The Audiozine

For starters, an apology: in 2007 there were no new posts to the Audiozine Listening Series. Two reasons: A) I was super busy with school and B) I am a huge procrastinator and it made more sense to procrastinate on this blog than on my schoolwork.

That said, here's a short and sweet set of posts to music I meant to post throughout 2007. May they make yr summer 2008 merry:

1) Spoon -- The Underdog (Demo)
Spoon's Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga came out in summer '07 and became my number one jam of the sunny season. Ga... is their most accomplished album, managing to sound terse and tense, but replacing the minimalism of earlier LP's with a new lushness. This demo version of lead single "The Underdog" comes from a limited 7" that came with the album if you bought it at an independent record store. Which I did.

2) Spoon -- It Took A Rumor To Make Me Wonder, Now I'm Convinced I'm Going Under
The B-side to aforementioned 7". This is a quirky little electro-disco-dub workout.

3) Radiohead -- The Gloaming (DJ Shadow Remix)
Remember the Bush era? When nobody could so much as question anything without being labeled Al-Q-whatever? Well, back then Radiohead set the standard for political rock -- namely, they (and TV On The Radio, who had some politically charged moments on "Return to Cookie Mountain") expressed our sense of frustration and powerlessness. Too bad they couldn't transcend it with their music and offer reasons to take action, get informed, or at least stay hopeful. Well, whatever, here's a track from Hail to the Thief, remixed by DJ Shadow and released as a limited vinyl single. Couldn't find a cleaner version than this rip from the radio, but the graininess kind of lends some grit. P.S. these electronic squiggles, blips, and clangs really jarred listeners who expected downtempo instrumental hip-hop from DJ Shadow.

4) Jaylib -- The Message
Ok, I lied. The other soundtrack to my Endless Summer '07 was the reissue of Jaylib's Champion Sound. Jaylib = J Dilla + Madlib, two of my fav producers. The album is comprised of nasty lo-fi hip-hop, with lots of vinyl noise, static, and rhythmic disjunctions. "The Message" is not one of the album's tracks, instead coming from a white label released by Stones Throw. It refers obliquely to an early Grandmaster Flash + The Furious Five single.

5) Child Rebel Soldiers aka Kanye West + Pharrell Williams + Lupe Fiasco -- US Placers
Oh geez. There have been super-vague rumors of an album-length collaboration between these three giants under the name Child Rebel Soldiers. This track comes from one of Kanye's mixtapes and contains a beat that rips from Thom Yorke's solo album The Eraser. So in the year that brought us In Rainbows, we also got our first Radiohead-hip-hop-crossover.

RIGHT CLICK + SAVE AS + ENJOY!

A-side from the free 7" that came with the first XXXXXX # of copies of "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" if you were dope enough to buy from an independent record shop.

B-side from the free 7" that came with the first XXXXXX # of copies of "Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga" if you were dope enough to buy from an independent record shop.

Radiohead's song "The Gloaming" from their "Hail to the Thief" LP, remixed by DJ Shadow.

J Dilla + Madlib = Jaylib. This track does NOT appear on "Champion Sound", Jaylib's only full length album. I believe it comes from a white label vinyl instead.

Kanye West + Lupe Fiasco + Pharrell Williams = Child Rebel Soldiers. The beat samples a track from Thom Yorke's solo album, "The Eraser".

Hey all,

Well, today is the 2nd anniversary of the Audiozine.

Short and sweet reminder:

Audiozine Volume 01 -- Collaborative Sound Collage
Audiozine Listening Series 01 -- Animal Collective
Audiozine Listening Series 02 -- Nas, Ghostface, Talib Kweli/Madlib, Miles Davis
Audiozine Listening Series 03 -- Ricardo Villalobos + Portishead
Clarence Thomas Mixtape -- Justice, Blind Willie Johnson, Madvillain, Michael Jackson, Charles Mingus, AMM
Clarence Thomas Action-Adventure Unit Live at The Bridge PAI, 04/05/08

Thanks for listening + reading. Listening Series 04 will arrive within a week. And there is nascent work on at least two more Audiozine sound collage collaborations. 2008/2009, busy times.

After an achingly long period of dormancy, the Audiozine is back in action. It's been over a year since I posted to the Listening Series, but today's posts should be a nice return to form. Check it:

1) Portishead -- "Machine Gun"
This is the new single from the upcoming (and 10-years-in-the-waiting) new Portishead album, Third. "Machine Gun" represents a significant change of pace, with a stuttering electro beat replacing the pitched down R&B samples of yesteryear. This bodes extremely well.

2) Ricardo Villalobos -- "Enfants (Chants)"
After hearing about Villalobos for a long time, I picked up his Fabric36 Mix many months ago and it quickly became one of my favorite albums of 2007. He has a knack for sculpting really clean, round sounds and placing them into really intricate rhythmic structures. The tracks are minimalist dance music through and through, but when I played the mix for non-fans of electronic music it resonated with them too; his attention to detail, the seamlessness of his mixology, the snappy treble and elastic bass sounds, and strange leftfield turns (taiko drummers?!?!?!) invite outside listeners in, even as they confound dancefloor conventions. "Enfants (Chants)" is a 17 minute epic that Villalobos made the day before his first child was born. The track is deliberately minimal because he meant for a handful of his DJ friends to use it as a scaffold for mixing with other tracks. As his small coterie of friends started spinning this jam, it created a sensation that culminated in its release as a somewhat limited release EP and tons of blogohype. Rather hard to find for a while but now proliferating on the interweb, enjoy this slab of digital hotness!