of the band's live archives.

Johnny Boy "You Are the Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve" (MP3)
Johnny Boy is actually the UK duo of Davo (guitars, loops, vocal) and Lolly (ditto) and this single succeeds everywhere that the Raveonettes, unfortunately, do not. From the reverb soaked Shangri-Las/Spector drum intro it's a pure bubblegum wedding of Northern Soul, Jesus and Mary Chain scumsurfing and pure pop bliss. Their full length is due later this year, and bands like them and the Long Blondes might be reason enough to start picking up the NME again. You gotta love that song title though; and check the very cool video on the site as well.

Radio Pyongyang "Start 'Em Young" (MP3)
The latest batch of Sublime Frequencies' globetrotting audio documentations features not one but two releases from the Axis of Evil (as our President would have you believe). Radio Pyongyang: Commie Funk and Agit Pop From the Hermit Kingdom rawly captures, as they say, "a healthy dose of hagiography for Dear Leader Kim Jong-il", and also bills itself as the "Now Sound of North Korea". As with many SF releases, you're not getting a Nonesuch/Smithsonian Folkways-like exploration into the roots of music and culture framed in a National Geographic-like manner, but rather a snapshot in a dreamlike way of everyday sounds you would hear as someone passing through, the veil of mystery and wonder preserved. This particular volume is basically culled from a cassette recording Christiaan Virant made of intercepted broadcasts, samples of CDs he found along the way, demonstration field sounds, news reports between 1995 and 1998. This particular track brings up some images of kids dressed in revolutionary garb, singing under a 6-story tall Kim Jong-il, the accompanying music state-sanctioned and sterile.

Oxbow "Girl" (live on WFMU) (MP3)
Recording the Bay Area group Oxbow "unplugged" so to speak isn't as easy as one would think; under normal circumstances (i.e. electric), the band teeters in the mix with a delicate blend of tension, eerie ambient drones, explosions of math-rock mayhem, and stumbling-down-the-stairs blues, all dragged along by the rather unconventional vocal approach of frontman Eugene Robinson. Eugene, a bona-fide competitive bodybuilder, takes harrowing subject matter and creates high theater (in live situations especially) quite often physically dragging the audience into one psychodrama or another; you'd expect something like this from say, Darby Crash, but could Darby pull off an effective Nina Simone cover or duet with Marianne Faithfull? When Eugene and Oxbow guitarist Niko Wenner played an acoustic set on Brian's show back in November 2004, the dynamic of host-behind-the-glass-watching-performer took on a very new kind of vibe; engineer Gil Shuster needed to accomodate Eugene's most whispered moents and chaotic, slobbering outbursts into account in the mix, he could be in your ear quiet one second and pinning the meters running around the room the next. But it worked, and the particular mix in this session is one of the more fascinating excercises in live music recording here in recent memory. Hear for example, the Beatles' la-la ode "Girl" turned into what sounds like a person caged in confined quarters about to knock a hole in the wall, while Niko balanced the song's delicacy with downright disturbing tension you could cut with a knife.

DJ Comp of the Month: Mac's Big Seven Inch Collection

MP3s: 29 of them below the jump.

This month's MP3 compilation comes from our own Mac, host of the Antique Phonograph Music Program, who compiled a batch of sales-oriented seven inches for the WFMU record library. This collection was never offered during our marathons, Mac put it together specifically for the WFMU record library. So sing along with the Telephone Pioneers of America, shed a tear with Art Linkletter, and lasso some tefillin with Harold Stern, the Jewish Cowboy. If you like these, be sure to also check out Mac's Museum of Carboard and Oddity Records, one of the hidden gems of our vast website.

Tres Femmes Fâchées

My current musical obsession focuses on 3 artists: Colette Magny, Catherine Ribeiro, and Theatre du Chene Noir.  Many's the unifying string running thru all three: French women doing their defining work in the late 1960's & early 70's; operating well outside any cultural drift; all three appearing on the famed Nurse With Wound list (which Wm Berger has been so heroically documenting on these pages - rise Wm, rise!!).  There's a fierce political character to all 3 as well, often subtle or implied, tho in the case of Mme Magny, sublimely overt. 

But the thing that most strikes me about all 3 is a delivery that seems informed primarily by fatal despair and a supremely confident anger.  I think it's this quality that has me so gaga over these artists, and it's this quality that I'll present to you in audio linkery.  On this page, there's some brief biographical info on each, and over the fold I'll offer the audio links, selected discogs, and more links.

Colette Magny came first, (and has sadly died first) and was a massive influence on much French music to come.  Beginning her career as a blues and folk singer, she became radicalized by the U.S. Civil Rights movement, the Nueva Canción  musicians in South America, as well as the worldwide student revolt of that bygone era - you know the one.  Her most astounding material is unapologetically violent, shocking, yet quite effective agit-prop accompanied by a heavy, romping jazzy rumpus.

Catherine Ribeiro (link is to her official website) began her career as a Ye Ye Girl and actress (appearing in 1963 in Godart's "Les Carabiniers") before meeting the composer Patrice Moullet, whom she married, and with whom she formed the bands 2-Bis and Alpes.  Heavily influenced by Magny's vocal style, musically Ribeiro's most exciting incantations leap off from some of the most intense, repetitive and thrilling rural space-rock you'll find this side of Amon Düül, or even early Gong - several of whose members found their way to Alpes. Catherine's still busy performing in France, and she's apparently quite popular in Belgium.

I don't know who this woman to the right is, but she may possibly be the mysterious and haunting voice of Theatre du Chene Noir, a performance troupe from Avignon led by a guy named Gerard Gelas. There's sadly little I can find out about them, but it does seem that their recordings are actually documents of live stage plays.  Check out this pic from one of them, "Miss Madonna". Musically presenting a diversity of styles, the anonymous vocal delivery is at once sexy and defiant, cooing and unapproachable.  Her voice seems to be the one that appears on albums from 1971 and 1975. In any case, Gerard is still active.

Jump the fold and listen...

The Horror Compilation (MP3)

As a special Halloween treat, here's a seventy minute long horror music mix I put together for the 2001 WFMU marathon, culled from years of Halloween specials on my Wednesday morning show. When the big day comes, throw a speaker out on the front porch, hook it up to your MP3 player and set it on repeat, this'll keep those satanic dilletantes at bay. Careful though, it's a ginormous download, clocking in at a whopping 97 megs. Download The Horror.

Artists on the mix include: Krzysztof Komeda, Wojciech Kilar, Krzysztof Penderecki, Jaap Blonk, Albanian Men's Choir, John Cale, Dick Jacobs Orchestra, Jerry Goldsmith, Theatre of Tragedy, Barnabas Collins, Endvra, Elend, Coven, Daniel Licht and others. For more info, go here.

Jean Shepherd Archives

Radio legend Jean Shepherd needs no introduction (but that link should work fine). Instead proceed directly to the Shep Archives for a 1550 track library containing nearly 1000 hours of Shep MP3 goodness. We're talking over 1000 recordings from the WOR days alone. I think you'll find it's an enjoyable as well as an unconquerable companion to WFMU's Aircheck.

Ponderosa Stomp 2006

The Ponderosa Stomp moves from New Orleans to Memphis on May 2 and 3 2006.   Artists tentatively scheduled to appear include Dale Hawkins, Billy Lee Riley, Sonny Burgess, ? & the Mysterians, Billy Boy Arnold, Lady Bo, Scotty Moore, D.J. Fontana and many more to follow.  The money raised will be split between the New Orleans Musicians Clinic and a special fund to be administered by the Mystic Knights of the Mau-Mau — producers of the Stomp — to directly help New Orleans and Gulf Coast musicians. Due to the economic damage of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the Mystic Knight of the Mau Mau want to try to help musicians rendered homeless and jobless by these disasters.  The Stomp originated in 2002 with phenomenal performances by Lazy Lester, Barbara Lynn, Dave Bartholomew Orchestra, Lil' Bob and the Lollipops just to name a few.  Each year has been bigger and better with 2006 promising to be a mind explosion.  Watch the website for ticket updates and in the meantime, dig these tunes recorded live by Dave The Spazz.
Barbara Lynn 2002
Phil Phillips  2003
Brenton Wood 2005

Avant Retard

People Like Us, WFMU's sound collagier and host of the avant-audio montage program, Do or DIY,  is taking a breather during our new schedule (which runs through June 12, 2006) to make time for extracurriculars.

As a consolation to her many fans, PLU is offering up a special hour-long Do or DIY super-mix MP3 download (80 MB), complete with cover art and track listing.

If that doesn't satisfy your cravings, check out WFMU's vast library of archives for Do or DIY.

Shit From an Old Glove Compartment

My Mom rarely throws anything away.  I wouldn't say that she's a hoarder of tragic proportions, not like some you may have read about, but her home is unquestionably a museum of old magazines, old clothes, useless furniture, dried-out magic markers and cat knick-knacks.  "No Surface Left Uncovered," I like to say.  Every once in a while, her hoarding leads to unexpected discoveries, like a plastic baggie full of paper items retrieved from the glove box of the Dodge I drove throughout the early 90s.  As I sorted through them, these papers recalled a tattered reality of past lives, past loves, old friends and past decadence.

I used to have an assortment of little cards like this one, which typically carried a handwritten signature on the back (otherwise it was fairly useless.)  That signature (theoretically) endowed the presenter with the ability to purchase certain "specialized groceries" at said location(s), which would not have been available to the walk-in patron.

"Song For Uncle Wiggly to Sing" - Lyrics that were never musically realized, penned for us by friend and genius painter/performer TJK Haywood aka Wooden Thomas.  His work also adorns the cover of the second Uncle Wiggly LP, Across The Room and Into Your Lap.  Here's a link to Wooden Thomas' web site, and a free mp3 from his milestone album, Age of Aquarium.

Envelope and postcard from Thailand.  Sent by Sari Rubinstein, now The Queen of Rubulad.  Inside the envelope were a personal letter to me, and this glorious postcard of the Wat Chayamangkalaram Buddhist temple in Penang.  The postcard lacked a street address, but was written and addressed in name to my friends Mark Ashwill and Julie Spodek.  I guess I was supposed to hand deliver it.  Note my proto-hip Bedford Ave. address.  Some goateed beatnik no doubt lives there now and pays 4X the rent my roommate and I paid in 1992.

Van Morrison's Contractual Obligation Album

MP3s: 31 improvised songs from Van Morrison's Bang Records Contractual Obligation Session, below the jump.

In the great pantheon of contractual obligation records, there is the noisy (Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music), the brassy (Neil Young's This Note's For You) and the phony (Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Record).

And then there is Van Morrison's Bang Records Sessions.

In order to fulfill his obligation to his early solo label Bang Records,Van Morrison sat down in 1967 or so and cranked out 31 songs on the spot, on topics ranging from ringworm to wanting a danish, to hating his record label and a guy named George. Make sure you get past the first few tunes - it takes him a few to get cooking.

Listener Scott S, who originally brought the tapes to our attention in 2001, wrote:

As far as I know, none of this stuff was ever issued in the '60's. I can only surmise at some point in the early '90's, whoever controlled Van's Bang masters ran across the tapes and - either having questionable ethics and/or a twisted sense of humor - licensed the tapes to European labels that were releasing compilations of Van's Bang-era material. I know of at least two double-CD sets that include demo stuff as the second disc - one is Payin' Dues on Charly in 1994, and the other is New York Sessions '67. WIll Rigby told me that he saw a single-disc best-of that actually mixes legit Bang-era Morrison tracks with material from the demos - now that must be an interesting listen. I guess there's irony in the fact that Morrison recorded these tunes as a big fuck-you to his label - before he signed to Warner and recorded Astral Weeks - yet ultimately the joke's on him, now that they're being packaged as legitimate tracks (on "best-of" collections, no less).

Hey - Lerner - Lasst Uns Doch In Ruh'

That's right kids, more german madness.  As if Rapper's Deutsch wasn't enough retarded kraut for ya, here's Another Brick in the Wall, aka Stein um Stein.  This shit is totally evil, especially when the kid's chorus comes in.  A fitting song for the current state of the world.  Enjoy!  I'll see you in hell...

Derek Bailey Interview

Derek Bailey Interviewed by Henry Kaiser, KPFA February 7, 1987 (MP3)

21 Variations on "They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-haa!"

My earliest memories of playing with records were sticking my head up to my parent's phonograph cabinet and listening over and over again to the end of the Strawberry Fields Forever single for the faint "I Buried Paul," and similarly burning out the grooves on the backwards B-side of Napolean XIV's They're Coming To Take Me Away.

Paul is still dead, but imagine my joy 39 years later when we received Napolean Complex, a collection of 21 international versions of Napolean XIV's 1966 hit single. Being a sucker for German, my favorite is Malepartus II's version, but it's hard to resist Rose Brooks when she sings "You Thought I'd Go Buhzoik?" And then there's Lard's impressive extended version. Download and enjoy them all.

Napoleon XIV - They're Coming To Take Me Away, Ha-haaa!

Josephine XV - I'm Happy They Took You Away, Ha-haaa!

Henry The IX - Don't Take Me Back Oh-nooo!

All for the Cause

In the wake of disaster, who reacts with a speed, power, and fury that no government or charitable organization could ever equal? Who’s PR posse punches the clutch and shifts into 5th before even the President’s people can dig up a bewildered child, an eyedropper, and a photographer? Sure, we may sigh with sympathy upon reading devastating headlines and send money to a charitable organization, but only the proper spokesperson can move us... to collectively... burst into song.

I was floored upon reading that Prince hastily recorded not one, but TWO songs for Katrina relief just 5 days after the storm hit New Orleans (less time than it took Sean Penn to get down there with his leaky boat). Meanwhile, Jacko is still collecting a high-profile cast for his Katrina charity single. It sure ain’t 1985 anymore, but in the coming weeks pop music’s A-listers will prove whether a modern-day charity celeb coagulation a-la-USA For Africa is still possible.

Below is a truncated history of charity song superhits (a more extensive list is here):

India-Pakistan War Refugees
- “Bangla Desh” by George Harrison, The Concert for Bangladesh, 1971

Ethiopian Famine Relief
- “Do They Know It’s Christmas” (real audio, click to hear the song played backwards from an archive of Mark Allen's show) written by Bob Geldof for Band Aid, Ethiopian famine relief, 1984 (Band Aid II took place in 1989, Band Aid 20 in 2004)
- “We Are the World” (click to download a teensy snippet in MP3, courtesy of Brian Turner) USA For Africa, famine relief, 1985
- “Tears Are Not Enough” Northern Lights (Canada), 1985
- “Stars” Hear ‘N’ Aid (heavy metal supergroup), 1985
- “Everybody Wants to Run the World” Tears for Fears, Sport Aid, 1986
- “Running All Over the World” Status Quo, Sport Aid, 1986

Apartheid
- “Sun City” (real audio, from an archive of Evan "Funk" Davies' show) Artists United Against Apartheid (incl. Steve Van Zandt, Bob Dylan), 1985

Disadvantaged Children
- “Perfect Day” (real audio, from an archive of Strength Through Failure with Fabio) by Lou Reed for Children in Need, 1997

AIDS
- “That’s What Friends Are For” Dionne (Warwick) and Friends, 1985
- “What’s Going On” Christina Aguilera, JLo, Britney, Bono, etc., 2001
- “The World Is Ours” Missy Eliot and Justin Timberlake, 2004

Bosnia
- “The Little Ones” Cat Stevens, 1998

Sept. 11
- “What More Can I Give” by Jacko, never released (producer made gay porn)
- “El Ultimo Adios” Christina Aguilera, Gloria Estefan, John Secada, et al., 2001
- “Freedom” Paul McCartney, Bon Jovi, etc., 2001

Poverty/Hunger (G8 Summit)
- “Every Bomb You Make” (adaptation of "Every Step You Take") by Sting, at Live 8 concert, 2005

Hurricane Katrina
- “SST” by Prince, 2005
- “Brand New Orleans” by Prince, 2005
- “From the Bottom of My Heart” MJ, 2005

Venture below the fold for a grip of (un)savory celebrity PSA MP3s and other tripe...

For our Tuvan friends, a little thing called Perspective.

Yes, sure, there's something like 2,000 years' worth of history informing the art of the throat singers of the Mongolian, Siberian, and, since 1921, Tuvan regions of Central Asia - fine, you're right. Now get back in the basement and stop harshing our groovy.  You see, thanks to Albert Kuvezin and the band Yat-Kha, this deep cultural tradition has been solidly plopped into post-modernity, and FUN!

OK, a teensy bit of background: Tuvan throat-singers, such as the longstanding WFMU faves Huun-Huur-Tu and Sainkho Namtchylak, have long fascinated Western ears with their ability to sing multiple (and audible) harmonic overtones at once.  Oftentimes, their khoomei resemble the drone produced by that cornerstone of your more advanced hippie jam-circle, the didgeridoo.  And very often, their tones feature a distinct bird-like whistle.  You want to know more?  The web's full of it, go see - we've got some recontextualizing to do.

Here at WFMU, it takes a more refined novelty song to get us horny.  Song parodies and funny voices tickle us not.  But did you say "what would Perez Prado sound like playing Nirvana songs?"??  Talk to me, brother!  And really, who can resist this utterly choice nugget:

"I'd really love to hear a Tuvan throat singer do Joy Division" ("Love Will Tear Us Apart", realaudio from Stefan's "The Belly of The Beast")

And there we are.  Say, while we're at it, maybe throw in some Zeppelin?  Hey, make it topical - "When the Levee Breaks".(Realaudio from Ken's show)  Now We Are Talking!  And here comes the aforementioned Albert and his Yat-Khas, and they've got us covered with their new album "Re-Covers" - a collection of... yessssss, fave rock hits done in the Tuvan style!!

You know the Inuits?  Those eskimo people up north that Ken likes so much?  They've got a tradition of throat-singing too.  Though mostly they're about gamesmanship, and you're not going to hear them riffing a mean "The Man Machine" (Realaudio from my show) anytime soon.  But they're throat-singing, so they're in the continuum.  And thanks to Albert Kuvezin and Yat-Kha, we can see that road more clearly, and may readily note some formerly unlikely precedents to this Throat Singing jive:

Clarence "Frogman" Henry "I Ain't Got No Home" (Realaudio from Dave the Spazz)

Bent Bolt & The Nuts "The Mechanical Man" (Realaudio from Greasy Kid Stuff)

Billy "Froggy" Laughlin, of the Little Rascals / Our Gang comedies

Popeye (wav link)

Or maybe you respect tradition and history - fine, look below the fold and receive rich musical rewards. 

Terry Riley MP3s

Two out of print, very rare Terry Riley LPs for your MP3 listening pleasure.

Vintage Beatnik Poetry MP3s from Cafe Bizarre

I really should have posted these the day that Maynard G Krebs passed away, but I was asleep at the bongoes that day. So here are a batch of spoken word tracks recorded at Greenwich Village's Cafe Bizarre, long before "Beat" became a parody of itself.

And while we're at it, have a look at a documentary on the Greenwich Village scene, narrated by Jean Shepherd. (via the Internet Archive)

The MP3s from Greenwich Village's Cafe Bizarre Presents Assorted Madness start after the jump:

A Romantika Hangjai

Introducing the wobbling warbling of wunderkind

Janika!

via szanalmas

Adventures in the NWW List, Part 3

For background information on the NWW List and related links, see my previous posts.

The Sperm - Shh! (1970) - The 60s counterculture hit Finland with explosive results.  Even prior to the late 60s, Finland was considered an important center for contemporary electronic music and avant-garde art and performance.  If you then consider psychedelic and progressive rock on into the 70s, the Finnish scene was so rich that once you start listening you'll never run out of new discoveries; certainly, a wealth of curious releases remain unissued on CD. Several key titles have been made available on CD by Love Records.  For a detailed account of what went on, and the artists that propagated the mayhem, see the Finnscene site.  Also look for the indispensable compilation CD Arktinen Hysteria - Suomi-Avantgarden Esipuutarhureita (Love Recs), featuring several artists from the NWW List and other notable Finnish maniacs.

The Sperm were formed in 1967 by Pekka Airaksinen (who also features independently on the NWW List), J.O. Mallander and other giants of the Helsinki art/music scene, making them sort of an underground "supergroup."  They organized happenings, and made outrageous music using electric guitar, tape manipulation and other noises, spiritual grandaddys to the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Merzbow, Matthew Bower and The Dead C.  Yes, this album really is that good. [Heinäsirkat mp3]

Also quite worthwhile is the recently released Pekka Airaksinen/Sperm 2-disc collection including unreleased goodies, Madam I'm Adam (features 2 other tracks from the Shh! album.)

Patrick Vian - Bruits Et Temps Analogues - Excellent moog-based rock album released in 1976 on the legendary Egg label.  It's a wonder this hasn't been reissued, what with the intense interest in all things analog, to say nothing of the dozens of "sampleable" grooves herein.  Similar to early Heldon, or mid-period Tangerine Dream, but really its own thing and a very enjoyable recording.  Patrick Vian had previously led the group Red Noise (1970), also featured on the list.  [Grosse Nacht Musik mp3] [Tunnel 4 Red Noise mp3]

The Return of UbuWeb

UbuWeb is back. After a summer of rebuilding, the site is back with thousands of avant-garde MP3s and is chockfull of new content including:

Music With Roots in the Aether: A seminal series of interviews and performances concieved and realized by Robert Ashley in 1976, consisting of 14 hours worth of video and audio. Subjects and performers include: David Behrman, Philip Glass, Alvin Lucier, Gordon Mumma, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, and Robert Ashley. Robert Ashley says: Music with Roots in the Aether is a series of interviews with seven composers who seemed to me when I conceived the piece-and who still seem to me twenty-five years later-to be among the most important, influential and active members of the so-called avant-garde movement in American music, a movement that had its origins in the work of and in the stories about composers who started hearing things in a new way at least fifty years ago."

The Charlotte Moorman Archive: UbuWeb is proud to host the audio archive of Charlotte Moorman (1933-1991), containing hours worth of unreleased works and collaborations by Nam June Paik, John, Cage, Earle Brown, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Terry Jennings, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Jackson Mac Low, David Behrman, La Monte Young, Sylvano Bussoti, George Brecht, Dick Higgins, Giuseppe Chiari and others. The selection is curated by Stephen Vitiello, with special thanks to Barbara Moore / Bound & Unbound.

People Like Us: The Complete Recordings 1992-2005 UbuWeb now hosts the complete works of the UK-based People Like Us. The brainchild of Vicki Bennett, these hundreds of MP3s feature solo works and collaborations with Matmos, Negativland, Wobbly, The Evolution Control Committee, Ergo Phizmiz, Irene Moon, The Jet Black Hair People, Xper. Xr., Messer Chups, Kenny G and Tipsy.

Christof Migone: Montréal-based Migone is a multidisciplinary artist and writer. His work and research delves into language, voice, bodies, psychopathology, performance, video, intimacy, complicity and endurance. UbuWeb is pleased to present an audio retrospective of Migone's work, both solo and with collaborators. Also featured here are numerous writings by Migone, including a book-length work, La première phrase et le dernier mot, which is comprised of the first sentence and the last word of every book in Migone's library.

Alien Nation

MP3s: Ronald Reagan - speech to UN mentioning aliens (excerpt) | Roswell Radio Broadcast from 1947

This site is dedicated to kids who have been abducted by aliens. Read up on the abduction process, why the green men want us, how a thought screen helmet can protect you, and check out plenty o' drawings by children, post-abduction. Oh, and their factoid list states that aliens do not use radio nor can they understand our languages when they are transmitted via radio, so you'll want to stay on our good side until judgment day. (via del.icio.us)

This rendezvous with our interplanetary pals reminded me of a friend who attended college at UC Santa Cruz: he signed up for a course called "Anthropology: Culture and Religion" and became mighty suspicious when the reading list included The Field Guide to Extraterrestrials. Although he failed to read the course's subtitle ("Alien-Nation and Outer Space") before enrolling, I believe the semester-long investigation of ufology (official university-sanctioned term) prepared him well for our day of reckoning.

Gonadically Speaking, R Shand is The Embalmanization of The Rap Game

U Wanna Be A Grip?

"Listen, learn & comprehend the sheer joyfultudinal sounds as R Shand raps about the eggstimatic joy of being a grip."

"It's raw, uncut, & Bangin G ! Dang...if Shand woulda gone to those classes, his flow mighta been too refineded & sonically correct....and that ain't what's happening in New School."

"Euphemistically speaking, the aural flatulence of his thrombamatic sounds will discombobulate the senses."

"No one has ever quite captured this fecal bliss quite like one R Shand."

"His flow is better than Fitty Sense, he conjures up Nastonian sounds out the Ying Yang twins!"

"Not even Kanye can flow quit like R Shand & gonadically speaking, he is the embalmanization of the Rap game."

"R Shand has bought a bubonic smile to my face like the plague & he has given me esteferic hope for the future of Rap."

"We have seen the future of Hip Hop/R&B & he is called R Shand."

"U Wanna Be a Grip takes rap to a new level! I was taken into a world of rhymes spit out at micro speed and hydro proximate lucidity. These rhymes grip you and send you into spasmatic convulsions of the cranial cortex. I felt so gripped, and no one can gripe about his spitability!!! In other words the boy be baaad..... Thank You R. Shand, I'm gripped and ripped and you are so hip!!!"

"Songs like this need to be on the radio because I get tired of hearing 50 Cent, The Game, and Kanye West talking trash when you have undiscovered talent waiting in the wings like R. Shand!!! He makes me want to become a grip. Thanks for music that will outlast what's hot right now, R. Shand!!! BUY THIS!!!!!!"

Blame should go to Otis Fodder and even more blame to Phil Milstein.

Adventures in the NWW List, Part 2

For the background and explanation of the Nurse With Wound list, see last week's post.  Also, last week I neglected to link to this great NWW List site, chock full of useful information.

Now on to this week's list of exceptional recordings.

Urban Sax - I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I avoided listening to Urban Sax for years.  You see, I have a thing about names, and the name Urban Sax conjured up visions of the stereotypical street alto player, clad in a loose-fitting geometric print blouse and a leather Stetson, bopping David Sanborn riffs to the aether somewhere near 72nd and Broadway.  How wrong was I?  Very wrong indeed.  Upon cautious investigation, I found that the "urban" in Urban Sax refers to the original project concept of creating sound environments in cityscapes via a large group of selectively positioned brass players.  Urban Sax is the creation of progressive music icon Gilbert Artman, founder of Lard Free and member of the experimental trio Catalogue with Jac Berrocal.  The band's discography up to and including the Spiral album in 1991 is varied and stellar, and perhaps most importantly, not what you might imagine.  Their sound is low on skronk, high on drone and performer interplay, such that the expected saxophone sounds are often submerged in harmoniously unrecognizable waves of tone, color and percussion.  For more information (and if you can at least somewhat read Francais) see their homepage; also see their brief but informative Wikipedia entry.  Though I believe that most of the Urban Sax catalog has appeared on CD at one time or another, nowadays the discs are reasonably hard to find.  Their self-titled 1977 album is a masterpiece, comprising four sidelong pieces of organic waft and shimmer. [Urban Sax Part 3 mp3]

Osamu Kitajima - Benzaiten - Debut rock/ethno/psych album released on Antilles in 1974, incorporating traditional Japanese instruments (koto, biwa, wood flute) into the standard rock mix. Largely instrumental and proto-new age, but definitely a rock record first and foremost, with heavy electric guitar passages.  Kitajima has an extensive discography, though my guess is that Benzaiten will appeal most to fans of the list.  Today he is "Dr. Kitajima," and runs new age label East Quest records. [Benzaiten (repris) mp3] 

Do You Know What It Means...

...to miss New Orleans? I do. It doesn't seem possible that a city so vital to this country's history, culture and economy could be cruelly abandoned to its fate but the New Orleans I've been back to time and again is gone. If I feel this devastated I can only imagine the burden my friends down there carry, one of whom was evacuated by the National Guard Saturday night as I was putting together Communication Breakdown #12. This latest podcast is a tribute to the Lost City of New Orleans and features:

• Mayor Nagin's emotional interview with WWL-TV
• A Midnite-Call-A-Friend Segment to Andy Nicastro who helps dissect the disaster
• An interview with Jim Marshall, aka The Hound, about his lost business and residence in New Orleans
• A recording of an Alex Chilton-led tribute to The Coasters held at the Mermaid Lounge in N.O. on December 29, 1997.

If you haven't done so already, please find a charity or aid organization that is doing good work, like AmeriCares, and donate to the relief effort.

The photo of me with a Dixie beer was taken by Kaz on my first visit to New Orleans in 1987.

Namelosers - New Orleans mp3

I just wanted to share this with everyone; my favorite rendition of this popular song, made in 1964 by some Swedes who I'm guessing were never in the great city.  They sure as hell aren't singing "Southern belle" either.  Nonetheless, it rocks.  Band info  [mp3]

New Orleans, WWL and WWOZ

I have a big batch of MP3 and movie posts to put up here, but Katrina has changed things.

This one hurts.

Where to begin. The humanity? The musicians. The architecture. The culture that's lost. The hell it has become.

There's always been a connection to New Orleans on WFMU, as there would have to be for any station that takes music seriously. As I tap, Monica's doing a great show dedicated to the victims of Katrina. Doug and Spazz both did incredible New Orleans / Louisiana shows this morning and last night. (Doug's archives are here: MP3 | Realaudio and Dave the Spazz's archives are here: MP3 | Realaudio.) Doug aired that incredible interview with New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin, which you can download here: MP3.

Nagin was interviewed on WWL 870 AM last night. WWL's coverage of this disaster has reportedly been incredible.

UPDATE: WWL now was an online stream, as part of a radio consortium called United Radio For New Orleans. Go here and click on "listen live" for a windows media player feed. Thanks Chris T!

As for WWOZ, the great community radio station in new Orleans, I've been in touch with David Freedman, their General Manager. WWOZ's been destroyed - transmitter and production studio under water, no word yet on their main studios, but it seems unlikely to me that they are still in useable shape even if they were above the water. David is holed up in a motel in Arkansas, the closest room he could find when he evacuated. Needless to say, WWOZ is off the air completely, not even their stream is up. The staff is scattered all over the south, some even in the hellhole at the Superdome. They're searching for family members and each other.

And even if WWOZ were to rebuild their transmitter in a year (which is highly unlikely) how much of their audience would still be there listening to their FM signal? The hurricane has destroyed their over the air audience, but it doesn't have to also mean an end to their significant online audience. I'm working with David to help get some kind of temporary WWOZ stream back up as soon as possible, maybe even tomorrow, and then as the WWOZ staff find one another, the station will get back up with a temporary studio. WWOZ's website is till up here and when the temporary stream goes up, there will be links to it there. General relief agencies are listed here. I'll keep you posted about the OZ stream here as well, and if I get a minute I'll put up a batch of MP3s.

UPDATE: The WWOZ In Exile stream is up via the WWOZ Home Page. Thanks to all the FMU staffers who've offered help, and especially to The Professor and Bill Zurat for getting a WWOZ stream back online. In the coming weeks, this stream will be replaced by WWOZ proper, and the folks at WWOZ are already laying out plans for putting up a new temporary transmitter.

Laura Cantrell & Jason Forrest Make Beautiful Glitch Together

In the tradition of Lindsey and Stevie, Elton & Kiki, Captain & Tennille, Mitch & Mickey, and Shields & Yarnell, a classic male/female artistic duo has collaborated once again to make lovely sounds (or in Shields and Yarnell's case, non-sounds). In possibly the first commercially-available musical team-up of two WFMU DJs, Jason Forrest AKA Donna Summer (of Sunday night's Advanced D&D radio extravaganza) and Radio Thrift Shop Proprietess Laura Cantrell have released "Nightclothes and Headphones" (MP3) as a track on Jason's new Shamelessly Exciting CD (Sonig label) hitting the streets now. Laura's sweet pipes add some nice sheen to our boy's music, but don't worry, he gets back to blowing up David Essex in a digital blender and spitting his carcass out at 300 BPM shortly thereafter and we love him for it. Laura, as many of you may know, is basking in the glow of many fans and critics alike with her new full-length album on Matador, Humming By the Flowered Vine, played a fantastic set in Battery Park on July 4th on a bill with Yo La Tengo and Stephen Malkmus, and she may be playing in your neck of the woods sometime soon.

MP3 Download Dinner Bell For September

Steve Bent "Going To Spain" (MP3)
Mark E. Smith has always had an ear for the perfect covers for the Fall to do, and since this breezy ditty got remade of 1993's Infotainment Scan LP, I've always wanted to hear the original. Lo and behold Irwin spun it last week and directed my attention to a Yuk/K-Tel compilation from 1978 title The World's Worst Record, compiled by UK DJ/comic Kenny Everett. This song was penned by Steve Bent, who performed it on a British TV show called New Faces in 1974, a sort of primitive precursor to American Idol where contestants did their own compositions. I love the whole naive tourist vibe, where the protaganist sings "Cousin Norman had a real fine time last year", being kept company by "tapes of Elton John" and says "I hope I can quickly learn the language", before the totally weird reverbed falsetto leap into the chorus. Makes a good segue to Three Dog Night's "I've Never Been To Spain", which coincidentally, I played on my last show before I, uh, went to Spain for the first time. I didn't quickly learn the language, but had a real fine time!

Reverend Charlie Jackson "Live" (MP3)
Kevin Nutt, host of WFMU's Sinners Crossroads started the Case Quarter label a few years back and has been sanctifying souls young and old with some powerful releases, the first of which was a collection of 1970's gospel singles by the Reverend Charlie Jackson. This disc packed so much raw power that everyone from Mojo to Rolling Stone was zapped by the holy thunderbolts delivered by the snakecharm guitar, ragged amp and booming voice of Jackson; garage rock gurus Crypt Records even put it out on vinyl, and singer Grey DeLisle recently did a cover song. Live documentation of Jackson (said to be at his peak in the 80's when the only place you could hear him was at festivals or gospel programs) is spotty at best, but thanks to Kevin we have an unreleased track for your Gawdfearing pleasure.

Patrick Sean O'Brien "Archie and Edith In the Fifth Dimension" (MP3)
The Bunkers get the turntablist treatment. Also check out the animated vid here.

Black Lodge Singers "Spongebob Squarepants" (MP3)
More Kids Pow Wow Songs (Canyon Label) unfortunately falls way short of the Singers' jawdropping Kids Pow Wow Songs some years back, but this is a nice addition to your MP3 collection. If you can't get enough 'bob, check out Jonny Blaze's take on the tune as well (Real Audio), culled from the DJ Technics collection of Baltimore Club Tracks we blogged about here earlier this year.

Health Hen "Drive She Said" (MP3)
If you ever wondered what Laverne DeFazio singing in a hybrid of Essential Logic and Mars might sound like, Health Hen might give you an idea. Oddly, this band gets left off your 80's Downtown/No New York-style compilations, which is too bad; not a whole lot of information except that their EP was on the Twist-O-Flex label, somewhat related to the East Village Rant imprint, another fine of some scratchy new wave sounds.

Mark Savage "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy" (MP3)
First heard this on Otis Fodder's 365 Days MP3 Project, now immortalized further on the new Schoolhouse Funk Volume 2 CD on DJ Shadow's Cali-Tex label. It's heartbreaking that this cuts short after 1 minute 36 seconds, this might be the greatest thing ever.

Blaster Al Ackerman "The Pepper Young Translations"  from I Am Drunk (MP3)
Ehse Records is offering up complete MP3s of assorted releases on its site (we've sung the praises of the great Little Howlin' Wolf in the past, his most recent LP is there); one in particular features the spoken recordings of Baltimore's Blaster Al Ackerman, a spoken-word artist who has been referenced by Throbbing Gristle. Says Ehse: "This listener's prediction:  the muffled voice of Blaster Al Ackerman reading his "Pepper Young" translations with a presumed bar of soap in his mouth followed by tree frog belches will replace the sound of a passing steam locomotive as the poetic sounds of indescribable mystery and high lonesomeness. This audio icon of the 21st Century can be found on Ehse Records' LP release of Blaster Al Ackerman's "I Am Drunk".  And indeed at times he does sound drunk, but not just on booze, also on language and human absurdity. Featuring live as well as "studio" recordings, "I Am Drunk" also has two Blaster classics that raise the humdrum world of the workplace to the giddy heights of Philip K. Dick in Munchkinland - "The John Eaton Recommendations" and "The Crab".  Another prediction: copies of this album with its linguistic hijinks and squat and thrusts will be played far more times and enjoyed much more than any mothball enshrined Caedmon LP of T.S. Eliot or Robert Frost intoning.

Hubble Bubble "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" (MP3)
In our never ending search for weird punk rock, listener Phil H. in LA has put into our hands at long last a full album's worth of music from Belgium's Hubble Bubble, which featured none other than Plastic Bertand of "Ca Plane Pour Moi" fame on drums. Damn, it's good, the perfect concoction of fried DIY weirdness and structured songs. It's not quite punk, it's not quite new wave or mininal synth, but all of those elements bubble up in the mix. Some have compared them to Germany's Pack (who existed as well around this time, 1978), but that band was a bit monochromatic compared to HB. Some of this could be the Screamers mixed with Raxola, or even the Damned at times, and there's an awesome dirt-shovel on the hippies with a cover of "If You're Going To San Francisco". Here's their take on the Kinks' "I'm Not Like Everybody Else."

Baby Washington "Think About the Good Times" (MP3)
From a killer Stateside collection spanning 1963-69 that showcases Dusty Springfield's all-time fave vocalist. Baby (calling herself this after a stint as "Jeanette" though her real name was Justine) started out in 1956 with the Harlem group the Hearts but came into her own after signing to the Sue label in 1962. Her style varied from punchy soul to more tranquil jazz evocative of Dinah Washington, and her uniquely rich and earthy vocals seem a natural to inspire the likes of Dusty (who covered "Breakfast In Bed" and several other of Baby's tunes.) This track comes from her 1968 Veep LP With You In Mind, which comes its entirety on this CD I've Got a Feeling, which also includes her two Sue LPs.

Cindy & Bert "Der Hund Von Baskerville" (MP3)
I am not saying Germans are Nazis, and I am not saying Sharon Osbourne is a Nazi for her terrible treatment and public abuse of Iron Maiden on her own concert stage, but here's a German take on Black Sabbath's "Paranoid", sort of.

Adventures in the NWW List, Part 1

In 1979, the members of Nurse With Wound, Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill and Heman Pathak, compiled a roll call of their favorite "outsider" musical artists to include with their first album, Chance Meeting on a Dissecting Table of a Sewing Machine and an Umbrella.  No other details were provided, just 300 or so names in block type.  The second version of the list included several newly added names, and came with the To the Quiet Men From a Tiny Girl LP in 1980.  Stapleton and co. knew not what they hath wrought; the so-called Nurse With Wound List has since become a scavenger hunt of holy grails for fanatical collectors of Krautrock, progressive rock, psychedelic, post-punk, jazz, free improvised and experimental music.

Most of the artists on the list stem from the period 1969-1980, that gloriously creative, fertile era when most of my favorite records got made, boundaries were broken and excesses were indulged.  To date, many of these artists and their recordings remain unissued on CD, though a substantial number have been made available by stalwart reissue labels like Alga Marghen, Captain Trip, Fractal, Spalax, Paradigm and MIO.  In fact, the list is at least partly responsible (along with the Freeman brothers, Julian Cope and others) for the resurgence of interest in the Krautrock genre and the reissues that followed.

I have attempted to include here only selections that cannot be easily found elsewhere.  By and large, the labels that have endeavored to put these titles out are very small labels that deserve your patronage.  I have no desire to undercut their business, or the business of specialty stores and distributors around the world.  Most of what you'll see and hear here (and in future posts) are rips from my personal vinyl collection, or else they've been acquired as downloads via online file-sharing communities.

Orchid Spangiafora - Flee Past's Ape Elf - According to information found here, "Orchid Spangiafora is Rob Carey sometimes aided by Byron Coley & Chris Osgood (of the Suicide Commandos)."  This album came out in 1979, and has got to be the weirdest record ever released on Twin/Tone.  Brilliant, obsessive, hilarious spoken word-tape-cut-up-hell of the highest order.  For audio samples, or to purchase a "custom CD-R" from Twin/Tone, click here. [Sheer Madness mp3]

Sally Smmit and Her Musicians (1980) - Hangahar - This is The Mekons' Sally Timms like you've never heard her, long before she became the belle of skewed new wave-country music fans everywhere.  Released on the ridiculously short-lived Groovy label (Pete Shelley's label, which also released his now ultra-rare Sky Yen album), the album is two sidelong pieces of shambling post-Yoko Ono, post-Can jamitude. Undoubtedly an influence on Kraut-pranksters Damenbart. [A - Part One (edit) mp3]

Verto - Krig/Volubilis - Dark, hovering, French progressive psych released in 1976 on the Tapioca label.  Tapioca was associated with the obscure Pôle label, responsible for the original release of this and several other monumental French prog classics featured on the list, including the Besombes-Rizet double LP. Guitars, keyboards and ominous vocals. [Et Terre mp3] [TK 240 S 52 mp3]

Download Kingface MP3s

The endlessly storied 1980's hardcore scene based around Washington DC is a topic I spent a good deal of time obsessing over during my formative years as a fan of the weirdo music. Every rotten generation has musical saving graces of one sort or another, and being a dispossessed and underachieving teenager while Government Issue, Scream, Shudder to Think, Beefeater, Soul Side, and a then-new group called Fugazi (click any band name to stream songs in Real Audio from the WFMU archives) were doing their thing is something that I still feel pretty fortunate for, given that most of my peers seemed eerily satisfied with the flaccid metal and pantywaist pop of that same era.

In 1984, I'd only been to DC once (with my parents, on vacation) but a handful of years later, I could rattle off two dozen miniscule bands, the names of the clubs they played at, what bands the members had been in previously, and all sorts of other esoteric crap that probably contributed to my nearly flunking out of school several times prior to graduation. It's a pretty typical phenomenom, actually, and I can sense a few of you shaking your heads right now with the recognition.

Always being the sort that was drawn to the outsider amongst the outsiders, one DC band that has remained a source of immense joy for me so many years later is Kingface. Although they performed alongside all the fabled bands who propelled the Dischord record label to international prominence as a premier source of underground rock music, Kingface was neither A.) a hardcore band, or B.) part of Dischord's roster of bands.

Machines Vs. Music: Mechanized Music MP3s

MP3s: 17 of them below the jump.

This month's DJ MP3 compilation comes from once and future DJ David Suisman of the Inner Ear Detour, who, in between searching for the greatest trousers in North America, made this collection for our 2002 fundraising marathon. It's called Machines Vs. Music and David described at the time this way:

Musicians - who needs 'em? Just to prove it, here's a collection of music performed exclusively or partially by automated machines, from music boxes and orchestrions to mechanical manipulations by Conlon Nancarrow, Pierre Bastien and others.

Click below for the MP3s:

Bronwyn's iPod Shuffle

Hello, Everybody—nsya.

There’s lots of things I don’t have, money being probably the main thing because if I had some money I might get some of the other things I don’t have now. Then I would have those things, but I wouldn’t have the money any more.

One of the things I don’t have is an iPod Shuffle. But if you go to the web site that explains how to automatically fill up your Shuffle with your favorite corporate listening product, you will see that Bronwyn's device is copying a tune called “Tonight We Fly.” I wanted to hear what that song sounded like, so I googled it and found a reference to a group called Divine Comedy, but I couldn’t find any links to that song or any little samples of it. I did find a record company called Divine Comedy that has lots of stuff I think I’d really like to hear. Maybe we can get them to send some things to Program and Music Director King Brian at WFMU. But even if I did have some money, I don’t think I would trade it for an iPod Shuffle, because if I were listening to real music I might not be able to hear the songs that are always on in my head.

Thanks for reading my irregular blog entry, and MGB.

Shooby Taylor CD in the Works

A few years ago, WFMU's dynamic duo (Irwin Chusid and Ken Freedman) played a crucial role in digging scat legend Shooby Taylor (aka The Human Horn) out of obscurity and placing him in the spotlight (click for real audio of an interview with Shooby on Ken's show in 2002) for some well-deserved, albeit belated, recognition.

Unfortunately, Shooby passed away in 2003, while plans for cleaning up and releasing the music from his legendary tapes were still in the initial planning phase. News of progress on the project has just hit Irwin's Key of Z site, indicating that a CD of Shooby's songs may soon come to fruition.

Read the whole story surrounding the rediscovery of The Human Horn in Key of Z's Shooby Taylor Journal, or check out this site for some Shooby MP3s.

Meet The Beatle Barkers

In the shameless pantheon of novelty music, there is one sub-genre so unspeakable that it's practitioners almost never reveal their actual names. I speak of course of the Singing Animal Song. The Beatles Barkers are no exception. Nowhere on their album (released in the middle of the night in New Zealand) does an actual human being accept musical responsibility. It is credited only to "The Woofers and Tweeters Ensemble," but even this obfuscates the most important point about this deservedly unappreciated genre - the best Singing Animal Records are those in which there are in fact no animals at all. The Beatle Barkers success (if in fact there is any) is derived from the fact that, unlike other Singing Animal records, the animal noises are in fact samples made by human beings. Animal noises are too important to be trusted to the animals.

Here in its discredited entirety is the Beatles Barkers LP, including the original version of that most rancid song, Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da. Beatles-ologists know that Paul McCartney originally penned this aural trainwreck for Badfinger, who respectfully passed on it. Badfinger in turn passed the song on to The Woofers and Tweeters Ensemble, who recorded it in early 1968, but did not release it until 15 years later, after New Zealand's musical statute of limitations had expired.

Pictured above left is Dr. Phrankenshop's new cover for this album. A higher quality copy (as a pdf) is available here. The original album cover is here (jpg).

All My Loving
Can't Buy Me Love
Day Tripper
Hard Day's Night
I Feel Fine
I Saw Her Standing There
I Want To Hold Your Hand
Love Me Do
Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da (original version)
Paperback Writer
She Loves You
We Can Work It Out

What's On My Micro

I haven't done a weekly show on WFMU since 1999, so please indulge me.  Much like that kid at the party who takes over the stereo, this is the only opportunity I get to communicate my tastes to the world at large.

When the need arose for a portable music listening device, I bought this nifty little thing called a Creative Zen Micro; it holds 5GB of music or data, is about two-thirds the size of an iPod, and best of all, you don't need iTunes in order to export/import files (easy-to-use Windows-based software is provided.)  No freezing or battery charging issues, either.

So what's on an ex-FMU DJ's portable, you ask?  Note the absence of Morton Feldman, Stockhausen, La Monte Young, the "Lake" album, Conrad Schnitzler, Stars of the Lid, H.N.A.S., Merzbow, DDAA and other oft-played artists of this nature from my years on the air.  That stuff still gets played at home all the time; remember this is music for being on the move.

Alrune Rod - 2 albums by Danish heavy psych band, ca. '69-'70 (and way above average for things fitting that description.)  Got the tip from the unsung section of Julian Cope's Head Heritage website. [mp3]

Amon Düül II - Yes, I am still a Krautrock fanatic.  2 albums:  the highly acclaimed Yeti from 1970, and the less-acclaimed (but still dear to me)  Vive La Trance (1974). [mp3]

Bad Brains - Their 2 great SST albums, I Against I and Quickness, plus the phenomenally good dub disc I & I Survived. [mp3]

Basement 5  - Unofficial complete discography of this UK post-dub-punk outfit, ca. 1981; produced by Martin Hannett, and compiled lovingly by R. Stevie Moore. [mp3]

Culture - mp3 assortment - Classic 70s reggae; including their hit "Two Sevens Clash." [mp3]

Don Bradshaw-Leather - A rare item from the infamous Nurse With Wound list.  See Brian Turner's post here.  Super-dark psych weirdness, heavy with mellotron and piano.  Not recommended for listening on the bus.

Fugazi - Repeater + 3 Songs - For those times when I need a righteous instant pick-up.  Slinky, uplifting punk music from 3 of the nicest guys I ever ate mediocre Chinese food with (Mr. MacKaye wasn't there, but I'm sure he's nice too.)

Always Wear A Helmet

45 (MP3)  Ballad (MP3)  Ballad2 (MP3)  SRC  (MP3)
"WHY"
It Seems that wherever in this world I go,
No matter who nor what I know,
People will look; some of them stare,
I wonder if they really care?

They see this cane with its golden crown,
some of them smile, but most of them frown.
I hear them laugh, and I see them cry,
No matter what,
They all ask why?

Well, I'm just like you, and you,
and you and your wife,
We all have a special purpose in life.
This way of life I'm glad that I found,
For like you, I too, make the world go 'round.

We're all alike,
Oh yes, we are
We all have a dream on some faraway star.

For me when it is over and done at the end of a day,
Some can relax, but I go to pray
For I know that tomorrow in some other place,
I'll have that fear again to face.

Could it be the quest for money and fame,
Oh no,
To play with my life is not much of a game.

It's a want  -  a want that's so dear
It's given me faith,
I can face that fear.

Oh, yes, I do think about a day
in life when fate came along and struck my way.
Each time it's happened they've all said,
This guy is lucky he's not dead.

They were right.
But I wanted to get up to try it again.
I kept telling myself that I knew I could win,
so I'd close my eyes and to the Lord I'd pray,
Oh, help me God, let me walk some day.

He did.
And every stitch on every scar
has just brought me closer to my dream afar.

To be a man,
To do my best,
To stand alone is my only quest.

Success is a term that has broad use,
For having none in life there is no excuse.

For you, what I do is not right---
But, for me, it is not wrong.
What I have been trying to tell you all along
is that it's got to be,
You ask why?
Well, just like you, I gotta be me.

Evel Knievel

You're fuckin' pretty loud, New Jersey!

Because it's an utter act of criminal negligence that this is not readily available via a quick google search, we hereby present to you the mentally-defying sounds of the between-song banter that tumbled from the mouth of Venom vocalist Cronos when his band played at City Gardens, (Trenton, NJ).

Venom - Spoken Excerpts Recorded live at City Gardens (Download MP3) (Not safe for work)

Backstory: In 1986, Black Metal legends Venom played what some thought of as an unlikely bill with Rollins-era Black Flag at famed punk dump City Gardens, in scenic Trenton, New Jersey. The club was a magnet for all types of unsavory social elements -- skinheads, criminals, bikers, leather-studded punks, people who liked Meat Beat Manifeto, and so forth. Anyway, the punkers, metalheads, and general thugs who turned out for the show not only got to witness two of the more badass bands of the era sharing a stage, but were also treated to some of the most (unintentionally?) hilarious between-song stage banter ever, courtesy of Venom's knuckle-dragging vocalist Cronos.

Pearl Williams: For This You'll Need A Glusenshpiegelbaster (MP3s)

I picked up my first Pearl Williams album many years ago while working at the Confirmed Bachelor Record Store. Recorded live in the early 60s during a "late, late show," A Trip Around The World Is Not A Cruise opens like this:

(Pearl sits down at the piano, tinkles a few chords)

"Good evening, this is Pearl Williams. A raconteur, a story seller - dirty stories, clean stories. I'm also a chanteuse - which is French for cuerva. I own a vibrator. A French poodle. And I went out and bought a Roto-Rooter.  Oh that Roto-Rooter (followed by an unintelligible but no doubt filthy Yiddishism). Oh I love my Roto-Rooter. A looong Roto-Rooter, I can lend it to two broads standing behind me. Definition, of indecent: If it's long enough, hard enough, and in far enough, it's in decent."

And so it goes. Lots of self-accompanied after-hours shtick and songs - mostly one-liners and jokes about "knishes, "shlongs," and "the new Jewish holiday - October 21, the day the new Cadillacs go on sale." All delivered with Pearl's husky-voiced killer timing. Check these sites for her bio and historical context (i.e., Belle Barth and Patsy Abbott).

Here are 28 MP3s of Pearl Williams' best and ballsiest bits pulled from her bawdy adult party albums:

"Phil Collins Minus One" And Other Promo Scams

MP3s: Collins on Collins, David Bowie Idents (1 | 2 | 3), King Coleman ID, Homer Simpson ID, Weezer ID, Weezer and Peaches Remix

Back in the days before Clear Channel owned every other station in the country, record labels were forced to do a little bit of legwork in order to promote their releases. Throughtout the 70's and 80's, one technique in their arsenal was to mail an "interview records" to every station in the country. Interview records were essentially spoken word karaoke interviews with rock stars, so that a local station could pretend that its own jocks had landed the big one. Stations received a record with the rock star giving answers to interview questions, which were supplied to the station on a script.

An hour or so in the production room with reel to reel tape and a razor blade, and voila! even the lowliest station in the country could air that exclusive interview with Jimmy Page! We still have one such interview record in the mighty FMU record library, "Collins on Collins," in which Phil Collins knowingly chuckles to your insighttful questions, and waxes philosophical on "Philmania" and the difference between "pop fans" and "music fans." Here is an MP3 of the Collins on Collins record which came out in 1985. If you really want to play along at home and ask Phil the questions so he can knowingly chuckle and reply to you, here is a pdf document of the script that accompanied the record.  Another variation on this theme were rock star "indents," in which a celebrity introduced his or her new single. Here are a few David Bowie idents we still had laying around: Bowie Ident 1 | Bowie Ident 2 | Bowie Ident 3 (Station Manager Ken)

Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Body Workout MP3s

(mp3s: 13 fully aerobicized mp3s below)

All those tales of groping and "rowdy Hollywood parties" couldn't stop Arnold's inexorable march to the governorship. Secret salaries for promoting over-the-counter steroids in muscle magazines haven't brought him down. Even his oft-quoted admiration of Hitler was a non-issue.

But Arnold Schwarzenegger's opponents have overlooked the most embarrasing episode in Arnold's pre-political carreer  - the exercise record he recorded in 2000, Arnold Schwarzenegger's Total Body Workout.

Yes, more damaging than appearing pregnant in the movie Junior, more humiliating than the box office performance of Kindergarten Cop, Arnold's Total Body Workout record has him doing 12, 24, 36 reps of calf raises to It's Raining Men (MP3)!

Think about it. Calf raises to It's Raining Men. It could achieve what groping affidavits, over the counter steroids and Rob Reiner can only dream of.

Part One (Without Weights)

Save The Overtime For Me
(Gladys Knight and The Pips)
Don't Stop Believin'
(Journey)
867-5309/Jenny
(Tommy Tutone)

MP3 Download Dinner Bell For August

Tall Dwarfs "Crush" (live on WFMU 1992) (MP3)
One of the more exciting bits of live music news in New York for the summer is the return of the mighty Tall Dwarfs from New Zealand, slated to open for Olivia Tremor Control at the Bowery Ballroom August 2nd and 3rd. Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate helped herald in their country's punk scene in groups like Toy Love and the Enemy, but with the 80's advent of the Flying Nun label and it's near-flawless roster (which informed a large chunk of the American and international underground; your Pavements, GBV's Yo La Tengos and Sonic Youths have bowed quite dramatically towards the Southern Hemisphere) the duo coalesced an amazing vision into a simple TEAC 4-track recorder and created a musical output unlike any other. Somewhere between T Rex, Pierre Schaeffer, Brian Wilson, Beefheart, and the kitchen sink came inventive, experimental pop with often dark undercurrents; they made their own videos, sleeves and commanded a musical universe unlike anyone else. Live, they remained a duo, utilizing live tape loops, drum machines, omnichord and guitar, buoyed by Knox's often-hilarious stage presence (his solo shows through the years have caused many an audience member to hide in the back for fear of molestation, though he kept his hands off everyone performing at a 1997 WFMU benefit). In honor of their return to New York (for the first time together since 1992), the above MP3 is "Crush" performed in the WFMU studios on David Newgarden's show, and found on the station's They Came, They Played, They Blocked the Driveway compilation from 1993. As a bonus, Here's a little taste of the studio wizardry of the Dwarfs in its lo-fi glory, "Dare To Tread" (Real Audio) from their 1992 Fork Songs LP.

Los Shains' "El Monstruo" (MP3)
If, for some reason that certainly may be too personal to discuss, you've longed for a Spanish take on the ultra-primitive Nova's hit "The Crusher", well here's it's your lucky day. If you've never heard "The Crusher", it's simply one of the greatest songs ever featured in the whole Back From The Grave series of ultra-obscuro garage trash from the 60's, and also covered by the Cramps quite faithfully. I am not sure how faithful this version is, or if it even replicates the same lyrics; what's Spanish for "do the crusher you turkeynecks" anyway?

Christ Child "Star Whores" (MP3)
My friend Mark brought a bunch of records over recently and I wound up taping a bunch of stuff, but I screwed up the pause button on the deck so right on the middle of Arthur Brown, this mysterious, unknown-to-me-as-I-didn't-write-it-down heavy jam pops up in the middle of nowhere. Anyway, I wound up playing Arthur Brown on the air recently off said cassette, and when unexpectedly dropped in, listener Sue P. emailed me flipping out because I was playing her latest obsession, Christ Child. Who the hell are they? Neither of us didn't really knew, except this was a major label release on Arista in 1977, they were from Malibu (!), and may have been that label's hope to follow, I dunno, Patti Smith who was then being marketed as both "punk" and "new wave" (in 1977 USA, it was kind of a blur as to what was what). I dunno, though, this thing kills as it whoodles in with weirdass minimal synth that goes into a total thuggy bug-out riff that burrows itself right into your head.

Elton and Betty White (assorted MP3's)
Don't really know the story behind "Elton and Betty White" (an unmarked CDR came from a listener), and whether or not these are actually recordings of the famous Betty White. It sure sounds like her, and knowing the potty-mouthed possibilities she demonstrated in Lake Placid, who the heck knows. Here's a smattering of MP3s alternating between her vocals and Elton's: "Climaxation", "God's Basketballs", "I'm In Love With Your Behind", "Menopause", "Woman Your Smell, It Makes Me Well", and "Bitch".

The Long Blondes "Autonomy Boy" (MP3)
With all the 80's throwback going on in the world of indie pop/rock, here's a refreshing nod-of-sorts to the great Dolly Mixture and Kleenex/Lilliput from a current UK band called the Long Blondes who could teach a thing-or-two to the fashion circle popsters dipping into their own 80s well no deeper than say,  Frankie Goes To Hollywood. This is out on the excellent up-and-coming NYC label What's Your Rupture, which has been batting a solid 1000 with recent singles by Love Is All and the Cause Co-Motion, whom you will surely hear more about in the future. For now, here's "Autonomy Boy" (MP3), a great song from a new 12" EP that hits the spot just right. Thanks to What'sYour Rupture for letting us post this.

Kelly Harrell's "I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again" (MP3)
One of the lovelier residents of WFMU's Cassette Library (we still keep 'em and play 'em from time to time) are tape collections called Victrola Favorites, put out by Seattle experimentalists and sometime WFMU guests the Climax Golden Twins. This amazing series of tapes floated around like a midway point between Yazoo's Secret Museum series and the Sun City Girls' recent Sublime Frequencies series; wedding old time jazz, pop, novelty tunes from the early 20th century with super 78s from exotic locales around the world (some of my favorite moments are taken from various comedy/theater 78s from the Far East). The Twins have posted a few MP3 here, one of my favorite being Kelly Harrell's "I Wish I Was a Single Girl Again" (MP3), a hillbilly gem from 1928. Kelly being a he is probably the key point in question here, and hence possibly also explains the 1927 song "My Wife Done and Left Me Again"?

Gurdjieff "No. 1, Mesoteric Series, July 22, 1949" (MP3)
Boy, there sure have been some real completist-friendly box sets over the last few years: Merzbow's 50CD's, Albert Ayler's 10CD's on unreleased material, giant Yahowa and Tomokawa boxes, etc. Basta's newly issued collection of Russian mystic G.I. Gurdjieff's complete improvisations is definitely catered to the enthusaist of long, extended drone pieces, and is beautifully packaged with 2CDs and a huge, intricately laid-out book with a disk of home movies. Add the MP3 disc that's also included, and you have nineteen, yes nineteen solid hours of material herein. It's all home-taped recordings of harmonium, a haunting instrument somewhat akin to a portable pump-organ, capable of creating long, sustained drones, and this featured outtake from 1949 (all the tracks here are recorded between 1948 and 1949) is just a sample of what one can become fully immersed in with this set.

Spaz "Spaz" (MP3)
Donna Summer/Jason Forrest solicited unsigned breakcore freaks to send him stuff for his last WFMU Marathom premium, and one MP3 from someone merely named "Spaz" made jaws drop. No info whatsoever, this is possibly the most retarded thing ever conceived by a laptop musician. We want more.

Lust Control "The Big M" (MP3)
Christian punks definitely one-upping the str8-edge band Crucial Youth's album (where they are depicted on the cover running over Gene Simmons and kids with beer with a streamroller). I don't think I need to see the cover of this record, based on the subject matter.

Juri Camisasca "Un Galantuomo" (MP3)
Creepy, eccentric folk track from an amazing 1974 Italian LP sent to me by listener Jamie in the UK. Supposedly not a big seller, but nonetheless one of the more out-there singer-songwriter efforts from Italy in any decade; reminiscent of the dark folk of Comus or even some early Tyrannosaurus Rex, with the voice definitely used in an avant-garde sense as an instrument within itself. Famed experimentalist Franco Battiato also appears on here, adding some fractured electronics over the stoned vibe.

Spazzy Answer Songs

MP3s: 28 of them below the jump, plus a handful of streaming realaudio archives.

All these periodic payola inquiries would lead you to believe that the only way to get a song played on the radio is by delivering duffel bags full of cash, cocaine and Adidas sneakers to a station's doorstep. Not so. For several decades, another time-tested method was to shamelessly hitch your tune to an already established single, a phenomenon known as the Answer Song.

In 2003, Dave the Spazz collected 28 answer songs for his WFMU marathon premium CD, which are now presented here as MP3s, with a few of the originals linked as realaudio archives.

Saturn, Your Other Home for Hippy Noise

Saturn Electrostatic Discharges is neither an STD nor the name of one of WFMU's 2-6 a.m. overnight radio programs. It is, from what I have crudely gathered a bunch of radio racket that occurs when lightning is in Saturn's atmosphere. Then there's those hot gases which seem to really stir shit up, allowing scientists from the Cassini-Huygens Mission to Saturn to study just what the hell those 3 rings (conveniently called A, B and C) are doing there. Fascinating as that may be, we just like the creepy noise. Here's a source for your space audio fix, and here's a recent recording (mp3) from our most blingingest neighbor in the solar system.

Corndogs

Like many people, I missed out on the minutemen documentary that was making the rounds a few weeks ago. As a nice consolation, a guy named Sir Demon Brown has been kind enough to put up corndogs.org, a collection of interviews, live shows and other scraps from San Pedro's finest 

Highlights include video of a 30 minute acoustic set from L.A. public access (210 Megs, in Windows Media unfortunately) as well as the lost corndogs video (great footage, terrible quality).   

Diese 45 wird total Verzögert

Hey kiddies, $mall ¢hizzange with another mp3 for your drug addled brains. Rapper's Deutsch aka Rapper's Delight in German! Scheisse! Supposedly its three German TV personalities from back in the day caaashing in the 'gimmick' of rap music (you know, before the 'fad' died like disco). The early 80's were ripe for this stuff.

And yet in today's world, with people way too serious about the type of champange consumed and the size of rims on their Escalades, there's more than enough room for parodies. Fuck hip hop, let's bring back RAP. Where's Bobby Jimmy and the Critters when you need 'em? However, Rich Little doesn't need to get back into the studio anytime soon.

Click here for an extensive site of novelty rap hits (or should I say misses?!). Even Marvin the Robot grabs the M-I-C.

The Chief Rocker, Frankie Crocker! (MP3)

"For there is no other like this soul brother - tall, tan, young, and fly."
    Frankie Crocker on Frankie Crocker

Frankie Crocker was one of the flashiest and most flamboyant radio personalities to ever rock a mic. His smooth come hither raps, movie star lifestyle, and broad-based musical taste are the stuff of legend. From his late 60's days on Top 40 giant WMCA (following Murray the K) to his Black Power stint on WWRL to his powerhouse years at WLIB and WBLS - where he pioneered a progressive urban blend of R&B, rock, Latin, disco, jazz, and even Frank Sinatra - Crocker took New York radio by storm.

And Frankie's ego knew no bounds. At the height of his fabulosity he could be seen squiring Jayne Kennedy, walking his matching Afghan hounds, arriving at Studio 54 on a white horse, appearing in "Cleopatra Jones," taking on-air bubble baths with model Beverly Johnson, leading his own disco orchestra, and commanding local record labels to subsidize his live remotes from Cannes and fetch his fried chicken. But there was no disputing that Frankie was King of the New York airwaves. As he himself put it,"when Frankie Crocker isn't on your radio, your radio isn't really on."

The classic Frankie rap below (thanks to Steinski for the vinyl-to-MP3 transfer) is part of WFMU's ongoing Aircheck program: an ever-expanding archive of radio ghosts recaptured. Heard every Thursday from 6-7pm, Aircheck preserves some of the more unusual and unpredictable moments and personalities in radio. The complete Frankie Crocker show can be heard here.

An All-Time Classic Frankie Crocker Rap (MP3)

Abandoned Amusements

Abandoned amusement and theme parks left for nature to reclaim.

This site contains a stunning series of photos of an abandoned Japanese amusement park. The first few pictures of a rotted roller coaster are especially creepy as they were taken in the morning fog. page 1 - page 2 - page 3

Suzy Poling, an Oakland photographer, has a great photo series of an abandoned theme parks called Hidden Village. She also features a spread of old delapidated theatres: Palace of Mold

Defunctparks.com features many snapshots of parks in their heyday alongside the current state of rot: Rocky Glenn Park in Lackawanna County, PA - Mountain Park in Holyoke, MA - Idora Park in Youngstown, OH - Chippewa Lake Park in Chippewa Lake, OH .

IllicitOhio.com made a trek to the PTL's Heritage USA.

Pacific Ocean Park decimated through time.

Here is a promotional film for Santa's Village (mov. file) from Extinct Attractions, a site that preserves Disneyland's and Disney World's past through interactive DVD documentaries. They also archive information, pictures and sounds of theme park rides, attractions and brochures. Browse around a bit, they have a few more video clips.

Take a listen to Goosy Goosy Gander (mp3) and The Happy Dragon's Tongue (mp3) - they are part of a collection of field recordings from theme park rides and attractions recorded and compiled by Melinda Simon and Mark Fay and released as "Songs for Little Ones" on Dish Recordings in 1997.

Picking Up Girls Made Easy MP3

An MP3 of the entire novely / sex 60s LP PIcking Up Girls Made Easy.

American Song Poem MP3s: MSR Madness, Volumes 5 and 6

MP3s: 56 of them below the jump, along with pdfs of the CD cover art and booklets for both volumes.

WFMU is happy to be the official host for the final two volumes of CD releases from the American Song Poem Music Archives. Prepared for release back in the late 1990s, for various reasons these two albums have been sitting on curator Phil Milstein's shelf ... until now.

Here are Phil's long-awaited collections, titled, respectively, I Like Yellow Things: MSR Madness Vol. 5 and Rat A Tat Tat, America: MSR Madness Vol. 6. Each album features full-color cover artwork by legendary cartoonists Peter Bagge (vol. 5) and Rick Altergott (vol. 6).  Together, these two volumes collect 56 of the best and weirdest song-poems that emerged from America's "send in your lyrics" musical factories. Back in the day, non-musicians mailed in their addled and/or eloquent poetry (often scribbled on sandwich bags or cocktail napkins), and for a small fee, a song was created out their poetic detritus. The concept is nothing new - there have been numerous anthologies of song poems (and even a film about the phenomenon), so many in fact that you have to wonder just how much good material there is. These collections answer that questions - tons of it, especially if you keep an open mind and you're as receptive to the strangeness of the genre as you are to the pained emotion and the historical insight they often provide.

There are some real gems here, including Burmese Land and Octopus Woman, Please Let Me Go, both favorites from Irwin Chusid's and Michelle Boule's Incorrect Music show. My own favorite here is technically not a song poem (because writer and singer are the same person), but it still fits - William Arpaia's magnificent Listen, Mister Hat. Like many song poem collections, there a batch of excellent anti-hippy musical diatribes (Till Death Do Us Part, sung by Heroin herself, Smoke It - The Pot  and The Doing Of Our Thing) And several others - My Daddy He Died in 1969, Stay Where You Are, Green Fingernails and Gretchen's New Dish - all testify to the continued richness of the song  poem genre. And that's just on Volume Five! So get started downloading, and listen! Special thanks to Phil Milstein, Irwin Chusid and Otis Fodder.

Free Speech Audio Experiment

Check out One Free Minute (some audio not safe for work), an audio experiment that gives anyone who calls in one minute to anonymously vent, rant, proselytize, sing, or grunt. Each caller's minute is recorded, and played back during One Free Minute "performances." Some dude used his minute to cluck the theme to Beverly Hills Cop like a chicken (streaming MP3). Want to top that? Call (800) 931-5056 to participate.

Click here to read a short article about the project in Wired.

Thanks to listener Marisa for the heads-up!

Take Warning

Sure, many disclaimers contain important information meant to preserve life, limb, and the American way, but let’s face it, we’ve long since passed a fork in that road and are now obsessed with stating the obvious. There are two more cases to add to the “if you spill hot coffee on yourself, you may get burned” file:

Soft drink disclaimers. Wait, back up the train, soda contains sugar?

Hillary’s outrage over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. You can download a hack for the video game that shows cartoon sex. Big surprise. The game’s disclaimer reads as follows: Rated Mature, for ages 17 and older, due to intense violence, blood and gore, strong sexual content, strong language and use of drugs. ‘Nuff said, Hillary. And anyway, if you are so determined to see virtual peg-people gettin' it on that you go through the trouble of searching out and downloading a program that mods your video game, then by god, you should be rewarded for your efforts with some pixillated porn.

Just Say No To Outdoor Summer Concert MC's

The summer means lots of outdoor free music events, but of course, they're never really "free" in the true sense when you examine closely. That's right, people sponsoring the event whether it be Snapple, Budweiser, or NAMBLA will always figure out a way to insert their agenda repeatedly into your experience, which of course, makes perfect sense, and is something we have pretty much accepted in our daily lives in this consumer-driven world. At the risk of going Andy Rooney, I have to say for some reason this year I find all the people MC-ing before, between, and after sets to be particularly prickly to my ears. I don't know why. Is it having absorbed all the recent SCTV box sets and realizing that Bobby Bittman (pictured) was somewhat of a harbinger of things to come, even though he was a parody of the past? Or is just that hearing a cheesy guy come out to pump everyone up and say things like "Give it up for my maaaaaaaaaan, J Mascis" in Central Park last night after Dinosaur Jr. finished is just downright annoying?. Or is it just the timing in these stressful times, where your entertainment should be a modem for escaping information-overload, thus making the usual routine of annoying interruptions amplified. I dunno, but the WFUV plug at a show involving the Magik Markers (who opened for Dinosaur Jr.) was pretty out-of-place too, one has to admit, and having Yo La Tengo's quieter moments interrupted by the buzz of the "Jack" plane overhead had me thinking of the blimp in Black Sunday crashing into the Super Bowl. These Jack people hate Matador, I know it! Anyway, I shouldn't vent, nothing could have been as bad as this guy (MP3). Says our friend Bill W.: "I'd like to 'put my hands together', with his neck intervening." I expect responses to this post from this weekend's Siren fest, especially if the US Army has that sponsorship booth there. Will Don Rickles don his CPO Sharkey garb and introduce Dungen?

Happy Birthday MP3!!

Billboard Post Play Blog reports that the MP3 turns ten today. The tiny terror was hatched ten years ago today when researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits in Germany ("Vee have vays of making you stream!") decided to use ".mp3" as the file name extension for their new audio coding technology. Since then, the MP3 has brought the music industry to its wobbly knees as the first modern music configuration not introduced, controlled, and marketed by the industry itself (which hasn't put a halt to the gluttonous and obsolete practice of CD packaging deductions levied on artists and other royalty recipients). Consumers have rejoiced in a drunken downloading frenzy, ditching their broken-hinged jewel cases and clunkola CD Walkmans for iPod mugging bait. And for that, young man - the stripper, the Veuve, and the cake are on us. Just don't tell your mom as she'd probably kick our aged analog ass. Hit, it Marilyn!

"Happy Birthday" by Marilyn Monroe (MP3)

a lil' Reggae for your Jeggae

Wassup wassup.  I'm finally getting around to dusting off the laptop and posting to the almighty FMU blog.  I'll keep it short and bittersweet cos all you greedy mofos just want free mp3s anyway.  So here 'tis. a nice dubby take on the Brubeck classic 'Take 5' by lengendary reggae session man Val Bennet.  While the A-side is nice, it gets a wee bit schmaltzy, so we flip it over and give you the version on the flip, cos as Public Enemy once stated, 'B-Side Wins Again!'  Originally came out on the Roots label, and there is actually a Take 5 riddim, I have something else on this by Welton Irie. Download MP3.

A Musical Fungus Among Us

MP3s: Fungal remix excerpts of New Order, Soft Cell, The Eagles, The Beastie Boys and Gordon Taylor.

Mold and Music go way back. Remember Moldy Oldies, before they disappeared from the airwaves thanks to Jack FM? Or how about Moldy Figs, the sarcastic term applied to swing and big-band fans who snubbed post-war Jazz innovations like Be-Bop (think: the record collecting crowd from the film Ghost World). And then there was that one armed drummer for The Barbarians, Mouldy. (Listen to Mouldy's theme song from Charlie's 1/10/05 show in streaming realaudio).

Cleaning Out My Inbox

The world's ugliest dog has been located. Styggeste hund, indeed. (via b3ta)

Dschinghis Khan and Cheesy Eurodisco completionists might want another video of the band in action, this time doing their society thing with an orchestra and everything. (Realvideo clip for download, via Listener Ed)

"Put the camera down and worry about your friend." (streaming quicktime video, via fazed)

And you thought it was wet in Glastonbury? (Doh! This is Glastonbury)

Expansive art/photography site with many well known photographers and works. (via peremeny.ru)

Great page of Brazilian Bossa Nova and Samba MP3s, via Listener Zach.

How do you get extra credit from Professor Fuck? (via b3ta)

Nice street art / graffiti sketchblog.

Live in a giant coconut or create your own flying carpet. (via gizmag)

Go get lost in superbad.

Where sheep are nervous.

Psychedelic Christian Radio: Pastor John Rydgren MP3s

(MP3s: all 19 of Pastor John Rydgrens Silhouette radio spots are linked below the jump along with more illos that Dennis Worden's did in 1988 for our former zine, LCD.)

When Liz played Pastor John Rydgren's Rinky Dink last Tuesday, I was reminded of just how great and weird Rydgren's radio spots were, and what a strange confluence of events created the country's only Psychedelic Christian format back in 1967.

Heading into the Summer of Love, Rydgren was the crafty head of the TV, Radio and Film Department of the American Lutheran  Church. Years before the words "Jesus" and "Freak" became joined at the rib, the straight-looking Rydgren created a daily radio show called Silhouette in which he became the reassuring, resonant-voiced Hippy for God. Rydgren wrote, announced and programmed Silhouette, taking his musical and cultural cues from The Electric Prunes, Herb Alpert and the cover of Time (Is God Dead?), with a vocal delivery that was straight out of the Tom Donahue / Scott Muni / Ken Nordine school of breathy baritone radio seduction. Silhouette dropped all the counter-cultural codewords of the day into a heady mix of Peace, Love, Sex, Drugs and Jesus. Not to mention Fuzzy Guitars.

My Commodore 64 Secret Life

I grew up with a Commodore 64 as my best friend. The C64 offered a new world to escape to from the banality of 5th grade. This is a story I always tell and people respond with a blank stare eventually uttering, "What was the point?  That's pretty stupid." So you just shouldn't bother reading this.

When I was ten I acquired a 300 baud modem. Services like Quantum Link (later to become AOL), which were primitive chatroom networks, soon lost appeal after I was repeatedly kicked off for excessive cursing. I started logging on to local BBSs (bulletin board systems) where a SysOp (one lonely guy) set up his computer to receive other users one at a time. The BBS’s featured message boards and download/upload areas. I was still involved in the real world of life, not totally ensconced in the world of computers, but I was looking for a way out, something new that would let me escape the constant ridicule of being fat and weird. Unfortunately these local BBSs were not the answer because they were usually run by old geezer hobbyists and most of the BBS members were from his close circle of friends.  On the message boards they usually talked about RUSH.

A Real Revolution

For Independence Day I thought I'd share this little gem (MP3) I discovered years ago on a thrift shop cassette. Apparently recorded as an "aural invite", this re-working of The Beatles Revolution is guaranteed to get John Lennon spinning in his grave.

So you can sing along at home, I've transcribed the lyrics:

You know we have the right solution - well you know -
we all love the Slim-Fast plan.
Guaranteed health & nutrition - well you know -
you can trust the goodness in a can.
And when you talk about weight-reduction
don't you know that you can count us in.

Don't you know we love to be
So slim... (x3)

You know that it's a revolution
have you heard
about the latest Slim-Fast lines
boffo pretzel twists & cheese curls,
frozen entrees - delicious frozen de-lite.
For only thirty-eight dollars & fifty cents a week
you can have all the Slim-Fast that you can eat.

Don't you know we love to be
So slim... (x3)

MP3 Download Dinner Bell For July

As if being humiliated in an interview as sell-outs on video by Extreme Elvis wasn't enough, this prank phone call (MP3) to Gabe from costumed hardcore mutants the Locust comes courtesy of a Buddyhead compilation CD (the same disc with the Iggy Pop song where he inexplicably focuses on beating up Moby). Slipknot's "manager" offers a more-than-willing Gabe an opening slot on his client's upcoming South American stadium tour, prattling on about "mask rock" taking over.

Taken from the Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God label comp Industry Wannabes and Radio Anomalies a few years back (but heard for many many years on WFMU and elsewhere), there is little in the way of words to describe the J & H Productions guy. Except that many of you who work in the "recording industry" are familiar with messages "pertaining to" this kind of biz (MP3).

Jobriath was Elektra's big attempt to replicate Ziggy Stardust, and was a financial disaster for everyone involved. Relegated to being a footnote in rock history, only recently has attention turned to this strange and charismatic artist who fell between the cracks; Morrissey even produced a retrospective compilation for Sanctuary in the UK last year. Here's a rare live excerpt of Jobraith in front of an audience of mostly industry cronies toasting their hopeful Future of Rock, his song "Good Time" live at the Bottom Line in NYC, 1974 (MP3).

We've been enjoying a whole lot of recent South African female vocalists lately in the library, in particular Dorothy Masuka, with a great disc called Hamba Notsokolo donated by our own Doug Schulkind. Here's an MP3 of the track "My Parents", taken from another appearance of Masuka on a 1950's collection on the BB label of Hot Jazz and Dance from South Africa.

Another soul-stirring voice from another land is Gurmeet Bawa, a Punjabi vocalist with total power, emotion, and as you can here on this MP3 of "Bolia" from her 1988 album Love and Life in the Punjab, one hell of an ability to hold a note. I often think of Bawa everytime American Idol is on, wondering what it would be like to watch Simon, Randy and Paula dive under the table and render the whole contest nil, but perhaps she is somewhat of the Indian equivalent to Kelly Clarkson after all? Or so you might ascertain by reading this recent quote from a review of one of her homeland concerts: Rajni and Sandeep, third year engineering students said, “She is too good. She expressed deep feelings. Her songs were as soulful as those of Celine Dion in Titanic. She has bound us to our culture.”

Chubby Checker may have told us to do the Twist, but while we were doing that, he went to Holland, smoked a lot of pot, and recorded a single called "Stoned In the Bathroom". The flip, "My Mind" (MP3) is found on the new Toytown compilation of obscuro psych, called Nightmares At Toby's Shop, findable via Forced Exposure.

The Japanese artist known as Yann Tomita records under a lot of different names, including Pardon Kimura. Here's a track by Yann, aka Pardon, called La Strada, (MP3) not to be confused with the Fellini movie of the same name.

Another artist who makes up recording pseudonyms faster than we can keep track of them is Lassigue Bendthaus, aka LB, aka Senor Coconut, aka 386 DX. As 386 DX, he records cover versions of western and russian pop songs. Fans of Ken's new automated co-host Julio may enjoy this version of Erik Clapton's Layla.

On a recent show, our own Mike Lupica did a nice collage of Glenn Miller's In The Mood along with a hilarious segment from an unidentified Joe Frank episode. So overwhelmed was Mike with inquiries over this fine radio moment that he has excerpted it in MP3 form for your downloading pleasure: In The Mood For A Prayer (MP3).

In honor of Nike ripping off Minor Threat and then apologizing over the incident, here is a cover version of Fugazi's Waiting Room by Germany's Mambo Kurt (MP3).

Finally, in our new download offerings for the month of July, here is Go Home Productions' mashup of the Velvet Underground and Christna Agui!era: Girl Just Want to Say Goodbye to Rock and Roll (MP3). It's not new, but it sure is great.

WFMU's Amazing Floating LP

As much as we here at WFMU tend to reject characterizing ourselves as "nutty," "wacky," "boffo," "screwy," "batty," "balmy," "loony," "goofy," "jokey," "nutso," "waggish," "bonkers," "cuckoo," "harebrained," "zany," "daffy," "cockamamie" or otherwise anything even closely resembling a state of being "totally bananas," this can still be a pretty weird place to hang around. Case in point: WFMU's mysterious and now-legendary floating record album.

Yes, WFMU's alphabetically-arranged record library is not only home to some of the tools of our trade -- that trade being freeform radio -- it is also home to a genuinely nomadic record. A record that can not be filed alphabetically. A record that knows nothing about structure or boundaries and refuses to hemmed in by that whole limitations trip the other records and CDs are always trying to lay on it. Considered in this light, it is very much a microcosm of our mission here at WFMU. In another way, it's a corny Russian jazz record with a name I can't type out on this keyboard. What makes it truly unique, however, is that every time one of our DJs comes across it in the stacks, it is their duty to then refile it someplace else. Anyplace else.

As you can see by the detail of the jacket, this tradition dates back to 1990. No one around here will fess up to starting it, however... Even Irwin claimed not to know anything about it, and he constantly ribs me for being such a kid in comparison to his elder statesmanship at FMU. (He recently reasoned that he'd been into the band Grauzone (click to stream Real Audio) since "before [I] was born", which leads me to believe that Irwin thinks I am only 11 years old.)

But back to the matter at hand: Hokey Russian Jazz records. Here's an MP3 (right-click to download)  of the second song on side one, the title of which reads something that (in Russian) looks like "Mpncmotpn Aahr MactylIok", which according to one of those online translation programs means "Electric Pork Tuxedo". (Other songs on the record not available for download include "Aeebea" ("Asphalt"), "By Abte Aoepbl" ("Lick my Boots"), and "Xaomanhte B AaaoIihn" ("Marmalade and Heroin".)

Word on the street is that this hot combo's LP was released in a limited, hand-numbered run of only 800 copies (ours is #49). In order to secure yours, I'd suggest you soon start jockeying for position at our next Record Fair, to be held November 4th-6th in Manhattan. In the meantime, I'm heading downstairs to re-file the LP. I'm feeling drawn to somewhere between the Creedence records and the last RJD2 12"...

Culture Shock MP3s From Doug

MP3s: 20 of them contained in this post.

Disco from India? Doo-Wop from Malawi? Rap from Vietnam? Salsa from Scotland? With bagpipes?

They're all included here in the online version of Doug Schulkind's 2004 marathon premium, Culture Shock. Dont pass up this amazing collection of jaw-dropping, mind jarring cross-cultural music hybrids. Eighty minutes of melodious map-melters that set the world on its ears. A bonus: The music is not just goofy, it's good!

1. Salsa Celtica - Fuerte
Combining rumba with reels, son montuno with ceilidh tunes, this Scottish conflagration has the hots for Latin music. And speaking of hot, check out the scorching bagpipes - doing the violin's charanga part no less - on this track from 2000. Download MP3

2. The King Elio Boom - El Fulo
Identified as "highlife ragga" on the disc this comes from, "El Fulo" has more in common with Congolese soukous. It's a slice of funk typical of the champeta created by the African-music-crazed youth of Baranquilla and other port cities on Columbia's Caribbean coast. Download MP3

Podcasting Just Got A Whole Lot Easier

Welcome to the future. Presuming you already possess a pair of white headphones connected to some sort of digital audio playback device, please continue neglecting the need for human contact in favor of listening to hours of entertaining sounds in the safety of your own personal bubble. Easily indulge in this fantasy through the magic of podcasting.

WFMU is offering up 16 programs for portable playback, and now the new version of iTunes (v 4.9) supports podcasts. Here's a quick lesson on how to get our podcasts pumping through iTunes:

1. In iTunes, go to the Advanced menu and select Subscribe to Podcast
2. Highlight, copy and paste the http...xml links listed below for the program(s) of your choice in the resulting Subscribe to Podcast window and click OK (more help right here)
3. iTunes will now download the most recent show to your computer, and automatically download new shows each week as they are added

All WFMU podcast programs are listed below, just highlight, copy and paste the "http" address into the "Subscribe to Podcast" window of the new version of iTunes (v 4.9):

Music programs
Advanced D&D (breakcore) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/SU/SU.xml
Antique Phonograph Music Program (early recordings, 1890s-1920s) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/AP/AP.xml
Coffee 2 Go (underground hip-hop, podcast-only program) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/CG/CG.xml
Downtown Soulville (soul 45s) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/SV/SV.xml
Sinner's Crossroads (gospel, religious) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/CR/CR.xml
Thomas Edison's Attic (early cylinder recordings) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/TE/TE.xml

Talk Shows
Aerial View (archives, with Chris T.) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/AV/AV.xml
Aircheck (unusual moments in radio) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/AC/AC.xml
Communication Breakdown (with Chris T., not safe for work) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/CO/CO.xml
Dave Emory (anti-fascist researcher) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/DX/DX.xml
Jonesville Station (with Glen Jones) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/JS/JS.xml
Professor Dum Dum's Lab (metal, phone-in) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/DL/DL.xml
Seven Second Delay (with Ken Freedman and Andy Breckman) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/SD/SD.xml
The Speakeasy (with Dorian) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/SE/SE.xml

Sound Collage
Audio Kitchen (found sound) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/AK/AK.xml
Do or DIY with People Like Us (cut-ups, audio artistry) - http://podcast.wfmu.org/PL/PL.xml

Another Lionel Double-Shift

If you live within the radio reception realm of New York City, you might wanna check out Lionel today. (Or you can stream here.) He’s filling in for crusty old talk radio legend Bob Grant again on WOR (710 AM) from 4 to 6 this afternoon (broadcasting now as I write this post), and also doing his regular show which starts at 11 p.m.

It’s kind of a throwback to Lionel’s glory days when he took Bob Grant’s slot on WABC in the mid 90's. While it probably won’t be as wild and wooly as all that, it’s always entertaining to hear Grant’s rabid right wing callers interact with Lionel’s mischief. Today he’s taking apart the Bush speech from last night. Bob Grant must be rolling in his... Oh, I’m sorry. Bob’s still alive.

If you’re unfamiliar with Lionel, he’s a unique and slightly twisted talk host who I talked about at length in a post last month, which you can read here.

I was listening to Lionel’s show the other night and I almost thought I was back in Florida listening to Lassiter again. For a taste, here’s an mp3 of 2 calls from that show– a clueless Christian, and a drunk and excited Lionel fan.

I wish Bob Lassiter would fill in for Bob Grant every once in a while.

Ten Commandments MP3s

In honor of the Supreme Court's wacky, FCC-like decision on the Ten Commandments, here are four Ten Commandment MP3s:

Charlie the Hamster Sings The Ten Commandments (via 365 Days)
The Ten Commandments of Love - Five Diamonds
Ten Commandments - The Fugs
Ten Commandments of Love - Harvey and the Moonglows

The Glass Harmonica: Stairway to Madness

Listener Max sends in this mp3 of Stairway to Heaven, as performed on the streets of New Orleans by Peter Bennett, Glass Harmonica player. To be more accurate, this guy (pictured at right) is playing a Glasharfe (or Glass Harp), the most common current incarnation of the rubbed glass instruments often referred to as Glass Harmonicas. A Glass Harp consists of a series of wineglasses, each filled with a different amount of water, so that a soggy finger rubbed on the glasses gets them vibrating at different tones.

The Glasharfe was popularized by Bruno Hoffman, the German virtuoso whose records rekindled interest in the Glass Harmonica (aka Armonica), and the compositions written for it from 1760-1820, when the instrument was the must-have accessory for parlors and sitting rooms. Here's a Realaudio archive of Hoffmann playing Fantasie in E Minor, from Bryce's July 25, 2004 show. You can play with a virtual Armonica here.

Video Game Concert

MP3 download: Super Mario Brothers Theme performed by a symphony

Imagine a mega-fest where video game music is performed by an orchestra to a synchronized laser show, stunt performers act out moves that would put out even the most dextrous of index fingers, and concertgoers are invited onstage to compare joysticks. Just when you thought gamers couldn't get any geekier, along comes Video Games Live.

Who wants to guess the male to female ratio at this event?

Other video game related items: Commodore 64 music and Super Mario Brothers in acapella (video).

Takeshi Terauchi MP3s

One of my favorite guitar players is Takeshi Terauchi, one of the many Japanese guitarists inspired by The Ventures 1962 Japanese tour. Takeshi had a whammy bar, and boy, did he know how to use it. The '62 Ventures tour inspired an entire musical movement in Japan, the Eleki scene. (Eleki is short for Eleki Boom, or Electric Boom.) Here's the mp3s for the album This is Terauchi Bushi, by Takeshi Terauchi with his first band, Bunnys (not the LP pictured at right).

UPDATE: Thanks to Cecile-Anne for the song titles!

Kanjinncyou | Sado Okwsa | Musume Doujyouji  | Mamurogawa Ondo | Komuro Oiwake | Cyakiri Bushi | Genroku Hanami Odori  | Noue Bushi | Hanagasa Ondo | Oedo Nihonbashi | Kazoe Uta | Tukuba Mountain

Amazing DJ Yoda Mini Mix

A few listeners asked me about this track I played this morning, so here it is for you: DJ Yoda's Annie Mac Mini Mix (mp3), which he did specially for Annie Mac's BBC radio program last month. And here is the set that DJ Yoda did for a British magazine, which we aired on Re:Mixology a few years back (realaudio archive ).
mp3 via boomselection

Treasure Trove of Found Sound Vocal Workouts

MP3s: 30 of 'em, below the fold.

Back when WFMU's Professor was still producing The Audio Kitchen - the greatest found sound radio program of all time - he threw together a compilation for WFMU's record library called Sing Along With The Music. It featured 21 tracks of people singing along with music, usually in the privacy of their own homes. Those are the first 21 tracks I've included below, and I've added nine more that seem to fit in with the theme.

While it's easiest to refer to most of these recordings as karaoke, it's not that simple. Karaoke usually takes place in bars, with an audience. What sets most of these recordings apart is that they were, for the most part, recorded at home, usually without the intention of an audience ever hearing them. This gives most of the recordings a refreshing lack of self consciousness. Of course there are exceptions. Moritz' version of Bohemian Rhapsody (mp3) definitely sounds like a karaoke performance, and Biz Markie's version of Benny and The Jets (mp3) was intended to have an audience. Those singalong tapes were how Biz built his early career.

The 911 Operators

Almost everyone agrees, September 11, 2001 was a really lousy day in America. Thousands died horrible and violent public deaths– in airplanes, in burning and collapsing buildings, and by jumping out skyscraper windows. All of us around New York City who watched two of the tallest buildings in the world burn and fall will never forget seeing something macabre and previously unimaginable take place that morning.

It was easy to take it personal around here-- Photocopy posters everywhere bearing the photos of the missing, people spontaneously sobbing on the street on in the subway, and the sick smoldering stench that lingered around here for months. It wasn’t until weeks later that I realized that people all over the country were probably just as affected by the replaying of slickly edited movie-trailer style videos of the day's disasters on television. (You can download and watch a couple mpg versions here and here)

While the smoking hole downtown is gone and most of the mess was cleaned up years ago, the memory remains ugly, distinct, and powerful. And what’s worse, despite Bush’s promise to “smoke” out the “evildoers” responsible for all the American death that day, nobody has been caught or tried for those ghastly crimes. Sure, we were immedietly told the attacks were the work of a vast network known as “Al-Qaeda” led by a guy named Osama Bin Laden. but the billions spent there hasn’t been any fresh leads on capturing these alleged terrorist masterminds since our forces inexplicably let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora over three years ago.

Cleaning Out My Inbox

Time to move this stuff from my inbox to yours...

One of the true wonders of New Jersey.

Japan-bashing artwork by Korean schoolkids.

Finally, a roadmap to the wide world of sexual deviancy. Human Furniture? Turkey Men?

Amazing German karaoke version of Bohemian Rhapsody (MP3). I've got a ton more stuff like this to put up in the next few days, watch for it!

Cool trippy movie called Ministry Messiah by Dutch filmmaker Gints Apsits (Quicktime).

The Museum of Retro Technology, including rocket powered bicycles and alcohol-fueled record players.

Van Gogh's letters, indexed by keywords like "venereal" and "hallucinations."

A Russian painter's incredible online gallery and even more incredible gallery interface.

All hail The Toilet Union.

Catalog of various end-of-the-world scenarios.

Wonderful art by Alex Gross.

The Fifty Greatest Song Parts. It would be fun to do a FMU version of this.

Copyright-free spoken word samples of famous literary works via Penguin Books.

Beautiful gallery of early photographic technique of cyanotypes by photographer Edwardo Aites.

Good new mashup of Led Zeppelin and Snoop Doggy Dogg (mp3).

Do Not Click On This Link. 

Thanks del.icio.us, boingboing, peremeny, Sarah, Music for Maniacs, fazed, beatmixed, J-Walk

Summertime Necessities

The tropical suburbs of Jersey City are burnin' these days, my friends. The air is thick and chunky to the point where it sticks to your body as you navigate from your spread-legged stance over the fan to the cooler of Coronas across the room. To the air conditioner-deprived among us, days like this signify life becoming a frustratingly expensive hobby of trouncing from Mexican restaurant to movie theater to bar to bookstore to friend's car to... the local drag strip? Maybe if you're lucky enough to have one in your neighborhood, but if not, you'd do right to check out the greatest musical harbinger of the sweaty season: Big Stick's summertime anthem "Drag Racing". Right click to download the MP3, and then consider the legendary lyric:

"...In the summer I wear my tube top and Eddie takes me to the drag strip..."

Kathy McGinty is Waiting to Talk to You

Hamburger Records has happily made the Kathy McGinty CD available once again, which is, for the uninitiated, one of the most genius of the prank call CD's of all time, period. The premise is simple: horny guys meet "Kathy" on the internet, and are invited to call her up, but wind up unknowingly speaking to a sampler hooked up to the phone triggering some appropriate and not-so-appropriate responses to the dudes in question ranging from "you have a sexy voice" to "I'm a burn victim". Even as some guys figure out that they aren't speaking to a real live breathing gal (which often becomes evident when the sampler goes crazy "malfunctioning"), it doesn't seem to matter to them, which is one of the more disturbing aspects of this collection. The new deluxe reissue features extra tracks, liners, and a now a photo of "Kathy" (above). Thanks to Derek of Hamburger (also pictured above as the "Kathy Robot Operator") for letting us put up this MP3 (super X-rated just FYI). I'm not sure I anticipate a Comedy Central puppet interpretation on this one.

Yat-Kha covers Motorhead, Joy Division

First heralded by Brian Eno after judging a 1990 musical festival in Kazakhstan, Yat-Kha have been enduring purveyors of traditional khoomei (throatsinging) sounds of its native land of Tuva in South Siberia, while being aware of the western worlds of rock and experimental rock (claiming Deep Purple and Sonic Youth as faves). Leader/bassist vocalist Albert Kuvezin has steered his group into much acclaim over the years and to much larger audience, thanks to hooking up with the Chieftains' management. Kuvezin even has made it to the WFMU studios, once in an in interview on on Rob Weisberg's program (real audio link to the show archive as a whole) and again on Ken's show for a short live performance with Yat-Kha (pre-archives, sorry!). Their new disc Re-Covers finds them taking on songs by Hank Williams, Kraftwerk, the Stones and more. Here are MP3s of their versions of Motorhead's "Orgasmatron" and Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart."

Jackson Moonwalks

Sorry. Just felt the need to be completely irresponsible and announce the news before it's announced. This is a blog, isn't it? And it'll make a great headline in the tabloids tomorrow.

UPDATE: You heard it here first, because we have no journalistic ethics whatsoever. Congratulations, Michael! Thanks Jones!

Have a pro-Michael Jackson mp3 by James Kochalka Superstar.

UPDATE2: NY Post and Daily News both run with the same picture and the headline "Boy, Oh, Boy!" But The Post comes through: June 14, 2005 - Michael Jackson moonwalked off scot-free from a kiddie-sex rap and every other charge against him yesterday.

Matching Japanese Doll Women

Remember the miniature singing Japanese fairies from the Godzilla movie Mothra? They were The Peanuts, and their appearance in three Godzilla movies launched hugely successful singing careers. Here's an MP3 of The Peanuts serenading Mothra, and there are two full albums worth of The Peanuts MP3s here.

But as successful as The Peanuts were, they merely paved the way for another female Japanese duet, Pink Lady, who ruled Japanese popular culture for three years in the late Seventies, and dropped off the radar just as suddenly after their attempt to break into the US market sputtered following their TV show, Pink Lady and Jeff.

Pink Lady and The Peanuts both represent an archetype of Japanese pop music - twin female singers who sing, act, talk and dance in unison. While the basic act has been updated with the times, it hasn't completely disappeared. Puffy Ami Yumi fit the mold, and in a weird way, so do Afrirampo, g-strings and pasties notwithstanding. Here's a realaudio archive of Osaka's Afrirampo rocking it on Brian Turner's 9/14/2004 show. They may not talk in unison the way The Peanuts did, but the old archetype of matching doll-women singing and acting cute wont fade away. It runs deep. Girls just like to have fun. And wear matching dildoes.

WFMU Podcast Update

Lots of news on the WFMU podcasting front! This is the first week of our new summer schedule, and three new shows join the roster of WFMU podcasts - Professor Dum Dum's Lab, Aircheck, and The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment, bringing the number of WFMU Podcasts to 18! And one show that we're already podcasting - Do or D.I.Y. with People Like Us - will switch from re-runs to new shows. The new FMU schedule is here, and our podcast page is here. (Podcasting delivers the MP3 archives of these shows automatically to your computer and/or MP3 player so you can take the shows with you.)

Our two podcast-only shows both have new episodes out. The new episode of Chris T's FCC-unfriendly Communication Breakdown can be downloaded directly here (MP3), or streamed from this page. And the new installment of Noah's biweekly podcast of unreleased hip-hop, Coffee To Go can be downloaded here (MP3) or streamed from this page.

Memphis Phone Sex

One of the most inspired phone pranks I've ever heard was when WFMU's Frank Balesteri (aka The Vanilla Bean) called a phone sex outlet in Memphis, Tennessee and pretended to be a guy with an Elvis fetish. But Frank's real stroke of genius was turning the tables on the actress/operator and getting her to fantasize about Elvis - his guitar-shaped swimming pool, Elvis getting laid in heaven, the jism on his blue suede shoes. Frank even gets her singing "It's Alright, Mama," or at least all the lyrics she could remember. Too bad this was never aired. Or so I was told. Download the MP3. (Not safe for work. Taken from WFMU's 2-CD set, Radio Archival Oddities, Vol. 2)

Language Removal Contest

Here's an end-of-the-work-week audio contest for you. Below are links to ten mp3s of ten famous people speaking, with all of the actual language removed from their speech. All that remains are the interjections, gutteral noises, yawns, screams, background sounds, denture-clacking, tongue flapping and other sonic ephemera that accompanies normal speech. It's not as hard as you might think - various tracks contain all sorts of audio hints as to the speaker's identity. The first person to identify all ten speakers correctly wins a WFMU T-shirt and double CD of live music from WFMU. Put your guesses into the comments section.

The mystery speakers are: Maya Angelou, Phillip Glass, Elton John, Thelonius Monk, Marilyn Monroe, Henry Rollins, Susan Sontag, Sylvester Stallone, Gloria Steinem, and Malcolm X.

And here are their MP3s to download: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten.

MP3s courtesy Language Removal Services.

Rock Jack

Rock Jack is Ezra Lux, the 3-year old son of Aesop, the drummer of Bay Area heavies Ludicra. Jack worships Andrew WK, has been compared in vocal styling to the Germs' Darby Crash, and sings about such important topics as Darth Vader, cannibalism, and the toilet. Impressive, considering some of the things Fred Durst has sung about, and he's all grown. Two of Jack's songs are up on his My Space page, and here's another MP3 of a cover of Van Halen's "Get Me a Doctor." Aquarius has his CD Belly Bones for sale as well.

Bust a gut

MP3s of Ice Cream Truck Music: Mr. Softee Tune | Anonymous Ice Cream Truck Song | Ghetto Ice Cream Truck Song (personal favorite)

Summertime weather has hit the eastern seaboard. Sidewalks in NYC are clogged with thousands of stainless steel dirty-water-dog outposts, scads of pasty-legged, flip-flop sportin', post-hibernation sun-seekers, and various ice cream truck jingles reverberate off of windowed high-rises.

Ring in the junk food season:
Burger blog (via BuzzMachine)
Hot Dog blog
Pizza blog
iPoddable NYC pizzeria reviews

23 MP3s of Wild and Wooly Vocal Stylings

In honor of Donna's return to WFMU weekly schedule (Wednesday's 3 - 6pm, beginning June 15th), here are the MP3s of her 2001 marathon premium, Babble. She described it this way:

All manner of vocal stylings, ranging from Ethiopian herdsmen serenading their cow's udders to avant garde types with microphones lodged in their esophaguses.

Cum Stains On My Pillow (Where Your Sweet Head Used To Be)

...and to think that I once played Cum Stains On My Pillow (Where Your Sweet Head Used To Be) on WFMU... Ah, the good old days...

For your pleasure, an album of "Country Porn" by Chinga Chavin (1975)
** NOT safe for work **

MP3s: 01 Talkin' Matamoros First Piece Of Ass Blues, 02 Asshole From El Paso, 03 Cum Stains On The Pillow, 04 Head Boogie, 05 Sit, Sit, Sit (Sit On My Face), 06 Dry Humping In The Back Of A '55 Ford, 07 Get It On The Run, 08 Tit Stop Rock, 09 4 a.m. Jump, 10 Cum Unto Jesus

Yo Deseo Ser Su Perro

It seems that "I Wanna Be Your Dog" by Iggy & the Stooges has achieved placement in that special realm of recorded sound we know as "The Popular Standard". Looky here to download many, many cover versions of the classic room-shaker.

And if those leave any doubt in your mind, come back here and check out some of our faves (all streaming Real Audio from the WFMU archives) such as:

- Archigram's mega ass-shakin' version of the Stooges' hit
- Allun's more amateurish take on those same mystical chords
- Bob Hund's uniquely Swedish rendering
- A bedroom-recorded acapella version by Ed Schneider
- A futuristic electrojam cover by Futon
- The terrifyingly atrocious parody from the Seven Stooges -- a record that comes with a barf bag.

I'm sure this is exactly the sort of thing that Iggy had in mind and he can thank DJs Bill Zurat, David Suisman, Ken, Irwin, Michael Goodstein, and Brian Turner for keeping the flame alive.

Buffies (First Season)

LINK: Quicktime Movie, 9.7 MB
Every utterance of the word "Buffy" made during the first season of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer," totaling nearly one minute.

It's an artwork by the great Chuck Jones (the Chicago-based aritst, not the also-great animator). Be sure not to miss his Isolation Studies which include audio edits from the TV Show "Loveline" (MP3s) Names, Numbers, No and Yes, Alright, Okay, Goodtimes. There's tons more great stuff to explore including Jones' original MP3s of  State Songs and the bizarre Penguin Rants. Finally, check his series of bizarre links pages starting here.

Girl Talk: Feel Bad About Yourself All Over Again

Girl Talk: Date Line was a late 80's board game. The objective was to get some dates.  It came with a cassette and a baby pink cassette player contraption. How the cassette factors into the game...I don't know...but it's full of irritating kids with Canadian accents calling each other for dates.  For your self-loathing pleasure, I have edited it down to the losers.

Girl Talk: Date Line - Losers! NO MATCH HERE! (mp3)

Helge Schneider Salutes CBS-FM

In memory of CBS-FM, I make this offering of mp3 cover versions by the great German comedian and ersatz rock star Helge Schneider, from his album Eiersalat In Rock. On this album, Helge is backed up by his rock and roll band, The Firefuckers: Nights in White Satin | Hey Joe | A Whiter Shade of Pale | My Generation | Ebony and Ivory | Whispering

Thanks to foreign listener C for making this post possible!

For Fun And Prophet

Forget the news. Aren’t you sick of all the reports of U.S. torture of foreign nationals, and how our country has been caught red-handed launching an illegitimate war? And who hasn’t had enough of the all the news cycle sucking sideshows– the runaway bride, the Motown Pedophile and the recent revelation of the real “Deep Throat”? It’s all so depressing and messy.

If you’re as distraught about what's going on in the world today as I am, then I may have some good news for you. The saucers may finally be on the way.

That’s right. All the painful political bickering and mind-numbing non-news may soon be reduced to forgotten trivia. The mother of all current events may be on the horizon– first contact.

A man who goes by the name of “The Prophet Yahweh” (a.k.a. “The UFO Summoner,” or just “Ramon Watkins”) claims that over the next few weeks he’s going to call down a bunch of spaceships over Las Vegas, and America, for the news media to film and fawn over. And while it all sounds kinda fantastic, the prophet did offer a taste of his powers to an ABC affiliate in Vegas the other day. And well, whatever happened it’s a pretty wild bit of news video. Download the windows video file here. And to really find out what this holy guy is up to, you can read his press release right here.

MP3s of 78 rpm Records

If you like to mix and match your ancient and modern technologies, then head over to Turtle's 78 rpm Jukebox for a batch of mp3s of records made during the acoustic era of recording, before electricity was used in the recording process at all. Turtle is offering up scads of public domain material  by Bill Murray and others who've been featured on both of WFMU's 78rpm / Edison Cylinder programs, Thomas Edison's Attic and The Antique Phonograph Music Program, both of which are also available as podcasts. via boingboing

MP3 Download Dinnerbell For June

Getcher clicking finger warmed up... Below you'll find more MP3s than you can shake a stick at. First, some newbies:

Ridiculous Trio - No Fun (MP3) Mike Hagedon on trombone, Rob Plesher on Tuba and Shannon Morrow on drums play the Stooges! More info and mp3s here.

Inflatable Boy Clams - Five songs from this proto art-punk female quartet from San Francisco, originally pressed onto two seven inch singles by Subterranean Records in 1981: Skeletons | Snoteleks | Marin | I'm Sorry | Boystown (MP3s)

Wayne Butane - MP3 excerpt from his new "Imbalanced" CD. Thankfully, people like Wayne Butane exist and have a lot of time to take millions of audio snippets and assemble them into brain-altering rivers of sound gush, that will often leave you chuckling in a most Beavis-and-Butthead-like manner before it all ends. Pure genius for the short-attention span potty-humor loving gnomes in the audience. Discs available at Flaming Canine's site

Chuck Jones - Loveline Questions (MP3) From Jones' Four Isolation Studies collection, a sea of strung together questions. No answers.

But there's more! Follow the link below for more new MP3s, plus a recap of all the MP3s from Beware of the Blog for the past month.

Don Campau and the Roots of Madness

One of the more fascinating records in the endless pile of weirdness that flowed into WFMU's PO box this month was the Roots of Madness reissue LP, recently put out on Minnesota's DeStijl label in conjunction with the Child of Microtones imprint (run by the Tower Recordings' Matt Valentine). Originally issued as a private press LP in 1971, the Roots of Madness was a collective of San Jose, Calfornia heads centered around a fellow named Don Campau who was clearly marinating in the remnants of ESP Records' lysergic freedom explorations in jazz, concrete, loose folk, and sound manipulation. The recordings breathed with a total musty basement air vibe, and were a defining bridge in many ways between the lost minds of the 60's and the high weirdness of the 70s that was yet to peak (think Residents, Faust). This particular LP Girl in the Chair is chock full of both the skronky and the sublime with an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to musicmaking interspersed with the odd over-the-top beatnik spoken passage ("The Old Man's Ass" is particularly memorable one). Campau touched base with us recently and pointed out that some other recordings from this area are available on CD-R at his site.  It's continually amazing that so many locales have their own subculture of weirdos with sprawling bodies of recorded output from this era yet to be examined. We've thankfully been given retrospectives from the LAFMS, midwest freaks like MX-80, Chinaboise, Debris, and so many other ensembles that have added local flavor to their worship of Stockhausen, Stooges, Beefheart etc., that one can only wonder how much more lurks in the sub-underground of America yet to be put into the spotlight. Thanks to Clint from DeStijl and Matt Valentine for casting one on this camp in 2005. Here's an excerpt (MP3) of "Realisation II" (with shortwave, walkie-talkie, trumpet, trombone, percussion) and a spoken piece that follows called "Nihility In Being."

"What Do You Think of Hip-Hop Music?"

Brian Wharton AKA Thigamahjigee AKA Thig AKA Sharkula is Chicago character you can usually find in the Wicker Park neighborhood or on an El platform selling his homemade hip hop tapes and CD-Rs. His odd MC persona has been compared to Kool Kieth and Busta Rhymes.

He recently put out a vinyl-only release under the name Sharkula compiled from years' worth of tracks recorded in studios, on friends' computers, and on his rusty cassette recorder. His most recent CD is called “Martin Luther King Jr. Whopper With Cheese”…if that isn’t a brilliant play on words, I don’t what is.

But my favorite Sharkula/Thigahmahjigee material comes from the cassettes he records of himself walking around freestyling and approaching strangers to ask them what they think of hip-hop music. He often asks for the person’s phone number…”to receive information on hip-hop music.” I’m not sure if the interviewees realize the conversation is being recorded and the tape will be sold for $5, but most give their phone numbers without blinking
(I edited out the phone numbers)

Thigahmahjigee - street tape excerpt #1 (mp3) (NSFW)
Thigahmahjigee - street tape excerpt #2 (mp3)

Read more about Thig/Sharkula here: 1 - 2 - 3

The Robots of WFMU

Everybody loves a good robot or two. Here at WFMU, we have three of them. Two of them call up our DJs from time to time and say things like "telemetry channel - zero zero." From time to time, you might hear one of our DJs announce on the air that they have to go back to music right away because the robot is calling. It's true. When the robot calls, a bright strobe light goes off in the studio, everybody has a seizure and the DJ is supposed to drop everything and find out what the robot has to say.

Our third robot, I can't tell you what he does. But he lives on Mike Lupica's desk and he has an arm that moves back and forth and does stuff. Dave the Spazz opens his show with a robot. You know the one - Hal, from 2001 A Space Odyssey. The one with the heavy breathing who goes "Just what do you think you're doing, Dave?"

Seven Minutes In Deadwood

The TV show Deadwood has taken the art of cussin' to new heights. Fans of the show are even known as fucknuts. But despite what you may have heard, Deadwood is not all blowjobs, cocksuckers and titlickers. Specifically, in a sample 60 minute episode, 53 minutes of it were 100% curse-free! I painstakingly edited out all the clean phrases and passages from one episode of Deadwood, distilling the show down to its brilliant essence. I now present to you Seven Minutes In Deadwood (mp3, not safe for shit - wall to wall cursing and ethnic slurs). (For fans of the show, this is episode ten of season one, the episode known as Mister Wu.)

The Demented Leftist Cabaret of Kollektiv Rote Rübe

Here are the mp3s of an album called Paranoia by the mysterious German band known as Kollektiv Rote Rube. The album was released in 1976, and was a collaboration between Kollektiv Rote Rube and the better known German band Ton Steine Scherben. At least that's what I think; this band has been a real mystery to me since receiving the cassette from a friend of a friend nearly 20 years ago. If any German speakers can provide their best guesses at the track titles or any other information, please add it to the  comments section. Kollektiv Rote Rube appear to have been a Munich-based theater group who collaborated on this album with Ton Steine Scherben. Beyond that, I dont know much but there is information online in German about them, and they are listed as a musical influence on a Nurse With Wound page. My favorite tracks are the disturbing number five, eight, ten, fifteen, sixteen & the filthiest song I can play on the US airwaves, number seventeen (immer wieder fickin?).

Happy listening: One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen | Seventeen | Eighteen | Nineteen.

New Communication Breakdown Podcast now available

The new edition of Chris T.'s utterly filthy and totally unsafe for work Communication Breakdown is now available for download, which you can do  here (right click to download MP3.) You can also stream Communication Breakdown as you would any other WFMU archive by going here, or sign up to have each new edition of the show automatically downloaded to your computer via the miracle of Podcasting, which you can learn more about by visiting Podcast Central.

The Haka

And speaking of sound effects, the greatest chant on earth is The Haka (mp3), the hundred-year old Maori rugby chant of the New Zealand All Blacks team. Hakas also refer to the stance that players take while doing The Haka, and recently, mystery Hakas have been popping up around New Zealand. And oh yeah, The Haka is patented, so don't get any ideas, you rugby teams. Or DJs.

Karate Sound Effects

Life without karate sound effects is not worth living. (MP3 of "Stick Fight" from Bruce Lee's Game of Death.)

ODB Tries Out For The Part of Mister Ed

MP3: ODB tries out for the part of Mister Ed.

Last year, when Ol' Dirty Bastard died, there had been rumors about him possibly doing the the voice of Mister Ed in the Fox TV remake of the series. Then today in my inbox arrived this mp3 (right-click to download) of the alleged audition. Is it true? Did Dirty really try out for the role of talking horse? And while you research the possibilities, experience ODB's interpretation of Phil Collins Sussudio from Brian Turner's show of 11/23/04 (streaming realaudio).

Nice Girls Don't Wear Cha Cha Heels

MP3: Razormaid remixes "Cha Cha Heels" (excerpt)

I was listening to Sigue Sigue Sputnik's "Jayne Mansfield" (click for real audio, from an archive of Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine), and realized that the song contains a reference to cha cha heels. Of course, this term was popularized in the 1974 John Waters flick, Female Trouble, by the ultra-fabulous juvenile delinquent Dawn Davenport ("I'm a thief and a shitkicker... and I want to be famous!").

Exploring the topic further, I discovered that Bronski Beat had written a song for Divine (aka Harris Glenn Milstead) to record, entitled "Cha Cha Heels." Unfortunately Divine passed away before the tune was recorded, but as a tribute, Eartha Kitt offered to lay down the vocals. The result is available above as an MP3, as remixed by Razormaid. Divine did manage to record a few tracks before her departure, and WFMU's DJ Monica was all over that drag queen sass... check out "Native Love (Step By Step)" (real audio) for a fix.

And be sure to get yourself a proper pedicure before slipping into a pair of cha chas. (Thanks for that one, Metafilter)

Sweet Young Children Grab Bag

The Genius Kids (mpg) - an astounding video of a North Korean girl playing xylophone backed by a band of violins and melodicas.  via Rob Pongi, who also does a zany dance party meets Uncle Floyd show  in Tokyo.  Browse around his site, there are many other wonders.

Mini-Pops - Disco Medley (mp3) - an odd and severely grating children's record from the 80's.  This is the "Disco Medley" which includes "YMCA" and "In the Navy".  A creepy leering adult voice backs up the children on "Celebration".

Raooul - Possessed (mp3) - Raooul was an East Bay Lookout band from the early 90's comprised of 14-15 year old girls.  Their music, which they called "Jail-bait Core" is a limping screech that always make me laugh.  This is from a Very Small Records comp...their split LP on Lookout might still be in-print.

Babies with Respiratory Problems Choking (mp3) - Someone gave me this tape years ago.  The only information  on the tape is a hand scrawled "Child". 

Fatty Jubbo, Age 11 (mp3) - A recording of me, age 11.  I was obsessed with Malcolm Jamal Warner, dildos and heavy metal.  I pronounce "Fetish"  FEEETISH.

University of Michigan Inpatiant Therapy Program - Oh Come All Ye Faithful (mp3) -  From a record of a Children's Psychiatric Hospital Christmas Concert (oh...it's never too early).  This was taken from the wonderful Pastor McPurvis Vinyl Orphanage mp3 Talent Show website.  Pastor McPurvis posts a new album every week of amateur and vanity press records.

Dylan turns 64

And the station's cassette still sits in its "Break Glass In Case of Bob Dylan Death" box in the 3rd floor hallway. Happy birthday to Bobby Z. and enjoy this MP3.

Chamber Muzak MP3s from Real Fish

In 1990, our Program Director picked up a batch of dollar LPs from the local Tower Records annex. Amid the dross were three albums from a Japanese band called Real Fish. Little is known about the band - they were somehow related to the great Japanese producer Haruomi Hosono (of Yellow Magic Orchestra), and all three of their records came out on the Invitation label. But the music was unique and fascinating - it has elements of Japanese muzak and allusions to the "new chamber" stuff that was floating around Europe at the time (Belgian bands like Julverne - realaudio clip). But it's on the undescribeable side, which is why I love it so much. If only all muzak were half this intelligent. Here are mp3s of seven tracks from their two albums - the aply titled A Very Big Band in Heaven (1984) and When the World Was Young (1987).

1. White Gloves  2. Rendezvous  3. When The World Was Young  4. Monday  5. Beach Parasol  6. Parade   7. Size of Love

Draaiorgel!

These beautifully ornate Dutch street organs, or "Draaiogels" populate Holland streets.  Some beefy thick-neck turns a crank and the mechanical organ churns out a tune.

I once conversed with a Holland native on Soulseek about these organs:

"I hate them.  They're operated by drunkards, usually with their retarded brother, always smoking a cigar.  Then they get very belligerent when you don't give them money.  I hate them"

I would rather have these beauties on the street  than your average busker bleating out bland renditions of Billy Joel songs!

Dutch Street Organ - De Vijf Beelden (mp3)
Dutch Street Organ - De Arabier (mp3)
Dutch Street Organ - De Vijf Beelden (mp3)

Draaiorgel website - complete with info on collections, events and CDs.

Testicles + Truth = Hope

On Tuesday, British MP George Galloway came before the U.S. Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to deny his alleged involvement in the Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. Instead of meekly defending his honor to the big bad senators, in his opening statement Galloway delivered perhaps the most powerful, eloquent and concise condemnation of the Iraq War that any group of war lovin’ American politicians has ever had to sit through. (Excluding the floor speeches of Robert Byrd, who may be eloquent and powerful but is rarely concise)

The Simpsons as Described by WGBH

MP3: Simpsons episode with "DVS" audio captioning for blind people.

The other night, I turned on The Simpsons, only to find that the program's audio had a weird narrator describing almost everything that was happening. At first I thought that The Simpsons were parodying the voice-over approach from another Fox show, Arrested Development. It turns out that my broken VCR was picking up an additional audio channel instead of the main one, and in the case of The Simpsons, I was hearing the DVS, or blind captioned version of the show. DVS stands for Descriptive Video Services, and it's the audio equivalent of closed captioning for the deaf. Here's a large MP3 of the DVS version of The Simpsons "Rapture" episode from May 8th (right click to download).

Prom-a-rama

MP3 download: The Fugs "Nothing"

WFMU volunteer extraordinnaire Jared shares this story with us:

As my own high school prom approaches, I recall what my dad passed along to me about his senior prom in suburban Long Island in 1967. At his prom, along with the usual assortment of non alcoholic refreshments, dresses, tuxes, corsages, and dance music provided by a local band, there was an additional attraction. After the last slow dance, a special guest performer -- The Fugs took the stage and rocked the gymnasium for the graduating class of 1967.

Take a listen to a few of these Fugs tunes captured from the WFMU archives, and imagine how quickly the carnation boutonnieres wilted on that fateful night...

“Wet Dream” (Real Audio)
“Government Surveillance Yodel” (Real Audio) from Pseu Braun's show
"Ah, Sunflower Weary of Time" (Real Audio) from World of Echo with Dave Mandl 

Stay tuned to WFMU for the latest updates and trends sweeping the nation's high school dances.

Wartime Lionel

Lionel is funny. And in talk radio these days, funny is hard to come by.

Sure, if you get your jollies hearing jokes about environmentalists, the poor, and the disenfranchised you probably can’t stop slapping your knee during the Rush Limbaugh program. But in general there’s not a lot of wit on talk radio lately. For the most part, the talk radio format has become a humorless void of political grandstanding and smearcasting. Blame the right wing morons for turning an entertainment medium into a barren kiosk of propaganda.

Lionel’s show originates from WOR-AM here in New York City, but it’s syndicated nationwide. In fact, the radio mega-corporation Clear Channel has been gradually creating new “progressive talk” stations, which feature Air America programming, and Lionel’s show is often tucked into the schedule. Which is strange in a way, because Lionel isn’t really a political talk show host at all.

He makes it clear on his show, he is NOT a liberal. However, he is most certainly a lawyer and an eccentric raconteur with a wacky vocabulary and an acid wit. On the side, he takes on a few stand-up comedy gigs too.

I’ve listened to Lionel for a long time, and traditionally he focuses his quirky intellectual laser beam on legal issues in the news, as well as sex and “news of the weird" kind of stuff. Actually, almost any topic is fair game. If it’s strange, titillating, or pisses him off, he’ll talk about it. But lately, Lionel is a little less lighthearted than he used to be. The war in Iraq and the war-promoting lockstep rightward march of talk radio has REALLY pissed him off. Yet, it seems to have made his show a little better. He may have the perfect temperament for relaying really bad news and trying to make sense of it.

Rocky Horror -- Norsk Version

Ain't ya just been dying to get yer paws on these?

MP3s:
Science Fiction/Dobbeltforestilling, , Bryllupsangen, Alltid Lys Hos Frankenstein, En Hip Transvestitt, Tiden Blir Skrudd, Damoklessverdet, Muskelmann-Sangen, Eddies Sang, Muskelmann-Sangen (Reprise), Ta Meg, Ta Meg, Det Hender Iblant, Eddies Teddy, Planet-Manet, Fra Forst Av Kunne Alt Ga An, Jeg Vil Hjem,  Super-Helter, Science Fiction (Reprise)

Cookie Monster: The Real Most Influential Musician of All Time

MP3s: Ted Shred's Michael Jackson vs Cookie Monster and Daniel's Death Metal Warmup Exercises (right-click to download, plus streaming Realaudio samples below).

I have to take issue with Program Director Brian's characterization of "Animal" from the Muppets as the most influential musician of all time. I didnt think I would have to explain this to you Brian and I hate to publicy correct you, but "Animal" is a puppet. Made of cloth and wire. He doesn't really play the drums at all. When you watch "Animal" during a drum workout, the drums you hear are played by a session musician working for Sesame Workshop. That Buddy Rich clip was done with puppets and trick photography.

Just because the term "Animal From The Muppets" brings up an impressive 807 google citations doesnt mean that any drummers out there actually want to sound like Animal. So how can he be an influential musician?

I grant you that Animal may be a convenient lynchpin for current drummers and rock writers. But he is far from the most influential musician of all time. He's not even the most influential Muppet. If we seek to honor one musician who has been extraordinarily influential, a lone artist who has singlehandedly influenced world wide musical markets and scenes for over a decade, from the deepest underground to the most mainstream, we need look no further than Cookie Monster.

I am Anger and I am Lies. I am Cheat. I am Steal. And I am Murder.

Renounce!

RENOUNCE!

[thank you Cake & Polka Parade]

Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy

Francis E. Dec, Esq. MP3s:
Rant 1
Rant 2
Rant 3
Rant 4
Rant 5
Rant 6

Francis E. Dec, Esquire, of 29 Maple Ave, Hempstead, New York, is one of the most mysterious characters in all kookdom. He plastered cars with paranoid posters and mass-mailed thousands of his rants to unwitting victims, mostly in media outlets. One of these packets fell into the hands of L.A. newscaster/talk show host "Doc on the ROQ" of KROQ-FM. In 1985, when Doc was employed at WZUU in Milwaukee, the station received a bundle of Dec flyers, which had been mass mailed to the media. He sez: "One chilly Sunday in '86, at Y-108 in Denver, I recorded the 41-minute tape now in circulation, using odd music tracks (Goldfinger, 'Pieces of Ice' by Diana Ross, Tomita, Capitol Library Series) mixed in quite at random, though it turned out nicely. I also used echo-processing for the faint 'mental' effects on the longest track, which I call 'LONG Island Lunacy.'" These are those sessions. It's amazing stuff. You can read some of the transcripts of the pieces here.

Recordings Of Champion Livestock Auctioneers

The Livestock Marketing Association in Kansas City sells great CDs and videos of champion livestock auctioneers. The LMA's 42nd annual World Livestock Auctioneer Championship will be held June 18 at the Tulsa Stockyards. Listen to streaming audio of auctioneer champions from 1963-2004 or round up MP3s of a few of my faves:

Stenson Clontz - 1985
Cecil Ward - 1964
Steve Liptay - 1976

Also from the LMA site...

Get your protest on

Like most people with even a chicken-nugget sized brain, I'm pretty pissed off about the state of the world most of the time and I'm betting that you are too. By (multiple) request, here is one of the truly great protest songs of our day and age. Sam and Joe's "Save the Children" (Right click to download MP3 -- Not safe for Work), as it was meant to be heard in its full, un-edited glory. This track is originally from the excellent "Fear of Smell" compilation (1992, Vermiform Records) which is still available here. It's a rant that not only covers the general "war is bad, it would be groovy if everyone had enough food" ideologies, but also ventures into the largely unchartered "I demand the right to masturbate whenever I want to" sentiment.
 

The Road From Yamasuki to Bananarama

UPDATE: MP3 now available for download - Yamasuki. Thanks, Finder's Keepers!

One of my favorite recent records is a reissue from 1971 called Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki. It's a wild amalgam of psychedelic pop, fuzzed out guitars, children's choirs and karate chants, coming together to create a sort of multi-kulty rock opera. The record started off as a cross-cultural dance project intended to bridge gaps between Europe and the Far East, but the two French pop producers in charge of the music quickly got carried away, learning Japanese, importing children's choirs and even hiring a famous Judo master from Japan to yelp and roar in the background. OK, so I'm a sucker for yelping. Especially Japanese yelping.

Furry Music

Do you like animals?  Do you like furry animals?  Do you identify with a particular furry animal?  You may already be a Furry.

Do you like radios?  Do you listen to the radio?  Do you listen to the radio, even when it's not talking?  You may already be a Music Fan.

Do you identify with furry animals?  Do you like music?  You may already be a Furry Music Fan.

Jesse Says No to the Bitches and the Ho's

Rev. Jesse Jackson publicly denounced *some* radio stations for turning a profit by playing songs that use degrading terms like “bitch” and “ho.” Because we are a non-profit station, WFMU’s own coddled bitches and ho's remain immune to the reverend’s wrath. Celebrate with us, won't you? Presenting the honor roll...

WFMU's Bitches
Soft Pink Truth  “Big Booty Bitches” (Real Audio) from an archive of Advanced D&D with Donna Summer
DJ Johnny Blaze "Rick James Bitch" (Real Audio) courtesy of Nickel and Dime Radio with $mall ¢hange
Gary Wilson "Chromium Bitch" (Real Audio) from Scott's show
David Bowie  “Queen Bitch” (Real Audio) from Black Ops' show
Elton John "The Bitch Is Back" (Real Audio) from an archive of Charlie's show
Koonda Holaa & the Beetchees "Fat Bitch Must Die" (Real Audio) from Scott's show
Consume & DJ Paedofile "Bitch my Smack Up" (Real Audio) from an archive of The Pounding System with Clay
Lil’ Kim  “Queen Bitch (excerpt)” (MP3) thanks to Megan (WMV), always on bitch-patrol
Notorious B.I.G. “Just Playing (Dreams)” (excerpt, MP3) aka “Dreams of Fucking an R&B Bitch” (another excerpt, Real Audio) lovingly selected by WFMU's Monica, hand-picked from her vast card catalog of bitch

WFMU's Ho's
Lidell Townsell "Get Da Hoe" (Real Audio) from an archive of Mike Lupica's show
DJ Assault "Hoes Get Naked" (Real Audio) from Nickel and Dime Radio with $mall ¢hange  
Ludacris "Area Codes" (Real Audio) from one of Debbie's fill-in shows
Baccara “Sorry I’m a Lady” (MP3) courtesy of Ken Freedman, who knows his disco ho's; the Baccara ladies yearn to let their inner-ho's loose as they feast their eyes upon a handsome gent.
Tragic Mulatto "She's a Ho" (Real Audio) from Mike Lupica's show
Dr. Dre  “House Wife (excerpt)” (MP3) from The Chronic (2001), you can't make a ho a house wife
DJ Rod Lee "Gimme a Ho RMX" (Real Audio) from Nickel and Dime Radio with $mall ¢hange   

And if that isn't enough for you, consider this self-described Pimpumentary. 

Bootleg Browser

That's bootlegs as in live concert audio, not as in mashups.

The most awesome Who cover ever

The Hospitals are a duo originally from Portland, relocated to San Fran, pretty much consisting of Adam Stonehouse and a few rotating guitarists over the last couple of years. Cutting to the chase, they're aptly summed up on the In the Red Records site as the Sound of Passing Kidney Stones. and if you ever wondered what Greg Ginn and the Electric Eels joining forces to cover "Happy Jack" would sound like, well, here you go (MP3). It's from their latest Yakisakana label 12" The Rich People, and if your earholes can take more, there's a whole live session on WFMU from the Hospitals here.

My iPod Weighs a Ton

Killer collection of Public Enemy MP3s here. Live stuff, remixes, and other related oddities. Also included are the tracks from one of those hokey interview CDs that get serviced to college radio stations which only contain the answers to the scripted questions in the CD's booklet. These marvels of the record industry enable any doof with a radio show to do a "live" interview with the band or artist in question. Years ago, on another radio station, I interviewed Michael Hutchence of INXS in this fashion, shortly after his strangubation.

She Be She Strike - Long Version

MP3s: 30 Minute version of She Be She Strike and three songs from Inuit singer Tumasi Quissa: Iyagaaluit, Irngutapiga Qiayuapeomat and Niaquvinialuit.

A few weeks ago, I posted five excerpts from a legendary underground cassette called She Be She Strike,  which captured some amazing radio from an Eskimo janitor and his friends who allegedly took over a Canadian radio station when the regular staff went on strike from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (or CBC - "She Be She"). The original post is here. A few people asked me to post the full unedited version, so I'm putting that up now (MP3, right-click to download). Two people from the CBC stumbled onto the original post, and they're trying to get the tape translated from the original Inuktitut. I'll report back when there's info about these tapes from the good folks at the CBC. 

The 30 minute version is rich with Eskimo radio goodness, but listening to it again makes me realize that there is an even longer version that this 30 minute version was made from. I heard that on WFMU in the late Eighties, but there's no trace of it now...

Jim Roche "Learning To Count"

WARNING: Not safe for work. Not safe for home. Not safe for your car. Not safe for anything.

MP3s:
Hippys Are Living Proof, 1971 (3:31)
Every Man, Woman, And Child, 1972 (7:53)
Fight It Out, 1972 (11:46)
Bubble Blower, 1972 (5:08)
Straight Razor, 1972 (9:14)
Mama Bear, 1972 (8:50)
Power Poles, 1973 (3:31)
Swoops Down Outta The Sky, 1975 (12:33)
Cadillac, 1973 (5:52)
Store Up Your Treasures in Heaven, 1974 (7:29)
Whatcha Doing Down There Boy, 1975 (7:32)
Whatsda Matter Wid Jew, 1977 (5:33)
Lucky T's Texaco, 1975 (6:17)

In the 1970s, Jim Roche, a performance artist from the deep South, made his way into the New York artworld and began doing pieces in galleries where he'd go into a trance-like state and channel redneck characters from his home turf. The result was this 2 LP set, "Learning to Count," released in 1982 by a museum in Kansas. These are the most intense audio works ever put to vinyl: insane rants, heavily racist, sexist. Many, many people will be offended by Jim Roche: the refrain of "Hippys Are Living Proof" is "Hippys are living proof that a nigger will fuck a dog." And it gets worse. Much worse. No one is spared: Jews, Asians, Hispanics, etc. are all targets of Roche's rage. Needless to say, we don't endorse Mr. Roche's fantasies, but for intensity's sake and for true horrifying outsider madness, nothing -- we repeat -- nothing outdoes this.

Donna Summer MP3s

WFMU's own Donna Summer (aka Jason Forrest - no, his cease and desist letter hasn't yet arrived) has a page up of MP3s from his label, Cock Rock Disco. Donna beams his show / podcast to WFMU from Berlin, and it airs Thursday nights at 6pm on WFMU.

Simple Minds' aggro days

Before they were John Hughes movie staples and inevitable stadium draws for a brief time in the '80s, before the singer fathered a kid to Chrissie Hynde, moved on to future Mrs. Liam Gallagher Patsy Kensit, and followed in the footsteps of messianic bretheren U2, Glasgow's Simple Minds had quite a few beercans lobbed at them as under the not-likely-to-be-endorsed-by-Greenpeace monicker Johnny and the Self Abusers. The band cut one 7" on the Pickwick label in 1977, "Saints and Sinners" b/w "Dead Vandals" and singer Jim Kerr dodged loogies while guitarist Charlie Burchill played in a pair of shoes covered with an erector set. The single was called by the NME "a drab parade of New Wave that jerks off aimlessly into the void" and the band was short-lived until Richard Branson signed them as Simple Minds to Virgin to follow a definitely more artrock/Roxy-inspired muse on their first album Life In a Day. Here's an MP3 of  the never-released Self Abusers track "Pablo Picasso".

Two More Telemarketer Strategies

Following up on Andy Breckman's pretend-to-be-retarded telemarketer ploy, here are two more strategies. First, Eugene Mirman negotiates a killer long distance rate, while simultaneously destroying the gay agenda (MP3 download). Second, Jessica Kane reveals the most subversive technique of all - being nice! (streaming realaudio from Kenny G's April 13, 2005 program)

Vomiting The News

MP3 of a News Announcer from Sydney, Australia reading the news and losing her lunch, all  at the same time. via b3ta newsletter

Yippie Yi Yo

Thirty two versions of Ghost Riders In The Sky.

GISM still hates you

God In the Schizoid Mind, Guy in Suicide Mission, Guerilla Incendiary Saborage Mutineer. No is is quite sure what GISM stood for, or if it was true that singer Sakevi Yokoyama stabbed a fan for wearing a bootleg T-shirt. But as "KI-2" (real audio) from their last album SoniCRIME Therapy (2001) can attest, they were Japan's most insane hardcore band, maybe the world's.

Angela MP3s

MP3s: Give The Children a Chance, Little Children Pt. 1, Little Children Pt. 2, Lenox Ave., Rapping, m-l-k

Back in the early 80s, little Miss Angela Simpson -- then 6 years old -- made an LP on Spectrum Records simply entitled "Angela." According to the liner notes, she was some sort of a prodigy, even going so far as to appear at the Apollo Theater. But to our ears, she's just awful. I mean, wonderfully awful; WFMU-style awful. Out of tune warbling, saccharine rhymes, and a voice that grates on even the most open-minded of listeners puts this gem into the pantheon of the unlistenable. File this under Atrocious. Needless to say, we love it.

The Internet Just Gave You $1,000

In 1967, stopping to sniff the germanium, Philips yoked their wagon to the Future, launching a series of electronic and musique concrète releases called Prospective 21e Siècle.  These records featured beautiful covers — intricate constructions of polarized foil, transfixing in their kinetic light play.  Naturally, being drawn to shiny things, hairy record dealers will happily eat their mothers' faces for the opportunity to septuple the price of anything Philips and silver.  In the loo at one FMU record fair, I regrettably walked into a dealer snorting lines of his own dandruff off Bernard Parmegiani's Violostries.

Dutch label EARLabs kindly supplements their CD offerings with free downloadables.  And there you can grab painstakingly declicked MP3s of the four-disc Electronic Panorama box.  Some of it's dry; some of it's amazing.  But even if you hate tape music, if you don't download it, you're throwing money out the window.

    "I'm worth $1,000."

I'm An Ass Man

I'm An Ass Man (MP3)

Let's face it: we're not big Karen Finley fans. She's the embodiment of artsy bullshit  pretention. But once -- just this once -- back in the mid-80s she hit the nail on the head. Perhaps the raunchiest thing ever recorded. Just delightful.

Habemus Papem... for now

MP3s: Pope Paul Pot - "This is Your Leader", Prats - "Disco Pope", Paternoster - "The Pope is Wrong" (all submitted by Brian Turner), plus tracks by JP2 and the Black Pope available here (posted by Cardinal Freedman).

I know, I know. We've all had Pope overload. The Pope dial was turned up to eleven. Pope-mania swept across the globe like bacne (blame Mike Lupica) on a teenager as the MC of VC passed on and a temporary replacement was selected. But here at WFMU, we realize that nothing exceeds like excess, so here's a collection of tunes that may help you warm up to B16.

Something About Livestock

MP3: German language version of the Mr. Ed theme by Ralf Paulsen

Here I am, tiptoeing around the minefield of federal language laws during the most severe FCC crackdown in history, and the first lady's all over the TV, making jokes about the president jerking off a horse! And it's not the first time that the notion of hammering away on a big old slab o' horse cock has been granted this special legal exclusion. Just last November, the FCC ruled that the Fox television show Keen Eddie was AOK, despite its scene of a prostitute jacking off a racehorse.

Now granted, the FCC's decision on Keen Eddie was an agonizing one to make. The vote was 3-2, in favor of Fox, with Michael Powell casting the decisive vote, and we all know what a fan of horse racing he is.

MP3 Danceteria

MP3s: Anquette - "Janet Reno" (thanks to Matthew Perpetua) and Funk Neurotico - "Untitled" (submitted by Brian Turner)

I know what you're thinking: "Hey WFMU, 1997 called and they want their Janet Reno jokes back." Well, friends, before jumping to the conclusion that we're just dissing JR and her stately shoulders a decade too late, take a listen to this gem of an MP3. This Anquette song (MP3) was written when the future Attorney General was State Attorney of Florida; a booty-lishus celebration of Janet Reno's tough stance on deadbeat dads!

And for those of you in need of some rear-end rumblin' breaks, check out this Brazilian kid rapper (MP3) from the Funk Neurotico collection. Brian Turner thinks this underage rhymer gives Troy the Wonder Boy (Real Audio) a run for his money. 

Hole in My Heart All the Way To

MP3s: Zhou Qisheng - "The Model" (thanks, Kenny G) and Zhou Xuan - "One's Young Life Like a Flower" (courtesy of Brian Turner)

Chinese cover of Kraftwerk's "The Model" (MP3), intro includes a chorus of auto engine samples.

Brian Turner submits this Zhou Xuan MP3 of incredibly beautiful sounds from a collection of great 1940's performances for assorted Shanghai films. Xuan was a beloved, successful Chinese icon, considered one of the country's premiere golden voices over the course of more than 100 films. Some interesting English translations of song titles on the disc: "Servant Girl Hongniang Is Ender Interrogation With Torture", "Gather Area Nuts", and "A Flower Inserted In Garment's Button Whole".

A Reputation to be Reckoned With

MP3: The Frogs "I Only Play for Money" (Live on WFMU)

Brian Turner sez:
From a session on the Stork Club, 7/18/97. We haven't heard from the Brothers Flemion in quite some time, in fact the last bit of music we received was Sebastian Bach's CD where Jimmy was in the backing band. In the mid 1980's they released an album of Gay Supremacist folk songs, put out a collection of songs examining the history of racial relations in America that no one would release for a decade despite the fact the songs rival some of Elvis Costello and Big Star's best moments, and did some other classic pop material with some questionable topics. This particular song conjures up the Bitter Rock Star. While they were here they put porno screensavers on the computers of staff members who were out of the office.

Read more about The Frogs and their unrelenting irreverence:
Interview with Dennis Flemion from 2000
Article from 2001

Avant Kid

Moog School MP3s: Intro, The Brain At Work, Emission Embossment, Interim Few, and Conflict

These are all from a 7" put out by the Julia R. Masterman school in Philadelphia; 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th graders exhibit their own slices of electronic music, under the direction of teacher Virginia Hageman.

(MP3s kindly offered by Brian Turner and Kenny G, via BOHA)

Hip-Hop Airchecks

Tons of hip-hop radio mixes from the Eighties available as MP3s here, including Mister Magic and former WFMU DJ Steinski.

Conet Project MP3s

Hard core WFMU Listeners are probably familiar with The Conet Project, a four CD set of shortwave recordings of "Numbers Stations." Now the entire set can be downloaded directly from Irdial, here. Numbers stations have been used by various international spy agencies to communicate with the agents in the field. A typical numbers station will repeat an endless series of numbers, only a tiny portion of which actually carry any meaning. It's the needle-in-a-haystack approach to secure encryption. Via One Man Safari.

Imagine...

Dubya singing Imagine and Walk on the Wild Side (MP3). Here's the collection it came from. More Dubya remixes here. Thanks to Listener Michael.

Do Geese See God?

Here's an MP3 of Palindromes, performed by Baby Gramps on WFMU in June of 1988, hosted by Nicholas Hill. Baby Gramps is a Seattle based performer who is best described as a cross between Popeye and a Tuvan Throat Singer. This track is his crowd-pleasing ode to palindromes, words, phrases (or in his case, entire books) that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. Not to be confused with the current Todd Solondz movie.

She Be She Strike

Eskimo Radio MP3s: Ayatollah Khomeini, You Are My Sunshine, Labatt's Beer Ad, Heart of Stone, Marijuana Humor.

The story and the tapes began circulating around the cassette underground in the early-eighties: an Inuit Radio station operated in Northern Canada by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was vacated by its regular staff due to a CBC strike, and the station was temporarily programmed by its Eskimo janitor and his buddies. The phrase "She Be She Strike" (CBC Strike) can be heard repeatedly on portions of the tape which are not excerpted here, but the truth may never be known until the language can be identified and a native speaker translates the entire recording, hint hint.

The story isn't too far-fetched though; the CBC operates dozens of Inuit radio stations through it's Northern Service, and the record shows that they've had their fair share of strikes over the years. You can listen to some of the Inuit stations over the net these days, like this daytime-only station (Windows Media feed).

Red Hash Revisited

I'm extremely excited about the forthcoming reissue of Gary Higgins' Red Hash, one of the pinnacles in lost-soul beardo psych/folk records out there. Tony Coulter's been playing this record for years, and more recently I've been hearing its praises sung to me by several of the people whom I generally sit up and take note of when they crow about something they deem a musical treasure, namely David Tibet of Current 93, Ben Chasny of Six Organs of Admittance/Comets On Fire, and my friend Zach Cowie. Zach, one of the most passionate dudes I know when it comes to music, made it his mission to track Higgins down after Chasny gave him a burn of the LP as a gift. Higgins' soulful acoustic opus Red Hash was born in 1973 after years of kicking around the NYC folk-rock club scene, backing up people like Gary U.S. Bonds, even playing with Simeon pre-his Silver Apples days. After an unfortunate pot bust, Higgins was sentenced to two and a half years in the pen, and as a direct result of that, a 40 hour recording session ensued in the time prior to his incarceration. One listen to "Thicker Than a Smokey" (MP3) and you immediately are sucked into the world of someone who feels a last chance at getting his feelings down in his music, maybe forever. It's gorgeous, pure, ultra-personal stuff that I became immersed more and more in with each listen. Last year Zach excitedly told me "I found him!" He not only called every Gary Higgins in the phone books of Connecticut where he allegedly resided, but wrote to every Gary Higgins he could find in the country. Band members have been reconnected, Higgins made a quick one-song appearance during a recent Six Organs show at Tonic, and word is a full-fledged release show with members from the original band line-up is in the making. Drag City (the label which thankfully Zach has landed at) reissues the disc July 26th.

Monica's Disco Panel

My own personal disco mentor and WFMU DJ Monica hosted a panel discussion on Disco April 28th at the Lincoln Center Library for the Performing Arts. Interesting article by David Hinckley in The Daily news here. And while you consider radio's non-role in Disco, download another Baccara track "Koochie-Koo" or this classic seven inch by The Funktionaries "Deutschland Uber Disco" (MP3s).

Podcast Number Fifteen: Coffee To Go

We launched our fifteenth podcast today, Noah Zark's podcast of underground, unreleased hip-hop, Coffee to Go. This is our second podcast-only show and our first podcast-only music show. You can download the MP3 of the first Coffee to Go here, and you can sign up to receive all future shows (and our 14 other podcasts) on our podcast page. You can also listen to Coffee to Go as a streaming archive on this page. There will be a new MP3 of Coffee to Go every other Wednesday at Noon, starting today. Noah describes his new show:

"When it comes to hip-hop, radio either supports the major label funded sounds or the independently released up & comers. Where do unsigned acts go? Look no further; "Coffee 2 Go" is THEE spot to drop your most raw and grimey unmastered demos! The half-hour shows are hosted by Noah Zark, DJ BrownBum and The Custodian Of Records. Download the MP3 of the show every other week as a new batch of tracks gets their due! A new edition of the show will be available for download or streaming every other Wednesday."

Jersey City: Get Laid, Be Happy

Hot on the heels of being dubbed America's eleventh sexiest city, WFMU's hometown of Jersey City has now been crowned the country's third happiest place to live. Not to mention that we are the single most happy city on the entire eastern seaboard! Sez volunteer Therese, who notified us of our new distinction:

First we're the 11th sexiest, now the 3rd happiest.  Or maybe we're the third happiest because we're the 11th sexiest?  I'll leave that to the statisticians to determine..

What's not to be happy about? Our mayor is affectionately known as Diaperman, we're sitting atop a bubbling cauldron of toxic chromium and the Muslim and Coptic Christian communities are buddies once again! We're Happy! Living Happily! Now we're veritable heroes of happiness! (MP3s)

Article here.

Pray For Refreshment

Want to pray for President Bush but dont know where to begin? Just click here for the Presindential Prayer Team's website, which provides up-to-date prayer guidelines pertaining to the prevailing agenda and itinerary of the executive branch. It's kind of like buying one of those books of sample lottery numbers if you can't think of a lottery number of your very own. On the President's current prayer agenda: praying for "refreshment" at the presidential ranch in Crawford, Texas, and praying for the removal of roadblocks standing in the way of confirming capable judges, whatever the hell that might mean! And be sure the check out the Presidential Prayer Team radio spots, including this one (MP3) about how God protected George Washington despite being shot four times! You could become immortal too, if you would only join the Presidential Prayer Team!

Simpsons MP3 Free-for-all!

More than 100 songs from The Simpsons, organized by season. Get 'em here.

Via Metafilter

The Anti-Edit

For those of you who like your curse words unencumbered by annoying non-profanity, here is the entire NWA album, Straight Outa Compton, with all the adjacent non-curse words edited out. Thanks Steinski! Like the site says, hurry, before they get their cease and desist letter.

Longitudinal Recording Is For Squares, Man!

The next generation of MP3 players will have ten times the capacity of your current machine, once the next great leap in hard-disk storage capacity arrives. It's all explained in this "Schoolhouse Rock" type animation, courtesy of Hitachi Electronics.

Image courtesy of Hitachi.

London Downloadable

In the spirit of sharing local quirks, I’ve got all the Forest City MP3s you can handle. With a population of about 360 000, my home London Ontario can be summarized as “2 hours from Toronto or Detroit”. Musically it’s best known for it’s long gone punk scene, which taunts today’s rock deprived Londoners at The London Ontario Punk Rock Scarchives. While not punk, the most well known acts to emerge from the toxic Thames include Guy Lombardo (streaming realaudio, slowed for your enjoyment) and the WFMU favorite, The Nihilist Spasm Band (streaming realaudio).

You sure as hell don’t want to come here today, so if you really want a taste of London get your plug-ins ready and head on over to CHRW’s London Music Archive which features tons (or tonnes) of complete albums in glorious MP3 from all the big and small acts ranging from 1967 to today.

Must have albums on the site are:

The Nihilist Spasm Band - Vol. 2

The Nihilist Spasm Band - Every Monday Night

The Nihilist Spasm Band = 7x~x=x

The Nihilist Spasm Band - Live in Japan

63 Monroe - Stinkin' Up The Joint (Maybe the greatest London album ever)

The Demics - Talk's Cheap

The Demics - The Demics

The Ledgend Killers - Better Than Hammerin'

The Legend Killers - The Legend Killers

The Napalm Babys - Who Cares About The Devil

Go ahead and check it all out and don’t skip the dozen or so What Wave compilations.
Next Time: Guelph Ontario. Brace yourself, Guelph isn't just another word for barf.

Take a cue

Sprouting from the west coast originally, I feel it is my duty to bridge the cultural divide between the laid-back and the quick-witted, the burrito and the hot dog, the pedestrian and the car horn, as it were. I want to promote the sharing of good ideas by informing folks on both sides of this continental land mass of the small but ingenious regional idiosyncrasies which may prove beneficial to other locales if adopted.

This time, I’ll share some oddities offered by Sacramento, CA. Although this city houses a little under half a million residents, quite a few small-town quirks have slipped through the cracks of the streamlining urban machinery.

Exhibit A.
Drunk boxing. That’s right, a bunch of tattooed, disgruntled slobs get together every weekend in someone’s backyard, down a few too many cans of domestic swill, and have at it. Just like an unpretty, unsynchronized, lowbrow version of Fight Club.

Exhibit B.
No Kill I. Why shouldn’t there be a Star Trek tribute punk band? With songs like “Starfleet Up My Butt,” “Wearin’ Red,” and “Neutral Zone,” even the nerds-that-be had to include them in the film, Trekkies 2. For your consumption, experience “Regulan Blood Worm” (MP3). If you are familiar with the ways of the Klingon, the No Kill I site offers up some links that may be of interest to your tortured soul.

Exhibit C.
Crash-a-rama. When a 50-something, junkyard-owning, ex-stunt driver is feeling down, he doesn’t just sit in front of the tube cursing Nascar. He orders up a flatbed truck and a few rock bands, inviting everyone with a six-pack of Bud and a faded Harley shirt to watch him relive his glory days. Up until last year, when the Sacramento equivalent of the Village Voice outed him, Johnny Crasharama would set up about 5 stunts on a piece of his own property in the outskirts of town, using old cars from his junkyard.

Exhibit D.
Pin-a-go-go. This pinball convention actually happens just outside of Sacramento, but is definitely worth a mention. Every year, slurpee-filled dads in dirty t-shirts cart their sons to an almost-abandoned fairground, where they pay $5 to spend all afternoon teaching their kin to launch, flip, and tilt.

I now invite my fellow bloggers to share the secrets of a small town near them... I've heard a lot of hype about Maplewood, nudge nudge.

A Public Service Announcement

The best public service announcement we ever received was this one here (MP3 download), which was mailed to every radio station in the country by Donald Wildmon's American Family Association, which apparently still harbors fantasies of liberal gestapo squads shoveling heaps o' Bibles into the secular humanist bonfire. No word on whether this magical piece of radio theater generated the million signatures they were aiming for.

After that, the silver medal for funniest PSA has to go to Father Harry, God Squad.   I dont have the record handy, but the streaming realaudio is here. It's a touching tale of a young boy who loved his mother so much that he was forced to cut off his hands. Or should I say hand. Since he already lost the first one in an unfortunate fishing accident.

The Mexican government has a tradition of printing up public service posters with wonderful artwork portraying the hazards of Alcoholismo, La Prostitucion, the scourge of Drogadiccion and Los Problemas Sociales in general.

While no satire can top Donald Wildmon or Father Harry, that doesn't stop people from trying. Ebaum's world remixed a batch of GI Joe video PSAs, which earned them a Cease and Desist letter from GI Joe's parents. And then there was Evolution Contol Committee's We Will Rock You PSA (Streaming Realaudio).

But the ultimate Public Service Announcement - the Holy Grail for PSA hunters - is an Arthur Godfrey clip which was recorded at the behest of President Dwight Eisenhower during the height of the cold war in the mid-Fifties. Godfrey recorded an announcement which was to be aired only in the event that the US was attacked with Russian nuclear weapons. After all, who better to calm raw, irradiated nerves than the man who sang that great paean to abused women, Slap Her Down Again, Paw!

Six degrees, indeed

The task at hand seemed simple: dig up the dirt on early-80’s SF new wave band, BOB. With the internet at my disposal, I’d just pick up a few brief factoids, report to the blog readers, and then get back to twirling my hair and filing my nails. But oh, the tangents I discovered!

First things first. Delve into this nugget, BOB “The Things That You Do” (MP3). The tune was extracted from a self-titled single released on Dumb Records out of SF in 1980. A decidedly lethargic version of this song also appears on their "Backwards" album that was released on the label 3 years later. I wanted more info, but imagine the search terms I could possibly use in this situation: bob, dumb, San Francisco. Real helpful. Ok, so I was able to find a few useful facts...

Releases by Dumb Records
Ixna “Mi Ne Parolas” (click for Real Audio) Marina La Palma and Jay Cloidt, vocals in Esperanto.
Novak “Oh Farrah” single
The Survivors
Other Music (released on Nth Degree, a Dumb sublabel)

Now it gets really weird. I start searching for BOB’s members: Jim Lively, Dewey Bruse, Margret Blanche... found a few real estate agent name-twins, but still no BOB info. Then, wait, I live in a hole and I recognize this name... Pons Maar! That’s right, holy shit, this dude was not only BOB’s drummer, but also the Lead Wheeler in Return to Oz, the lizard-man in Masters of the Universe, the lead character in the TV show “Dinosaurs” AND the voice of the Noid! His website of art/video clips is here. Maar only appeared as BOB's drummer on the single, and was replaced by Dze Bayles by the time their LP was released.

On a side note, I learned that Return to Oz is apparently some sort of portal to my subconscious (I blamed the film for my childhood nightmares of animated mannequin heads on this very blog a few weeks ago). And thus, my adventure has come full-circle.

It Must be the Russians

Inspired by the chatter regarding THE RUSSIANS on this blog lately, I was reminded of this great link to old Russian Propaganda, Entertainment, & Military posters that was sent in by Listener Joe.

Which, in turn, reminded me of the (many) relevant tracks by one of the 20th Century's greatest poets, Attila the Stockbroker, and from his brilliant "Ranting at the Nation" LP, we present the following MP3s of intellectual accompaniment:

(Right click to download)

They Must be Russians

Russians at the Henry Regatta

Russians in the DHSS

Russians in MacDonalds

I first heard Attila on college radio back in the 80s and was immediately transfixed by the clarity of his rants, his often-hilarious demeanor, and what remains a wholly unchallenged sense of smart assed-ness. Some of his more recent works can be had by going here, or for a further taste of what Attila's been up to, here is a droplink to the RealAudio archive of his appearance on Pat Duncan's show from July of 2002.

While we're giving it up for the Russians, let's also pause and reflect on the sexual-hygenically minded brilliance of early 80s po-punk-new-wavers They Must be Russians and their cautionary epic "Don't Try to Cure Yourself" (Right click to download MP3) as well as this RealAudio nugget from WFMU's Listener Hour archives. November 2nd, 2002 edition with your host The White Russian. Сразить, мои друзья!

Hey, Big Fella

Admittedly, I do like a little height to my men. So do the people behind Giants and Girls dot com , a small site dedicated to big scary dudes and the babes who try to outrun them.

They've got several categories to explore, with my personal favorite being the laboratory section, which features stills from the most traumatizing movie I ever saw as a child, The Brain That Wouldn't Die. Of course, if you're just looking for some straight-up Richard Kiel, you'll want to check out page 4 of the Prehistoric gallery, and page 2 of the Modern gallery.

Here's a related treat: Ted Cassidy (Lurch) narrates the intro to The Incredible Hulk (mp3)

The Happy Listener's Guide To Mind Control

Back in the waning days of the Cold War, I made a cassette compilation of corporate, religious and political propaganda called The Happy Listener's Guide to Mind Control, and I offered it to donating listeners as a fundraising tchotchke for our 1991 fundraiser. Fifteen years, one new world order and countless layers of Orwellianism later, the MP3s for the Happy Listener's Guide found me, so I'm hypnotically compelled to offer the contents up once again, free of charge this time. Thanks to whoever took the time to rip them!

F'ing Example

In case all this FCC stuff has left you wondering just how to use the word fuck properly, here are two examples which showcase it's wide variety.

The first is a song created by North Korea to express their dissatisfaction with the USA for, among other things, stealing a gold medal. Hear the MP3 or view the video for a translation.

Second is a track from H. Jon Benjamin (friend of The Best Show) and is "like fucking perfectly fucking perfect and great and fucking great". Download the MP3 or experience the video.

Mao-ee Wowee

Now, I’m no art phag, but I do love me some commies. A friend in SF clued me in to Sui Jianguo’s “Sleep of Reason” exhibit that’s happening at the Asian Art Museum over thar. If you look closely, the sleeping Mao is surrounded by armies of plastic dinosaurs (images stolen from this blog). Click here for a candid photo of Marx during a recent sabbatical he took from being dead.

What kind of pinko station is this, anyway?

The Eat “Communist Radio” (MP3)

Real Audio from the WFMU Archives (mostly from Comrade Freedman's show):
Kenny G reads Karl Marx
Red Shadow (The Economics Rock & Roll Band) “Understanding Marx”
Felix Kubin Backed with Quotations from Chairman Mao 
Alabama Three "Mao Tse Tung Said"
“Commie Lies”
Lulu Bellle & Scotty “I’m No Communist”

The DJ Pope

All this talk about banging the Pope with a silver hammer to make sure he's dead, and how he was a rock star. I don't know about the silver hammer story, but this pope wasn't a rock star, he was better than a rock star - he was a DJ! He had a night (author makes internationally accepted gesture of DJ'ing by holding cupped left hand to ear while making scratching motion with right hand) - the best night of any DJ in the whole sanctified world! Sure he was a laptopper, but that counts! Sony actually put out a legit CD of The Pope's mixes in 1999. It was called Abba Pater. Download "Cristo E Liberazione," the hit single from it, here. Still don't believe me? Download your faith with another DJ Pope - Shelley Pope, aka The Black Pope - instead.

Don't see nothin' wrong with a little bump 'n grind

Natrona County High School students in Casper, WY are being denied their right to party (read the article here). The school is requiring students to sign a contract stating that they will not participate in "freak dancing, lap dancing, bumping, grinding, thrusting, dirty dancing and any dancing that involves excessive physical contact" during their prom. In retaliation, students are organizing a MORP (hint: number nine, number nine) as an alternative to the school prom, allowing their adolescent hormones to fully detonate, unhindered by contractual agreements. WFMU supports NCHS’s need to express sexually suggestive booty shaking on their own terms, and we heretofore suggest the following tunes for their MORP:

MP3s:
"Wide-Ass Whumpin"
"Damn, Your Booty Don't Stop"

Real Audio from the WFMU Archives:
Peaches, Gonzales & Feist “aa/XXX”  (from Scott's show)
Sexual Harassment “Sexual Connection”  (from Mike's show)
Missy Elliot and Smith and Hack “Track one and Get Your Freak On”  (from Ken's show)
The Incomparable Rutland Junior High School Ensemble “The Hustle” (from Monica's show)
Sonny Dublin “Pigimy (sic) Grind”  (from Black Ops' show)
Kenny G and Irwin “I’ve Had the Time of my Life” (from Kenny G's show)

(from Downtown Soulville with Mr. Fine Wine)
Too Sweet “Hustle and Double Bump”
Ellen Jackson “Ghetto Boogie”
Jackie Wilson “Shake a Leg”
Sean "Mr. Esquire" Taylor “Funky Soul Dance”

 

Your Emergency Preparedness Dollars At Work

The air staff at WFMU has grown accustomed to the electronic ravings of our Emergency Alert System unit. Periodically, it starts spitting out nonsense about an officially sanctioned "Unknown Event" which we are duty-bound to inform the public about, under penalty of federal fines. Then of course, there was that certain Tuesday in September when the unit didn't utter a peep, because (as the FCC told us later) certain emergencies (like truths) are "self-evident."

This is the $3,000 unit that the federal government forced us to purchase and install in our main studio so that the WFMU staff could keep you, the public, informed in the event of an emergency. (The fact that the likes of us are entrusted with such a duty should tell you something about the system's shortcomings right there.) But this past weekend, our beloved EAS unit pulled a fast one on us. It issued a "Civil Emergency Message"  issued by "A Civil Authority." Glen Jones was perplexed enought to call me at home about it. Announce it, I advised, and announce it Jones did. We had to announce it - that's the law. But what was the civil emergency - was Canada invading at last? Flaming hailstones? A mysterious odor? And who was the mysterious civil authority making this mysterious pronouncement - the governor? The mayor? The dogcatcher? Ours was not to understand - as broadcasters, we are merely proxies for passing on this momentous piece on non-information to the public at large, the better to quell public fears and sow utter confusion.

Checking the news later, it would be fair to assume that the civil emergency was related to the flooding caused by this weekend's rains. In which case it might have been useful to warn people of something specific, like.. flooding. But the flood warnings ceased a while before the civil emergency warnings began. Ah well. At least it wasn't an "unknown event."

Maybe next time, for clarity's sake, we'll throw on Johnny Cash's German language version of Five Feet High and Rising. (MP3).

MP3 Downloads for the month of April

May your cup overfloweth with MP3-age.

Compiled and edited by Music/Program Director Brian Turner with contributions from Kenny G, Ken Freedman, and Mike McGonigal.

The Emeralds

Little Howling Wolf - "Mr. Power Shaker"

Tony Mason-Cox - "Pickin'"

Asin - "Itanong Mo Sa Mga Bata"

Various - "Top 40 Radio's Swingin' Soft Drink Spots of the 60's"

Coyle and Sharpe - "Dog Face"

Brian Eno with the Winkies - "Paw Paw Negro Blowtorch"

Fucking Pigs - "Best Individual Song on the CD"

Iron Knowledge - "Show Stopper"

T.U.F. - "Blue Danube"

Van Morrison - "Ringworm" / "You Say France and I Whisper" / "Have a Danish"

To receive WFMU’s monthly e-mail newsletter, Blast of Hot Air (BOHA, click to read this month’s issue), featuring our latest MP3 downloads on the first of every month (plus other WFMU updates), sign up here.

Be sure to visit WFMU’s On The Download site, where we provide an easily digestable and comprehensive listing of each month’s MP3s collected from BOHA and Beware of the Blog.

Read about each of these MP3 tracks by clicking the link below...

DJ Riko's Whistler's Delight

A few listeners contacted me about a track by DJ Riko, called Whistler's Delight, so I thought I'd post it for you all. Download the MP3 here. It's kind of a "Stars on 45" for the whistling set. DJ Riko has a ton of other MP3 remixes for download here along with the full track listing of Whistler's Delight.

Communication Breakdown Blog

My new specially-built podcast Communication Breakdown is available now. You can stream it or download it. It runs about 42 minutes (it was a tough coupla weeks). Speaking of which, I hope to have a new show available every two weeks - and they'll eventually run one solid hour in length.

It's been a long time since I've done a show without phone calls. And I've never done a show that is wholly pre-recorded. I consider this thing a work-in-progress, as I mention on the Communication Breakdown blog. Yes, I created a "space", a place for me and you to "converse". Oh, I know it's not the phone. We're not conversing in real time. But let's talk anyway, eh?

(Is the Pope with Jesus yet?)

Abbie Hoffman

Here's MP3s of Abbie Hoffman's long out-of-print LP from 1969 Wake Up America!

People Like Us

The Sounds of Christmas an exquisite mix by People Like Us, performed live at the Tate Modern, December 18, 2004.

Marshall McLuhan Interviews

Two archival audio interviews with Marshall McLuhan (MP3): Marshall McLuhan on the Dick Cavett Show in December 1970 (30 minutes; along with Truman Capote and Chicago Bears running back, Gayle Sayers. Both Capote and Sayers participated in the discussion with McLuhan) and Speaking Freely hosted by Edwin Newman features Marshall McLuhan 4 Jan 1971 (one hour). Also, an MP3 copy of McLuhan's out-of-print Columbia LP, The Medium is the Massage (Side A, Side B).

Getting Genghis Khan on your ass

Thanks to John Neilson for alerting us to the hot rappin', crotch-grabbing sounds of the Mongol Hordes, carrying the frontline in Mongolia's continuing hip-hop scene that sprung up around 1991 upon the Soviets' exit. Along with democracy, Mongolians apparently also re-embraced Genghis Khan as a national icon and the group Black Rose especially waved GK's freak flag pretty heavily. Here is a bit where the group's leader Amraa professes his admiration for the historic figure, right down to the hairstyle. Lots of MP3s for download here.

It Was Easy, It Was Cheap

Inspired by the glut of MP3 blogs that I've been trowling of late, I spent the other night rifling through my own records on a quest to dig out some bits of musical esoterica from my past that might make for interesting reading. Naturally, I do this every week to some degree in preparation for my radio show, but there's a large chasm dividing music that's sonically pleasing and music that also has a decent story attatched to it. Suffice it to say, it was hard to decide exactly what I'd end up making you all come sniffing around the curb for. After I'd torn apart the record shelves, scattered picture sleeves across my kitchen, unearthed 45s from under the bed, and otherwise generally destroyed my apartment for the purpose of a decent blog post, I settled on a small stack of 45s by a monosyllabically wonderful late 80s band from NYC called GO!

386 DX

Perhaps you've heard the pop-computer music of 386 DX on WFMU. The genius behind the curtain is Alexei Shulgin and he lives in Moscow. Now, there's nothing worse than the tired cliches of Macintosh voices trying to emulate pop vocals but somehow Shulgin's programming transcends the normative drones. Check out his site, loaded with MP3s of pop classics such as California Dreaming, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Enter Sandman. But wait, it gets even better with his disc Legends of Russian Rock. The entire disc is online as MP3s. Who knows what it's all about, but Russian Rock sure sounds fascinating.

Goth Me, Jim Steinman!

Another afternoon deliriously unemployed, the t.v. is set to VH1 with the sound off when I glance over at it. Oh, rapture, Meatloaf: To Hell and Back is on! All of the drama in this bio-pic centers around Meat's relationship with genius songwriter Jim Steinman who wrote all of the paint-peelers on the bazillion-seller Bat Out of Hell and it's follow-up Bat Out of Hell II: Back Into  Hell.

                           

Alright, so what if the guy who portrayed Steinman circa '93 was made up  to look like Bob from Twin Peaks and is currently playing the part of Mick Ronson in a Bowie cover band called Space Oddity?

It's all about Steinman, who embraces his reputation as "The Lord of Excess".  Looking back, I think he has served as a bigger role model for Goths than Robert Smith and Peter Murphy combined. All of the sinister grandeur, all of the dark majesty! I mean "Bat Out of Hell", heelllooo? What about that Bonnie Tyler video for Total Eclipse of The Heart, a Steinman number, where all those English schoolboys had their eyes whited out? Can you pale bloodless gals say "Emily Bronte"? Steinman can, consider the recently aired MTV musical version of Wuthering Heights.

What's that Unholy Trinity on the left? Turn around, bright eyes, it's Steinman flanking Manson-haunted director Roman Polanski with Bonnie Tyler. Clearly, she was holding out for two dark heroes! They are celebrating another defining Goth moment in all their careers at the opening night of the Steinman-penned international cult musical hit, Tanz der Vampire . Steinman, like the ominous forces that control our fate, remains triumphant! Here's a teutonic version of Paradise by the Dashboard Light (mp3-cuts off at end!)

Charlie and His Orchestra

The lure of the forbidden can be seen nowhere more clearly than the Parent's Television Council's filthy TV page. Here is the organization that has been responsible for generating millions of complaints to the FCC, and they make it possible to watch those delectably decadent moments over and over again.

In the 1930's the Nazis had the same love/hate relationship with swing music. They outlawed it on their homefront, throwing it into  the category of "degenerate" art. But at the same time, they employed it in the service of the fatherland. Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister, assembled a fairly competent swing band called Charlie and His Orchestra to perform Nazified versions of the jazz hits of the day. Led by an English speaking German, Karl Schwendler, Charlie and His Orchestra broadcast on the medium-wave and short-wave bands throughout the 1930s to Canada, the US and Britain.

The idea was to lure the masses in with the irrestible tonic of swing music and then slyly work in the anti-Jewish, American and British lyrics after the second or third verse. The broadcasts of Charlie and His Orchestra were not available in the Fatherland proper, but that only enhanced their legend, and they picked up an underground following in Germany as well.

How to Procrastinate: Tip No. 8—Go with the Flo

I am enraptured by this site: flocabulary.com.

The idea is that you can fabricate a mo’ better vocabulary by listening to “rap” songs that use capacious words. This is not a very advantageous idea, especially if you like 1) songs, or 2) words.

For  two bucks, Flocabulary provides an mp3 and lyrics, with the SAT-caliber words linked to brief definitions. The study materials include bizarre "use the word in a sentence" examples that feature mooning celebrities, recovering alcoholics, and people with dogs for body parts. The study materials could use a copy-edit by Gaylord. As could we all.

Here’s one mp3, and some lyrics to get you started:

    When I was nascent, being formed in my mama’s belly,
    It was so cozy I wanted to stay there forever, indefinitely,
    It was all obscure, totally caliginous and dark,
    I could hear the melodious sound of my mama’s beating heart, then
    BOOM I was born shrunken like a prune, a former plum,
    Shot out the womb like a gun into the room

(I’m old school. If you don’t know what caliginous means, look it up.)

And an example of the study guide:

    sagacious - (adjective) shrewd, showing sound judgment
    When it came to electing a Corn Growers Association president, everyone turned to the most sagacious member: old Jim "Corn Eyes".

Whence my forthcoming bloggification commences: illicit and prurient material appealing to the baser natures of all.

I.e., next time: porn.

Guess the DJ Locker Contest, part 1

As some of you know, each WFMU DJ has a locker at the station, and we use LP covers instead of name tags to mark each DJ's private cache. We're going to have a little "Guess the DJ Locker" contest here. The first person to correctly identify four correct DJs will win a WFMU messenger bag, or some other suitable WFMU Crapola if the winner already has the bag.

1) Each week, I will post a different LP cover here. You have to guess the owner of the cover that is featured here, not any of the other covers pictured in the locker picture to the left.

2) I will only show LP covers for lockers of DJs who are on the current on air schedule.

3) One guess per listener / reader per LP cover, as judged by their IP number.

4) Once the correct cover has been guessed, I will announce that on the comments list. First person to correctly identify four DJs, wins.

5) This is harder than it seems. There may not be a winner.

And here is the first mystery LP cover:

And while you peruse the drug addled duo above, have a listen to some incredibly bad between-song comedy from a Crosby, Stills Nash and Young concert in 1970. (MP3) Thanks to listener Bruce for this clip. It captures something quite odious about the stupid 60's.

60 Versions of Sukiyaki

Sixty versions of the japanese-language hit song Sukiyaki can be found here. (via Metafilter)

South By Southwest MP3s

Bob Brainen found this page of MP3 downloads from many of  the band's playing later this month at South by Southwest in Austin. Grab them before the host has to take them down! Link.

Cheesy Euro-Disco and Dschinghis Khan

For several years, I've had an LP cover by the 1970's German disco band Dschinghis Khan gracing the cover of my DJ locker at WFMU. So imagine my surprise when Bryce mailed me this music video (mpeg video file) of the band doing a fantastic cheesy cossack disco dance number! And then when Nachum Segal saw my Dschinghis Khan LP this morning, he screams, "Dschinghis Khan, they're huge in Israel!" And then Nachum send me even more Dschinghis Khan videos. Why does Israel go crazy for bands like Dschinghis Khan, Baccara and t.A.T.u.? (MP3s) Why do I?

Don't answer that.

MP3 Download Dinner Bell

Hold out your plates, kiddies, here are the savory new MP3s WFMU is serving up for the month of March:

David Blair - "The Antichrist" 1991 Cassette recording falling somewhere between Current 93 and Abner Jay. Taken from the album "Sir Blair of Rothes"; Blair has a determination to point out in massive detail his roots to Scandinavian royalty in many letters in the past to WFMU. The only thing found on the internet about him is here.

Black Lodge Singers - "The Flintstones" The Canyon label has been putting out a lot of contempo Native American sounds, lots of hip-hop variations especially. But this track from their Kids Pow Wow Songs CD from the late 90's has always dropped jaws whenever it got airplay on WFMU through the years.

Ray Kroc flexidisc Part of the the kickoff for the May 7, 1979 "Nobody Can Do It Like McDonald's Can" ad campaign, with too many versions of said jingle. Ray Kroc sounds crocked as he tries to rally his troops.

Improved Sound Ltd - "Hit Em In the Face" This Nuremberg band specialised in German TV and movie soundtracks, but on this wild track they either decided to exploit psychedelia, or someone spiked their Jagermeister with very pure LSD. From the comp "Electrick Loosers."

Herter's Crow Calling Record, Part Two Just in time for the global avian bird flu pandemic, Herter will teach you how to create as much of a riotous bedlam as possible. Blam! Blam! Blam! From the Only in America comp on Arf Arf.

The Huntress Makes Squirrel Melts From the cringe-inducing When TV Attacks video comp; an audio excerpt of a late 80s/early 90s cooking show where the hostess (a somewhat Zolofted Martha Stewart-like hunter) gets her own food to cook up; in this case, Rocky the Squirrel gets blasted from a tree by her kid, and made into delicious after-school snax on an English Muffin with melted cheese on top. Obviously without the video, you don't get to see the skinned fella getting is "little butt" (as she says) coaxed into the pan, but the creepy tone in the creation of this delightful treat warrants an MP3.

Slint - Live Slint is the band that all the kids love, but weren't old enough to see. Since WFMU has a long and glorious tradition of doin' it for the kids, and since the band has reunited for some NYC gigs, we present for your consideration a live track from a 1989 performance in Chicago.  

Frances Bebey - Pygmy Divorce This sad tale of love and divorce amongst the Pygmy population will nail you right in the ticker... and have you contemplating whether that lovely bride was really worth swapping out those eight elephant tusks for.

Television Personalities - I Hope He's Everything You Wanted Me To Be The story of Dan Treacy of the TVP's has been a sad one over the last few years; one of punk & post-punk's most beloved bards recently was released from incarceration in an offshore prison ship in the UK after numerous years of drug problems, and thankfully has landed back in the studio with a forthcoming record on Domino. Dan himself emailed WFMU this MP3 preview of things to come, and it's classic TVP beautiful angst.

Mad Bunny Sad Bunny "Steal Away" MBSB is a gnome from Bayonne, New Jersey, whose fascination with the vocal timbre of He of Curly Locks and Exposed Navel has led to some obsessive sonic explorations, this one in particular tickling the fancy of many FMU DJs as of late.

Kitchen and the Plastic Spoons "Happy Funeral" Little to nothing known by this Euro-synthpunk outfit circa early 1980's. This song sounds like a very gothed-out assortment of Peanuts characters doing their bobble-headed, arms-to-their-side dance in a graveyard.

Jeffrey Lewis - History of Punk on the Lower East Side 9 minute acoustic medley opus performed live by anti-folk sweetheart Jeffrey Lewis! Damn good job too, made sure he included the Godz! Jeffrey has also created a comic book to goes along with this song; more info can be found on his website.

To receive WFMU’s monthly e-mail newsletter, Blast of Hot Air (click to read this month’s issue), featuring our latest MP3 downloads on the first of every month (among other table scraps), sign up here.

And if you just can’t stomach sorting through all of our blog posts to grab the oodles of MP3s we offer on this forum, cyber-simplification is here to the rescue. Visit WFMU’s On The Download site, where we provide an easily digestable and comprehensive listing of each month’s MP3s collected from Blast of Hot Air (BOHA) and Beware of the Blog.

Now, brush your teeth before you kiss us.

FCC Says: "Private Ryan, Fuck Yeah!"

It's no surprise that the FCC exonerated ABC's broadcast of Saving Private Ryan. Michael Powell had indicated this ruling was in the works a few months ago, and the decision echoes an earlier FCC ruling about an unexpurgated broadcast of the Spielberg movie in 2002. But with this decision, the FCC has now come full circle in its torrid affair with that "most profane word in the English language" (the FCC's words). As a broadcaster, I'm more confused than ever over where the line is, except that I can now rest assured that if Senator John McCain introduces an academy award-winning Steven Spielberg production about World War 2 on WFMU, our first amendment rights will be protected.

Let's review the recent history of the FCC's love/hate relationship with the F-word:

October 3, 2003: The FCC rules that the word "Fuck" is legal, as long as it's used as an adjective. This was in reference to Bono saying "fucking brilliant" as he accepted an award during the Golden Globe awards. The FCC's ruling is here. An excerpt:

"As a threshold matter, the material aired during the "Golden Globe Awards" program does not describe or depict sexual and excretory activities and organs. The word "fucking" may be crude and offensive, but, in the context presented here, did not  describe sexual or excretory organs or activities. Rather, the performer used the word "fucking" as an adjective or expletive to emphasize an exclamation. Indeed, in similar circumstances, we have found that offensive language used as an insult rather than as a description of sexual or excretory activity or organs is not within the scope of the Commission's prohibition of indecent program content."

A Sign of Radio's True Desperation

In an indication of just how worried the radio industry is about competition from satellite radio (not to mention podcasting, MP3s, cable radio, video games and everything else), this pro-broadcast-radio ad has been circulating the commercial radio industry. (MP3) Nothing like yet another commercial to bring people back to a dying industry.

Cussing More Expensive Than Radioactive Waste

Rolling Stone magazine has confirmed what I had long suspected - that the FCC's language fines far exceed other governmental fines. The largest fine levied by the Nuclear (pronounced Nucular) Regulatory Agency last year was $60,000. The largest FCC fine? 1.2 million dollars, for Fox's "Married By America" bachelor party episode, in which all the bad words were edited out, and all the boobies were pixillated. A few years back, this 45-second-long ditty by Monty Python (MP3 download) garnered a $25,000 fine from the FCC, despite the fact that that the worst language in it is the phrase "Sit On My Face." And this was in the old days, before millions of American children were traumatized by being exposed to Janet Jackson's pasty for 11/32nds of one second.

A few weeks ago, I did my own brief survey of federal fines and came up with this list of non-FCC fines imposed by the Federal Government, so you can get some perspective on the current proposed laws to increase the fines for naughty phrases to half a million bucks each:

$10,000 for killing a Whooping Crane.

$54,500 for releasing anydrous ammonia into the environment.

$55,000 for illegally travelling to Cuba.

$70,000 for mishandling and mislabeling hazardous chemicals.

$116,000 for improper disposal of flammable materials and other violations.

$133,000 for exposing employees to infectious diseases.

$1.2 million for broadcasting pixillated boobs (FCC).

Let the Evil Spore

"Have you heard the song?  It really sucks."

On February 25, 2002, untold bags of Cheetos® in high altitude groceries burst from the sudden decrease in global air pressure brought about by a zillion simultaneous gasps of people realizing the Attorney General of the United States was demonstrably, incontrovertibly batshit fucking bananas.

Back In The Day

Here is a stunning collection of Old School Party Fliers from the likes of Buddy Esquire and Phase 2.

Blackcrack (MP3) to browse by

Public Figure Kill Kill

All this talk about that kid being arrested for plotting to assassinate Bush... who's gonna provide the soundtrack? Well, ok, these songs aren't about offing W, but they might make you a little aggro.

MP3 downloads for hateful people (the first one's dirty dirty):

"I Wanna Kill James Taylor" by Ivan and the Executioners
NYC band, song released in 1979 on Fine Taste

"Kill the Bee Gees" by The Accident
Bellingham, WA, also released in 1979 on No Three

Blame It On The Bossa Nova

Debbie submits this great page of original-era Bossa Nova albums - cover art, mp3s and more.

The Partisans on Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine

Diane Kamikaze sez: In 2002 I invited '79 brit angst punkers The Partisans to perform on Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine. They were unavailable for a live session, but came in for a taping. I was excited, as I had really adored their old material. I felt they defined the early waves of punk "back in the day" and hoped they still had their fury.

As it ends up, none of the session was airable. Some band members were drunk, belligerent, or both; hooray! I have gotten over my initial embarrasment and now offer it to the WFMU listenership for better or worse. That said, they have a new release as of 2004 on Dr Strange Records called Idiot Nation, that is quite good, and their performance at CBGBs just days after the WFMU taping was really good as well.

Download the mp3 of the unaired session here.

Fox Promotes The Cartoon Gay Agenda

Wow, Fox Television has really atoned for its pixillation of Stew's butt (from The Family Guy) with Sunday night's new episode of The Simpsons. Not only was Marge's sister Patty revealed to be gay, she was all set to marry her professional-golfer  / gay lover, when Marge discovered that said golfer was in fact carrying a fully operational cartoon penis! And that doesn't even touch on Homer's brief gay fantasy, in which he passionately and repeatedly tongue kisses himself! What are the Parent's Television Council going to say about this one? Will they include the Homer-Erotic moment on their best-of-filthy-TV page? Download an MP3 of Steinski's Simpsons remix while the PTV wraps its mind around this one.

Monkey Brain Controls Robot Arm, Moves Zucchini

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have developed a robotic prosthesis which is able to transport zucchini through time and space, using monkey brain power alone. Well, to be accurate, the monkey brain was housed inside a monkey body and the robotic arm was plugged into an electrical outlet. But you get the idea. It's long been established that monkeys are capable of operating complex machinery such as space craft (as evidenced by this mp3 of a historical reenactment by Monkeypiece Theatre) and "show me your breasts" buttons, but in this case, the monkey literally had his hands tied behind his back! (Thanks to Barb Economon / KFAI for the mp3.)

Beatallica Gets Cease and Desist Letter

Sony has issued a cease and desist letter (pdf file) to Beatallica's Internet Service Provider to prevent the further dissemination of songs like this. (mp3)

People Like Us Being Podcast

Our eleventh show is now being podcast - People Like Us' Do or D.I.Y. Just like with The Audio Kitchen, these podcasts are not new shows - they're MP3 downloads of the older shows that were previously broadcast. Every Wednesday at 7pm, we'll be making an MP3 available of a Do or D.I.Y. show, making it possible to have this MP3 delivered automagically to your computer and/or your iPod.

The WFMU podcast page is here, and it contains a list of the eleven shows we're podcasting, plus instructions and links on how to get it all happening.

Actually, all this hoopla about podcasting is really overblown, since our listeners have been downloading our shows onto their iPods for years already. It's just the automatic part of the process that makes it new.

But the hoopla about People Like Us isn't overblown. There are lots of cut-up artists and sonic manipulators out there, but Vicki Bennett is in a league all her own. If you dont know her work, check the People Like Us website or go to WFMU artist search engine, run a search for People Like Us and follow the links to the playlists that have clickable song links. She's my favorite sound artist working today.

And big thanks to Doron, Michael and Bill for getting our podcasts off the ground.

Italian DJ Fined 1.4 Million For Illegal MP3s

Quello è porco molto!

An Italian DJ was fined 1.4 million big ones for dragging a laptop full of MP3s down to a club.

via FMBQ.

Hitler Ski Story

As promised yesterday, here's a link to the complete, unedited, filthy and wonderful "Hitler Ski Story" by Benjamin Weismann.

The Fuck Stops Here

As you can see, my job has been reengineered somewhat by the FCC's indecency crackdown.

Today, the Senate gets its own ball rolling on the Broadcast Decency Enforcement Act (BDEA), as  the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights considers obscenity issues. They'll be discussing things like whether they should increase the fines to half a million dollars per cuss (like the House version of the bill) or whether they should take a stand for American values like free speech, and raise the maximum fine to a mere $350,000 per cuss (even if its not really a cuss). Meanwhile, the full House is expected to approve the House version of the bill today or tomorrow.

It makes me long for the enlightened days of the Hays code, when censorship consisted of a good, old fashioned list which clearly spelled out what you could and couldn't say or show in the movies. The FCC adamently refuses to issue such a list these days, repeatedly saying that to issue a list would amount to censorship. And the Supreme Court has reminded the FCC that, in between compelling broadcasters to pixillate the butts of cartoon characters, please be careful not to do anything that might restrict freedom of speech. After all, freedom of speech is what us merkins stand for, isn't it? What would those people in the insect nations think of us if we started restricting speech?

Meanwhile, the lobbying is heating up for a new FCC chairman who will take this issue seriously already! That Michael Powell was just a big softy on smut! So said a coalition of 30 House republicans in a letter to President Bush. And plenty of religious groups are also piping in, trying to get their boy Kevin Martin in to fill Powell's shoes. With Martin at the helm and anti-smut trailblazer Michael Copps at his side, and the BDEA filling their sails with wind, the next incarnation of the FCC could make the Hays code look like the golden age of the first amendment. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. It might finally force the issue to the Supreme Court, where the FCC stands a good chance of being rejected.

While some broadcasters and unions are toying with the idea of challenging the constitutionality of the FCC's current approach to this issue, it's tough to do, since the FCC effectively blackmails all broadcasters willing to take a stand on this with their oft-repeated threat to yank away broadcast licenses.

Eric Idle has the right idea. (MP3)

C64 SID Tunes

If you’ve never experienced the joys of music composed on the Commodore 64 computer, here are a few MP3s that will certainly amp you up. Both are from the Dan Dare video game (click to download Dan Dare Title song or Dan Dare Pause music).

Now that we’re on the same page about the spastic beauty of this music, here are some links for you to mine:

About the C64

SID Player (downloading this player will allow you access to zillions of free .sid downloads of more amazing C64 music, plus the sound is just better)

High Voltage SID (tons of .sid downloads)

C64 MP3s (for those reluctant to use a new audio player, but still need some buzzed out 80’s video game music as a soundtrack for feigning epilepsy)

Remixes (disclaimer: some are good, some resemble rap metal)

Enjoy! Special thanks to Justin Beck (aka Hard Hat Mack), who formerly hosted a program on KDVS featuring music composed on the C64.

Why won't my @#$% iPod record?!

For years I’ve used a Sony Minidisc machine to record stereo audio “in the field”, while hoping and praying some company would make an 'iPod that records”. Yes, I know there are gadgets you can attach to your iPod to turn it into an ersatz recorder - but I’ve heard these add-ons are not really up to the task. I’m looking for something “purpose-built” and it seems my prayers have been answered: two companies – Edirol (formerly Roland) and Marantz  - have just introduced Compact Flash-based handhelds that can record in .wav or MP3 format, at different rates, for direct USB transfer to your computer.

The Edirol R-1 is the smaller of the two but the Marantz PMD660 has XLR microphone inputs and seems a little more “professional”. Both of these machines should begin shipping in March and can be had for around $450 each.

New Brian Eno Interview

Fresh from my favorite file-sharing gang, I've posted an interview with Brian Eno recorded about a week  ago on BBC Radio 4 (2005.02.03). In it, Eno chats with Comic book writer Alan Moore. For those of you looking for that fantastic 1980 Eno interview that I aired a few months back, it's here.

John Cage & Morton Feldman: A Conversation

I love this 3-hour conversation between Morton Feldman and John Cage recorded in 1967. An excerpt:

Morton Feldman: Well, this weekend I was on the beach.
John Cage: Yes.
MF: ... And on the beach these days are transistor radios.
JC: Yes.
MF: ... blaring out rock 'n' roll.
JC: Yes.
MF: All over.
JC: Yes. And you didn't enjoy it?
MF: Not particularly. I adjusted to it.
JC: How?
MF: By saying that... Well, I thought of the sun and the sea as a lesser evil.
JC: You know how I adjusted to that problem of the radio in the environment?  Very much as the primitive people adjusted to the animals which frightened them, and which, probably as you say, were intrusions. They drew pictures of them on their caves. And so I simply made a piece using radios. Now, whenever I hear radios - even a single one, not just twelve at a time, as you must have heard on the beach, at least - I think, "Well, they're just playing my piece."

More Goodies From The Bandwidth Fairy

With the installation of our extra bandwidth proceeding swimmingly, we can really start rolling out the goodies for our online listeners.

First off, if you're listening to WFMU's live MP3 streams, the Accuplaylist info will now start appearing in the player itself. This is only true if the DJ at the time is actually doing an Accuplaylist (typing in the names of the songs and artists they play on the air in real time as their show proceeds). There is a page which lists all Accuplaylist DJs here.

In the past, you would've needed a separate web page open to see the song title info. Now you can see it within your player, whether you're using Winamp, iTunes, or Realplayer (and my condolences to you if you're still using Realplayer). The song titling will also appear in other, less popular players.

Moving our streams away from Live365 will also mean that our live MP3 stream will hopefully stop experiencing those outages which had been happening with increasing frequency.

Later this year we are going to experiment with changing the live MP3 stream to a variable bit rate stream, which means that the fidelity will improve for people with good solid broadband connections. Also on the agenda of the Bandwidth Fairy: experimenting with the new format of AAC Plus, which should give improved stream fidelity for all broadband listeners.

John Oswald, Douglas Kahn and Sound Art

For the past few weeks, I've been a panelist for the Tate Modern's forum on sound art along with co-panelists John Oswald and Douglas Kahn. Kahn is best known for his great history of sound art in the 20th century called Noise Water Meat. Back in the 80s, he did one of the funniest Reagan cut-ups called Ronald Reagan Speaks for Himself, a plundered speech-thing from an interview with Bill Moyers (a ton more Reagan cut-ups can be found at the Ronald Reagan Translations page). And of course you know John Oswald, founder of plunderphonics . But I'll bet you don't know his early releases that he produced under the name of  Mystery Labs called "Kissing Jesus in the Dark" and "The Mystery Tapes". I've posted 3 tapes' worth of this stuff here. Dig in: it sounds more relevant today than when it was released 25 years ago.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Scabs!

I love a good musical mystery as much as anyone here at WFMU. One of my favorites involves a song I heard on my local college radio station almost 15 years ago, driving home at 4 in the morning, and then shivering in my idling car for 10 extra minutes so I could hear the most-likely-stoned DJ back announce the set and add the song to my ever-growing list of potential aural conquests. I'd bet you a thousand bucks that any of my WFMU compadres could share their experience about a song like that, but since I got here first, we're going to talk about west coast kiddie-kore greats, The Rolling Scabs.

I remember it like it was yesterday. Sort of. It was sometime around 1991 and I'd heard this ridiculous song played by what sounded like a couple of snot brained pre-teens who'd maybe heard a Flipper record, and then picked up instruments for the first time. They didn't have a guitar player -- at least not in the band's theme song, (MP3) which was now locked sturdily in my cranium (thanks to the obviously heisted bassline from "Now I Wanna be Your Dog" by Iggy and the Stooges) -- and it seemed like they were making up the lyrics on the spot. Since there was no such thing as instant musical gratification (i.e. the internet) in those days, I got my first copy of the song the old fashioned way: I poised my finger on the record button on my home stereo and with my free dialing finger, I annoyed the shit out of the local DJ until s/he played it.

Fast forward about 8 years. I am in California visiting friends who live in the the Mission District (pictured below... no it's not usually that sunny there) and am harboring a record shopping jones that won't quit. If you've never been there, San Francisco is kind of like dying and going to record shopping heaven. In addition to Amoeba Records and the innumerable smaller shops that speckle the left coast paradise, records are often also on sale in delis, coffee shops, launderettes, and bars. I can't remember where I was when I finally found the Rolling Scabs record, but I'm sure my heart skipped a beat when I saw that wonderful goldenrod nightmare staring me at me squarely from the dusty bin for a measly $2.50.

Owning the record began answering questions that my cruddy radio-tape version of "We're the Scabs" hadn't even begun to ask. Not only were the Rolling Scabs a pair of 12 year olds being backed up by musicians with names like Tony Fag and Susan California, but the record had been recorded live at the famed Gilman Street Project punk dive, and perhaps most shockingly, it had been dedicated to "the living memory" of lead vocalist Giuliano "The Scab" Bourbon, 1975-1990.

Huh?? One of the little kids sporting the MDC t-shirts was dead? This quote from the liners revealed the shocking details:

"...last summer, word filtered out that Giuliano "The Scab" Bourbon was really dead. His live for the moment philosophy played itself out in a tragic accident of which the details are still sketchy. Apparently, the boy genius had rigged up a way to hitch rides hanging from a rickety elevator in the Connecticut mansion he was living in. Well, on this fateful day, Giuliano would not make it all the way down. His natural curiosity would get the best of him and his short life on this earth was brought to a confusing finish."

Hmmm, anyone smell an elaborate music scene in-joke unfurling here? Was this whole Rolling Scabs legend/death story some sort of complex hoax? Maybe, maybe not... But the fact that the above liners were credited to one "N. Tufnel, retired musician and noted rock historian" didn't lend a whole lotta credibility to the story, since everybody knows that "N. Tufnel" is short for "Nigel Tufnel" of Spinal Tap -- the greatest, most elaborate musical hoax of all time.

True or not, the rest of the record was just as good as the one song I'd already heard. To wit, the Rolling Scabs draw a line in the sand, and then dare others to cross it in the epic "My Mom Smokes Pot" (MP3). Consider the lyrical questions raised in the following passages:

"My mom smokes pot! All she ever does is sitting on that bed (sic), coughing off her big fat head! Yeaoaaah! Looking at the mirror watching her warts!... Marijuana has a first name, it's W-E-E-D! Marijuana has a second name it's J-O-I-N-T! And we smoke it every day blaehehahea! Marijuana has a way of fucking up the U.S.A. Today!"

Then there's the tribute to the never-realized Rolling Scabs world tour, "Around the World in 80 Seconds" (MP3) which confuses various Asian cultures with one another in a classic, ignorant-twelve-year-old kind of way.

"We're gonna go to China, buy some chopsticks, eat some rice. Sumo wrestling, find an oriental girl, do everything I wanna do in China... Eat some sushi in Japan, visit the Great Wall..."

Truly, the stuff of legend... But as is so often the case with many great things, my copy of the Rolling Scabs 45 fell behind the stereo (in the cosmic sense, that is) and was entirely forgotten about until I took it upon myself to unearth a true diamond in the rough for this blog. In the hopes that the internet had caught up with the band's considerable legend, I googled them before creating this post and came up with the usual results... a few radio playlist pages from freeform pals KALX and WPRB, but one curiously well-informed post regarding the band, written in a similarly ambiguous manner as the above-quoted liners... Could this guy be holding out on us? What's he hiding? Could he somehow be involved in a coverup? The world may never know, but in the cultural DMZ that you and I know as 2005, it's clear enough to me that hoax or not, the Rolling Scabs were just too good to last.

My Bathroom is a "Private" Kind of Place

Everybody like a little privacy while going to the bathroom, right? That's why we run off into the bushes when nature calls on the great highway of life. (MP3 download of American Standard's pro-bathroom privacy anthem.)

Listener Stephanie submits these two pictures of a new public bathroom in Houston. (Apparently, London also sported one of these last Fall.) On the outside, it looks innocent enough - clean even! Mirrored walls suggest a public toilet that might not require you to turn your smeller off for the entire experience. But take a step inside and the walls are revealed to be one-way mirrors.  Now you're taking a dump in the middle of a town square, surrounded by your fellow citizens. You got a problem with that?

The toilets are the brainchild of artist Monica Bonvicini who wanted to see if people would "defy their own embarrassment" by using the free public stalls, which operate under the title "Don't Miss A Sec." Of course, these mirrored outhouses also happens to be a godsend for folks who like to have sex with themselves or others, but prefer to avoid the pesky imprisonment that sometimes accompanies such behavior.

I think I''d prefer the public toilets of Berlin, which descend into the bowels of the earth on an elevator in between uses, where they are sprayed and disinfected with post-Nazi-like precision. But that's just me.

R. Stevie Moore in Today's New York Times

I know I just mentioned R. Stevie Moore a few days ago, but lo and behold, today's New York Times has a great profile of the man and his union jack geetar. And here's an MP3 of his song Colliding Circles, which was in heavy WFMU rotation back when I first started doing a show.

DJ Food's Raiding the 20th Century

To celebrate the long-awaited arrival of our cheap bandwidth, and to test the limits of our servers as well as my own common sense, I'm making this great hour-long celebration of sampling, mashups and general sonic tomfoolery available for 36 hours or so. It's called Raiding the 20th Century - Words and Music Expansion featuring Paul Morley, and it's by Strictly Kev, although DJ Food also figures in here somewhere also.

I played a few excerpts of this on my show last Wednesday, but frankly, my attention span has suffered irreversible damage from years of living in New Jersey, so I didnt play anywhere near the whole thing and probably wouldn't until next summer, when Re:Mixology will hopefully come back on our schedule.

So download this sucker while it's available, if you got yourself one of them new-fangled broadband connections. It's over 70mb tall, so be patient. Big Momma MP3 Download.

UPDATE: Our server is handling this file just fine, so I'm going to leave it up after all.

Xin nian yu kuai!

Pampellone says:

Just in time for 4702 (or February, 2005, if you're still using that system)

(Hey blue eyes, what makes your big eyes so round? Allow me to get into costume and entertain the powdered academic novelty of Chinese-Americans living in a predominantly dis-Oriented landscape. As one who has, by accident and venture, spent a significant part of his life interpreting the synthesis and dichotomy of East-West relations, the tendency to gawk at behavior that teeters a gerrymandering line between the socialized and the savage* is irksome first and rarely comes back for seconds. With that disclaimer said, I present ...)

Outtakes for Take-Out

a) Ben Gerstein, a guest artist (along with Mat Maneri and John McLellan) on Jeffrey Cobb's August 19, 2004 show, features three fine photos and 16 edited snippets a fine summer's day in New York's Chinatown on his Other Listening page. The mp3s are a tad brief, for my tastes, but I'm a sucker for the all too sparse genre of street sounds.

b) Eight internet years is a very long time. Since '97 (er, I mean 4694) I've been a fan of Sabrina's "A Taiwanese in NY" website. It used to provide more in-depth astrological info -- guess she wants you to buy her book to get the juicy details -- but you haven't heard the whole story till reading the concise horoscopes that are up. Oh! And Toss the bread crumbs to the pigeons 'cuz you will get lost on this site.

c) And now, the news. Lots of news. Courtesy of Radio Free Asia, news programming in Mandarin and Cantonese (and Burmese, Korean, Lao, Khmer, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese) is available in mp3 and real audio formats. Most of the Mandarin news I've heard seems to be talk radio. News-speak, in every language I've heard, has two things in common: a) a trotting 4/4 rhythm and b) horrible stories.  Dissolve the latter into a wallpaper of ignorance and your left with hours of blissfull banter.

Slightly off subject: the Korean News is in typical am radio fashion and serves up some delightful sounds of the 70s between segments.

* Hear: Robert Jensen, "The Political Economy of US Foreign Policy in the Middle East and Central Asia: Why Iraq First?", as featured on The Belly of the Beast with Stefan,  January 28, 2005. (Realaudio link)

Fuzz Guitar Appreciation Society

Mainly because it's been in my head for a week, but also because it's a killer tune, I am pleased to present Ronnie Ong's blazin' cover of "Buttons and Bows"  as heard on the Steam Kodak compilation re-issue of 60s Southeast Asian underground rock. According to the liner notes, the dashing Mr. Ong is remembered as Singapore's answer to Trini Lopez. Quite an accolade, huh? I'd be happy being remembered as Trenton's answer to Bruce Boxleitner, but I suppose Ronnie really knew how to live.

Ong is without doubt the star of the show in this track, but the supremely flanged guitar noises generated by axeman Horace Wee are truly a thing to behold and in my mind, earn "Buttons and Bows" true celebrity status in the All Time Fuzz Guitar Hall of Fame of My Mind That I Just Invented. The song generated considerable airplay on WFMU back when the station's copy of Steam Kodak arrived in the mail, as you can see here. (And as an added distraction/bonus, you can see all the other artists WFMU has played whose first names begin with the letter R by clicking here.)

Nice hair, too.

WFMU Random Song Generator!

Do you live by the moment? Thrive on spontaneity? Yearn for unpredictability? Well, friends of audio entropy, WFMU has just unleashed a fuzzy new 'net pet for you to play with: check out our Random Song Generator!

With the click of a button, a string of discriminating binary will deliver 10 random songs from various shows in the WFMU archives straight to your computer via Real Audio or MP3. And because you favor chaos, you won't even mind that the start times of songs are a tad, well, random.

Fans of mixin' it up may also enjoy our Random Archive Selector, which arbitrarily selects a WFMU archive from our vaults to throw your way.

Let the audio anarchy begin.

I sure do miss the Cowsills...

My mind works piecemeal: Trudging home in the rain tonight I kept...

...hearing The Rain, The Park & Other Things in my head.

Then I'd mutter to myself,  “That mini-skirted mom sure was sexy.”, a line uttered by the brilliant actor Jeffrey Tambor as Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show.

Besides making me laugh, Hank's speech always gets me thinking of my sisters and their Cowsills 45's, how they'd Magic Marker their initials on the labels: “DT” for Diana, “JT” for Joanie.

From there I thought of the siblings in the band and how I got to interview them on Aerial View before the legendary show they did at Maxwell's in 1990.

Todd-A-Phonic Todd arranged phone contact and it went something like this... Cowsills Interview MP3

R Stevie Moore's WFMU Song

Since I posted Crazy Mary's, how-shall-we-say... historically accurate WFMU song, I have to post another piece of WFMU history, R. Stevie Moore's  song, "Pledge Your Money"  (MP3 link) The phone number is no longer in service, so don't call it! If you haven't checked out Stevie's WFMU program archive,  you should. When I first started listening to the station in 1983, his shows blew me away and were one of the reasons I made the trek to East Orange.

Science Song MP3s

Listener Jake sez:  Here is a page with mp3s from a collection of 50s/60s science records. Some nice tunes, very WFMUish. I've seen some of these records around but this is the first time I've seen them mp3ized.

Comfort Stand

Comfort Stand. Did you know that FMU pal Otis Fodder runs one of the most amazing free MP3 labels on the web? Includes odd, unusual, and even familar material from the likes of The Old Codger (singing with Irwin Chusid, Krys O, R. Stevie Moore, etc.), Joe Meek, Messer Chups, Big City Orchestra, Dan Deacon, R. Stevie Moore, The Bran Flakes, and my favorite, Mar-Tie The Avant-Garde Grandpa. Hours and hours of fun here. Honestly, with resources like this, there's no reason to ever have to buy music again.

Petula Clark / Beach Boys in German

Listener Gary writes:

"I have been trying to locate an audio file (any format) of Petula Clark's redetion in German of "Downtown". I can't seem to find it anywhere. One of my friends said you might be able to help."

Of course we can. Here's Pet Clark's Downtown. And for the hell of it, here's The Beach Boys doing Ganz Allein (In My Room). Ain't that what this blog's for anyways?

Baghdad Radio

Lest you think that nobody in the military listens to WFMU, here is a picture of WFMU Listener Corporal Richard Faber, posing in Baghdad next to his truck, which is sporting the 2004 WFMU Bumper Sticker.

Colonel Faber recently e-mailed me and asked if I could send him some MP3 archives of his favorite FMU shows, such as Kenny G, The Audio Kitchen and Fabio, to name but a few. 

The notion that he might be listening to Kenny and Irwin doing their Karaoke version of Meatloaf while the mortars fly into his compound boggles the mind.

No matter how self-indulgent Kenny might get, it sure as hell must beat the local radio fare  (MP3).

La Monte Young (1965)

Forty-Two for Henry Flynt by La Monte Young performed by Peter Winkler (gong) at the Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde in San Francisco, 1965: A very rare MP3 of Young's from the incredible trove of avant-garde archived KPFA radio shows (many dating back to the 60s and 70s) and MP3s at the Other Minds Archive. "42 for Henry Flynt" probably has not been written out as a composition. The number in the title changes from performance to performance, depending on the number of repetitions of the sounds. The orchestration is flexible as well. This realization was performed by Peter Winkler on gong and was recorded at the Third Annual Festival of the Avant Garde in San Francisco, 1965. Its hypnotic character made it a favorite of KPFA Radio listeners for several generations.

Crazy Mary's WFMU Song

The band Crazy Mary recorded this song for us and the amazing thing is how historically accurate it is, right down to the year Vin Scelsa started freeform programming on FMU, what night he was on, FMU early influences (WBAI), the FCC non-duplication rule fer Godsakes!

Now if I just had a copy of Chris Knox' "WFMU" song from his benefit at Westbeth ten years ago, I'd be  complete.

Kiddie Records

Kiddie Records For the entire 2005 year, Basic Hip Digital Oddio will be featuring weekly stories and songs from the golden age of children's records, a period which ran from the mid 1940s into the early 1950s. This era produced a wealth of classics, headed by Capitol's Record-Readers and the RCA Victor Little Nipper series. Each one of these recordings has been carefully transferred from the original 78s (plus a few 45s) and encoded to MP3 format for you to download and enjoy.

Two More Podcast Shows

Fresh on the heels of adding Dave Emory to the list of WFMU shows that are being podcast, I'm happy to say that we've added two more: Downtown Soulville with Mr. Finewine, and The Audio Kitchen with The Professor. You can get the full skinny on our podcasts on our podcast page.

Downtown Soulville  is currently on the air on Friday nights at 7pm, and features tons of great (mostly) Detroit based soul from the golden era. The Audio Kitchen was a show that featured found sound - thrift shop cassettes, answering machine tapes, home recorded travelogues and the like. It's not currently on the air (although the realaudio archives  are still up) because of the hundreds of hours The Professor needed to produce it on a weekly basis. The Audio Kitchen podcasts are the MP3 archives of the old Audio Kitchen shows that The Professor produced back when the show aired weekly. We'll make a "new" Audio Kitchen MP3 podcast available every Wednesday night.

Podcasting simply automates the process of downloading our MP3 archives onto your computer or portable MP3 player. We're somewhat limited by the copyright police as to which shows we're able to make available this way, but don't you worry - we'll find more and more shows to put into your iPod. Soon to come will be People Like Us' Do or D.I.Y.,  and Noah is working on a podcast-only show of underground and unreleased hip hop.

So we're up to ten podcast shows, and more to come. Download ipodder  already and get aboard!

250 Versions of "House of the Rising Sun"

... all MP3s. Doesn't this make you happy?

osymyso - 05ymy50

osymyso - 05ymy50

For 50 weeks of 2005, osymyso -- one of WFMU's favorite bootleggers --  is going to put a track from his new album on his website, ultimately forming the basis for a proper release. he's making it as he goes along - a public work-in-progress of sorts. the first 3 fragments are up, check this weekly.

Gregory Whitehead "Selected works, 1984-2004"

Gregory Whitehead "Selected works, 1984-2004": A comprehensive twenty-year survey of MP3s, comprised of 52 tracks, varying in length from a few minutes to over an hour. Several of the pieces are heard here for the first time; others were commissioned by the BBC and New American Radio; many are live air-checks and full-length radio-plays. Also included in this survey are several pieces of writing by Whitehad on the subject radio, ranging from interviews to manifestoes.

Punk Rock Songs about New Jersey

Punk Rock songs about New Jersey seem like a no-brainer, don't they? People yell a lot in Punk Rock. People yell a lot in New Jersey. Don't be too startled by this alarming similarity and don't get too hot and bothered, because I'm only going to treat you to my two favorite examples. NJOK by the band Detention, and the slightly more abrasive (and considerably less complimentary) Hoboken_Sucks by Äss (featuring WFMU's Brian Turner on guitar).

Detention is more famous for their oft-deified track "Dead Rock & Rollers" -- a song that I happen to know enjoys iTunes space on the personal computer of Irwin Chusid, which I recently stole from him. (The computer, not the song.) I understand that the band still plays live from time to time, and that the Shields brothers of said band own a gym somewhere in Jersey Centralia.

The legacy of Äss is somewhat more mystical. After channeling and re-interpreting only the best parts of Action Swingers -styled brutality, the members of Äss drifted to other projects, as varied as brickface and stucco installation to making pilgrimages to the Burning Man festival, where one member personally stuck his head into the Goat of Truth's papier mache ass and achieved enlightenment. Or something closely approximating it, if your standards are low.

I'm sure that somewhere right now, some ex-member of irrelevant, podunk Jersey hardcore band #227 is firing up their angry email finger in order to tell me what a gross misinterpretation I'm giving to their scene by not mentioning their band's song about the tough streets of Mahwah (image by Google Image Search), former Governor Tom Keane's weirdo accent, or the chemical fire that burned for years underneath the Pulaski Skyway (image by Burt Schlatter ). Well, things are tough all over. Like I said, I was only gonna mention my two favorites. Perhaps you can find validate your teens while perusing the formidable recollections of this man? 

In addition to Brian Turner, many other WFMU staffers have spent time behind the shrieking mic and raging guitar. Pseu Braun and Diane Kamikaze were both a part of the local miracle that was Children in Adult Jails , Chris T  wielded an axe of some ferocity in The Nihilistics, and Dan Mackta tore shit up in A Priori.

Now that I've outed everybody, I'm thinking I should probably get out of here before a horde of the above staffers start massing in the parking lot screaming for blood and vengeance.

Tape-beatles / Public Works / PhonoStatic MP3 Archive

The Tape-beatles, Public Works, PhonoStatic Cassettes: UbuWeb is pleased to announce the launch of the Public Works archive, consisting of digitial transfers of dozens of cassettes, LPs, and CDs into MP3s. The Tape-beatles are a collaboration of varying membership that make music and audio art recordings,"expanded cinema" performances, videos, printed publications, and works in other media. They work under the aegis of Public Works Productions. PhotoStatic was a magazine, a periodical series of printed works, that focused on xerography (photocopy) as a creative medium. Founded in 1983, the title continued in some form until as late as 1998. A companion publication on audio cassette was dubbed PhonoStatic, with the inaugural issue appearing in 1984. In all, ten cassette issues were released at roughly six-month intervals, culminating with the "Audio Collage" cassette in 1989. The complete PhonoStatic cassette archive is available on UbuWeb.