it's blizz!

playlist for a snowday. snowlist for a playday. it snew many
many inches yesterday, and west philly was blanketed (28.5?)
and transformed into a fairyplaygroundland, snow day play for
everybody, yay! i left home at 11 for yoga and ended up out and
about all day long, which was the best the best, but it would have
been lovely to be at home and listen to some snowy sounds too...
this is some of the music that was snowing in my head all day:

sally shapiro, disco romance, cuz, 'course, just look at it.
mmmm snowy eyelash stars. i did however listen to the
very excellent permanent vacation selected label works
volume 1, or at least disc one, which has two s.s. remixes.

pantha du prince, black noise. just reviewed this for amg.
not quite as magical as this bliss, perhaps, but still super
lovely and wintry, even tho the cover looks autumnal. hm.

lemon jelly, '64-'95. not sure why, maybe because i always
think the song "the slow train" sounds like "the snow day"

the roots, phrenology, but mostly "sacrifice," which i think
i heard in my head coming out of the guitars of a different
lemon jelly song. also, i haven't listened to it in a long time.

i was reading the resident advisor best-of-decade jawns,
which has me v. excited about electronica at the moment
(& will probably make me buy some soon) but especially
their top 50 mixes list, which i was pleasantly surprised
to see this included on, and even more surprised to see
the dixon body language mix at #5, so i listened to that
the other day. nice to remember how good dj mixes are...

i was walking down the snowy street and got "hoe-down"
horns in my head. bip-bop (bip-bop)! bip-bop (bip-bop)!

because when do i not want to listen to walking wounded?
especially "before today." oh my god. sweet god of music.
i bet if i were going to do a revised favorite-'90s-albums list
(don't tempt me) this would rank shockingly high. oh my.

cuz you want some gentle warm cuddly quiet guitar sounds
too. i was bored by this one at first but have been listening
again and it is pretty sweet after all, at least in the middle
ground. maybe see them play a secret set next week? in the
evening we didn't hear this but we did sing and then listen
to a bunch of simon and garfunkel, which is kinda similar.

four tet, just generally. i think "hands," maybe, in partic?
(but i forgot it got so beaty.) this is the new one, which at
first didn't quite grab me, but i had in my ears while i was
walking thru the snowstreets, just past dusk, two beers in
me, and those angel voices chiming chiming chiming that
"there's love in you" just made me melt melt melt.
oh kieran...

also, not to forget:

ye olde wintry mix... not that it was in my head per se,
but certainly would have been the day for it... also, this
mix which i haven't thought about in ages (and i guess
you can't actually listen to it there anymore, but now it's
reuploaded here, so check it out y'all: wintry jangles from
the '60s and the faux-'60s, got me psyched for a sock hop.
sometime? soontime? springtime?

in the non-winter of my non-discontent

a Mixtape for ([just] such a) Winter's Day
1. Baby, It's Cold Outside - Jimmy Smith and Wes Montgomery (1966)
2. I Don't Intend to Spend Christmas Without You - Margo Guryan (1967)
3. Dawn - the Four Seasons (1964)
4. A Question of Temperature - the Balloon Farm (1968)
5. Two Divided by Love - the Grassroots (1971)
6. One Two Three and I Fell - Tommy James and the Shondells (1968)
7. A Hazy Shade of Winter - Simon and Garfunkel (1968)
8. The Chills - Peter, Bjorn and John (2006)
9. It's Cold Outside - the Choir (1967)
10. It's Now Winter's Day - Tommy Roe (1966)
11. A Winter's Sky - the Pipettes (2006)

jazz and silence

how come nobody told me about the clipse ripping off (interpolating?) geggy tah? (oh, i guess that song isn't really on the album.) that's soooo adorably lame of them, i love it. of pharrell really, the nurd.

if you care, the sidebar mixylinks will be fixed soon - in the meantime, i got a hott new setup over @ mymymyspace, with an old-school player that i may just have to install over here as well.

well. well, the whole december-january accounting period is through, fairly enough, and we're fullspeedahead into a whole new thing, which is to say the presentfuture. january is high time to relax, and the entire music community, producers, consumers, and facilitators alike, aptly tends to take things pretty chill this month (even as the movie folks are amping up the apeshit), despite the strong lingering awareness of the annual cycle that we're headed inexorably back into.

this munificent pause in the new-music machine provides a good opportunity - if one can give up continuing to try to catch up on the previous year's muchados [this one's a no-brainer, but futuresex surely deserved a listspot...] - to listen to some old music. (i.e. more than 12 months old.) take last year, when i celebrated the return drive from new years' weekend by creating a mix cassette of '50s-'60s tunes i mostly hadn't really thought about in years. that was something of a jumpstart to a resurgent '60s pop and soul interest i maintained for the rest of the year, and still into now, as you'll have seen below.

so if that's the cycle, i'm coming back around and trying to scratch that little bit deeper this time - i'm not only reading guralnick's book, but trying to follow along with the discography - MR. ROSS O. LOVE just ordered some percy sledge, clarence carter, etta james, jackie wilson, jr. walker, and boxtops from BMG (durnit "multi-unit sets" no longer qualify for free selex, hence no w. pickett, b. bland, r. brown); and meanwhile i've managed to acquire most or all of the tracks on the "r&b: the transition year" segment of PG's dream discography of (pre-internet/reissue boom) hard-to-find classics. kind of miraculous that. so anyway, i'll have plenty to report on. (currently grooving hard on ivory joe hunter's "i almost lost my mind")

meanwhile there's still ample contemporary noisemaking going on: already this year - this week even - i've been to more concerts than i'd seen in the last month and a half of oh-six (well, i guess there was a reason for that). friday it was girl talk @ johnny brenda's, absolutely the most lovely venue i've ever had for waiting 2+ hours to get into a sold out show. so homey and communal, especially running into so many folks there. [hat-tip to the south orangutan crew, john (no relation i presume) the bouncer, (no longer) green-haired katie and friend (sister?), allie chav whom i saw on stage just as gg flipped lady sov, the other allie, and of course steadfast stoic stangoni]

i had something to say about the show in the comments box for this awesomely titled but rather glibly snarky article in stylus (thanks to bedbugs for the nudge - i see neither nick nor anyone else has elected to respond), and i may have more to say later, as i have another bone or two to pick with mr. sylvester. basically, it was everything i'd have expected and hoped for, even though greg didn't get naked. (best bit, hands-down: the guitar rockout from the end of "digital love" over a number of things but most notably "hustlin'", before it got sped up in a rather daft manner.)

the next night was the great and probably late sun destroyers at the tritone, their putative swansong, and easily their best live performance to date (and i would know, i saw all three!) seriously, i found it very affecting, and not just because my roommate's leaving town, or because i'd just had two beers and a jack'n'ginger, or even just because of the alienating and inescapably allegorical effect of the two bright (albeit soundless) TV screens playing goofy commercial outtakes and distracting much of the crowd from the (poorly lit) band on stage, but also because gabe writes some pretty heartbreakingly bleak and unhappy songs. good ones too - check out "bust my face" and especially "objects" at theirspace, though for the full pathos you'd need to hear "dictionary" (which has my favorite SD lyric - "i hold the belief/that i can achieve/more than i can") and the new song about leavings. hokay guys, now you've officially been blogged about. guess you can break up now.

before they played i djed, which was a last-minute surprise because whoever else was going to do it had backed out - thanks to jason painchiller, who organized the evening and also djed after the band's set (hey, that's a pritty nice mix he's got on hisspace too. yay, lovefest@oursspaces!) it's a monthly do (named after probably my favorite fall song too, unless it's "spoilt victorian child") and looks likely i'll stay involved, possibly even help author it into something bigger dancier and more drawful. anyway, i enjoyed my surprise set, which jumped from mostly instrumental funk to a bit of microsomething, and then re-explored a number of choice moments from ¡OhSiX!, with alterations of course. "robot song" worked real nice with whatever i played it into. somehow abba slipped in there too.

and all of a sudden i've got all these other dj gigs coming up - one this friday, then three in february and another two in march (that's counting the mascher monthly, but not further t-t-t-tritone action.) so if you're in philly, you've got no excuse; if not, c'mon and visit! and/or get me to come play your town (i'd like to work on light-travelling laptop gigging capabilities, with the goal being a party in seattle EMP weekend.)

of course, there's really never a total lull in the media cycle. soon as i finish this i'm heading out to pick up the "new" (to you?) shins and of montreal records - in an attempt to demonstrate that downloading doesn't actually hurt record sales, the theory being
that even though i've now actually confirmed that i like both enough to own them eventually, i would have likely bought them on or near the day of release if i hadn't already heard them. something like that. maybe i'll even snag the the good the bad and the queen, which i actually am genuinely excited about, and i need to not let danger mouse make me forget that i'm not allowed to be party to the general damon albarn ambivalence, especially when nasty people are suggesting (rather counterintuitively) that his whole problem is not being able to move past blur. (since when did it become okay to talk about blur like they were uncool? you'd never get away with that about pulp.)

and while i'm at it i'm also gonna pick up some of montreal tickets (because, whoa!) though probably not ylt, not yet. looking forward too to jonada richman, maybe some of the other johnny b's shows, and ... the whole david byrne/fatboy slim/imelda marcos/carnegie hall thing (how can one resist?)

the title of this post, in case you were curious, refers to yet two more forms of sound-preoccupation that are presently forthcoming in this new year of newness. the jazz courtesy of this cat, a publicist for blue note (among others) who's been hooking me up with many more-or-less "modern" records to explore (more or less jazz too - hopefully he's also about to help me out in my soulquest with some sweet stax and specialty sides), getting me unexpectedly pumped up about jazz, and may or may not end up being my neighbor very soon. this-all does bode well for me actually getting back into jazz in the 007, as i've imagined i would sooner or later (free jazz even?) should be some good gristle there. [as side-note - who knows when i'll get around to (mod-)cunchry, but i have been listening to the new keith urban album, randomly, on the basis of thom jurek's perhaps rightly glowing recommendation.] i better hold off for now and save discussing actual music for a future post(s).

as for the silence...looks like that may be one of the few downsides to the brand-spankin'-new (job) i'm about to commence (!)...or who knows, maybe it'll be a blessing in disguise. hey, i could get into silence.