More musings on Finnish Nuggets

After receiving a reprimand for not posting comments in garagepunk.com, here are some more comments...

Some thoughts and musings on this massive comp, ( I received a copy on 4 discs!)

I dig the fuzz on Hey Hey Hey by Blues Section. The Sax riff in response to the vocal is a bit disconcerting. A pretty heavy tune otherwise.

The Ernos bust a moody move with the track Harha. A hypnotic riffs reels the listener in and then returns to continue pushing the song forward. The vocals are more of a harmonic thing, think these folks were influenced by Mamas & Papas?

The Renegades (Birmingham UK) give a hard, Brummie reading of 13 Women. That organ riff still startles me after a few listens. The dog seems to dig it. The guitar break is punctuated by screams, growls and cymbal bashing. Great tone on the axe. Ace.

Jormas scream it out on the keyboard heavy I Can't Break The Habit. Falcetto vocs provide the counterpoint to the distorto guitar that sludges along.

The Roosters shake a soul feather on thier version of See See Rider. I dig the rolling organ at the bottom of the mix.

Topmost gives the Artwoods a run for the money with their reading of I Keep Foregtting. The guitar break is pretty sweet, but could be tough by either turning up the amp, or hitting a distortion pedal.

The Careless hit the garage pocket with Desolate Time. I dig the accent here. Garage vibe from the North. Drum roll intros the tuff guitar solo. The cymbals are smacked hard as well.

The book that Euphonic assembled is also unbelieveable. After all of the comps that I have bought over the years, this surely has to be one of the most complete. Compilers take note...

I hope to print it, sit down with the comps, with a Belgian Ale and fully get the story of Finnish Nuggets.

Sons of Adam Moxie ep

Ah yes, the soothing sounds of The Sons of Adam. Soothing would not realy be a proper adjective with Randy Holden's blistering guitar. Mr Holden is a master.

This ep starts with You're a A Better Man Than I, the Yardbirds track. While most of the performance of the song has little to improve on the original save for Holden's guitar. The break will bend your mind. Lots of strings bending, sustain and speaker rippling feedback.

The Sons cover an Arthur Lee song called Feathered Fish that Love never recorded. Here Randy builds the base for the entire sound. He pounds it out, and the vocals, in a very 66 LA follow the path blazed by his guitar.

Baby show Me The Way was introduced to me from one of those Tony The Tiger comps from 10 years or so ago. This is a hard number with Mr. Holden playing counterpoint to the vocals. He seems to be trying to keep his axe under control, but his youthful energy and chops demand that he let it rip. "Lets move it down, now... Yeah."

The vibe is the MC5 at their most raw, without the politics. Word is genius.
The sound on this ep is pretty rough, obviously "mastered" from the original 45s themselves.

Here is a link to d/l mp3s. Thanks, Lost In Tyme Blog

Noise for the people

If you have been paying attention, I have been trying to get my skills together with garageband.
I still have a lot of work to do with the learning curve, but here is a remix of the funk nugget "Hachet."

Hachet

(the link above is to a non compressed 34 M file hosted by our friends in Deutschland at Rapidshare.)

Thanks to the prodding of my friends, hopefully this is just the beginning.

Nuggets from Finland

Wow, I constantly amaze myself with how much cool music came out in the 60s. It came from everywhere. Last year somebody provided multiple cds of mp3 sourced Portugeuse 60s music.

So here we go with FOUR (!) cds worth of 60s beat from Finland, home of a very heterogenous (and rocking) population.

The sound quality varies on record to record, but what else would you expect. Even the worst disc does not touch the "sound" of earlier Pebbles type comps. There seems to be some digital imperfections at some places in the songlist.

There are tons of tracks here, but I will try to stick to the ones that caught me ear. On disc two, there is Kevat by the New Joys. The fuzz riff is maximum, but then mood is kicked down quite a few notches when the vocals start. Lyrics are in Finn, and add an eerieness to the proceedings. Then a Keith Moonalike makes a quick appearance and smacks his drum kit like a collection of garbage bins. Cool track.

Dance to The Locomotion by Jormas, is wary fast and smokes. How does the drummer play that fast? R&B speeded to the max, the snare solo is crazy, followed by a frantic guitar lead. Their take on California Dreaming aint so hot, though. The tempo is kind of jerky on that song.

The Downwalkers do the moody thang with I Don't Believe You. These gents are from Espoo. There is a bit of the string jangle, but the vocals make the mood here.

Tunnen Sen by The Esquires seems that it may be more of an authentic sound, as it doesn't sound like anything else.

Volume Three kicks off with Call Me on The Telephone by Blues Section. It has more of a tough sound, I liked 80% of this one, excepting the saxaphone, and the cowbell might be a bit abused. The guitar snarls and wheezes trhough a break sounding like nothing else.

The Renegades do a great cover of the Sorrows, "Take A Heart," with a phenomenal harmonica sound.

The Hitchhikers do a track called Meditation with a driving organ. The tempo is all over the place.

I will try to post some more thoughts later.

Captain Beefheart Bat Chain Puller

This unreleased album from 76 comes my way via the mail. I am not sure why Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band never released this one. But thank you, internet.

The title track that leads this off, makes me say, "What an astonishingly odd way to start a record."

The harmonica "tone" that came out of the speakers gave my dog the inclination to do a double take. Sounded like wounded young elephant.

Maybe as I listen to this I am beinning to understand why this is lost. The third track, Harry Irene with it's sing songy vocals and whistle solo, really makes me this of one Jim Croce. Sorry, Captain.

Poop Hatch, while being a wierd Beefheartian spoken word piece, just kind of sucks.

Bat Chain Puller redeems itself with the track Brickbats. Lots of skronkity skronk horns dueling with some sloppy drums playing in an uncountable time signature. Surely those AZ pizza hut employees the Sun City Girls modeled their music in that style.

Not his strongest effort. I guess the hardest part is getting past Van Vliet's singing style. His famous multi octave voice is nary in view.

Handbraking weather

Well, to say that I am a fan of my daily driver whip would be the overstatement of early 2007.

My tonda shivic is quite excellent in the weather as experienced today. We received an inch or so of snow that fell at around 30 degrees, so that the snow was both slippery and fun. This is where the car shines, and I enjoy it the most, outside of the built in reliability.

Here are the main important features of the car:

1. The car is pretty light.
2. The car is front wheel drive.
3. Said shivic has a handbrake (even though it is a 4 speed lame o auto tranny.)

I enjoyed going to a local mall with Cratedigger Sr. holding onto the chicken bar on the headliner, and plunging over the snowplow "drifts" at the edge of each parking row. The look on pop's face was quite priceless as he screamed, "Craaaaaaaaatediggeeeeeeeeerrrrrrr Watch It!"

Another fun routine was forcing the vehicle into right angle turns, by taking my foot off the throttle and then pulling the handbrake, thus slowing front wheel spin whilst at the same time locking the rear brake drums, and jerking the steering wheel in the direction of intended turn.

I really should have taken some shots of the right angle turns in the slush. Good times.

DJ Shadow Psych Mix

I have been spending time in the cut/paste/edit/repeat zone as noted in recent posts. I finally got around to downloading the DJ Shadow psych mix as discussed on the yahoo group U-Spaces. I have to admit to being a lurker in that group...

This has been of interest to me for awhile, but my MP3 aversion is hard to overcome. I can't pull many of the songs that Shadow uses here, but I did recognize an Alexis Korner record used on the first track, as well as a Zappa voice over, "Suzy Creamcheese, where are you?" I do believe that is from the Mothers' Freak Out record.

For me the source records are not the most interesting part of this sound collage. The film strip from 7th grade sound quality of some of the sampled voice overs is of most interest. In fact some of the snips remind me of real experimental/industrial (not waxtrax) from the 80s. I wish I still had some of those tapes... The snips make mention of UFOs and other appropriate spaced out subject material that well accompanies the light headed feeling that the listener will get from jamming this. The sum of the parts, is much greater as a cliche.

The build from some unknown (to me) record at 4 minutes into track five, would be a great sound track to pumping the pedals up a large uphill ascent on your old roadbike. Then it breaks into "I am so tired and I don't know who I am..." A melancholy come down, go buy a farm in the country, hippie. There was some sound collage here also, but hard for me to make out at volume. Nice touch on the sampled loc groove at the end, scratches and all.

The sound quality is dodgy as I doubt this was ever very hifi and the source>aiff>mp3>aiff sound path has not helped on the highs in the sound spectrum. But I enjoyed splitting my wig to it nonetheless.

Not much in the scratching arena is in evidence here, but there are tons of edits, of that I am sure.

I found this collection of tracks to be highly effective, in additon to my homebrew espresso, to get the Sunday going.

AR + Machines Echo

What have I been up to? I have been getting lost in the Interzone of cut up music and distorted internet culture. Old WSB's ears may hurt from this $h!T, but he would surely get it from the creative and production level.

Take for example, the double record, AR+ Machines. Apparently, this is a Krautrock masterpiece that will "Never" see the light of day in a proper cd reissue. So the FLAC files that I decoded and burned to a couple of cdrs will be as good as it gets.

The dude behind this release is pictured above. His name is Achim Reichel and he used to be in the Rattles, a beat band with whom I am somewhat familiar. This record is firmly in the progkrautrockcamp. As illustrated in the pic above, Herr Reichel, likes to abuse the Strat and the tape loops. There are even some floot loops on one of the tracks.

Echo is one of those releases that you can put on and start the coffee and go about your Saturday morning, and the noise will put you into an oddly creative mood. I think that volume will make a big difference in what your personal takeaway is from the record.

It is almost useless to out write Julian Cope in regards to this record. He seems to get his Freak On about Echo.

AR+Machines abuses the tape loops and edits and uses phasing in such a way that it makes me wonder where I put my Fripp and Eno records. The mood goes from outer space to inner space and back again. I think that I will listen to this on the headphones the next time that I am on a plane.

Damm GarageBand is Baaad

Thanks to some of the persistence of one of my bros, I have been abusing the mac program GarageBand. The claw knows...

I have found it incredibly entertaining to abuse the tunes around the house and fill the system with some discombobulating noise. Just drop the noise into iTunes and then find it in GB and bring it in. I am thinking that putting it back out should be just as easy. So far I ahave been mixing live and hurting my garage sale amplification. One of my "tracks" is getting closer to the point that I may be able to record it soon.

Some of my faves are pretty mainstream funk dusties, then busting fills with Dutch noise. I may be onto something, or I may just be lame. But it doesn't matter really.

The program has an extremely easy learning curve. I really know nothing about sound, but GB makes it very easy to make edits, cuts, loops, and add extra tracks without much skill required. I can't believe how much fun this has been, maybe more fun than my tascam 4 track 15 years back.

The Churchills LP from 68

I had heard a bit about the Churchills LP from 68 a bit as being the one high dollar psych lp that is actually worth the money. They were an Israeli band that challenges Plastic Cloud on the fuzz category.

I am happy to get a cdr of an out of print $5-6000 lp usually, but I have not been able to make that happen yet. Yesterday, I was able to download an mp3 copy of the album from 1992. For mp3, this particular burn makes quite the room filler of sound.

Pictures in my mind has a preponderance of fuzz curlique throught the mid range. The stereo mix is very effective here. The 'Hills use the the panning effect to excellent result. Towards the end the fuzz travels channel to channel, up and down in volume in the mid range. This is all over a pounding blues based rythm stomp. Very cool.

Track four mellows a bit and takes the progression down.

Track 5 starts to pound and the guitar workout would give both Jimi and Ron Asheton a run for the money. Once again the panning effects are used to build tension. The arrangement is spectacular. The bass is tight and the drum kit is spanking out. My listening room is rumbling.

When the Churchills get to Straight People, they lose my attention a bit. The tempo reminds me a bit of Coronado's biggest drunken export, Jimmy Morrison. That f er should have sent more time mowing his lawn instead of "poetry," but I digress. Not a good thing to my ears. They use a preponderance of reverbed sound effects to move the song. The vocals just kill it for me. There is also either more tape hiss or snare rumble on this track.

Subsequent Final betrays their geographical heritage by including local instrumentation (the saz?). Sonically it reminds me of some of the more powerful Turkish psysch that was being reissued in years back. The bass is just doing bass drops. My neighbors must love me this morning. They break it down in an almost bluegrass fashion at the end. Amazing. This is possibly best one of the best arranged songs that I have heard in months. Rumble, rumble rumble oes the electric bass under it all. "Here I go..." Nice test tone at the end.

So Alone Today uses backwards guitar and echo to make chills form on the back of your neck and to make the dog ask to go outside. Freak.

Debka has the freak out award for this record though. Listen to our friends consult the joint chiefs over a rambling stringed arrangement as they build into a more medium tempo. The leader and intro is asking to be sampled.

I won't bore you with the details as they move into Led Zep cover territory.

Frank Zappa - King Kong (1968)

This was posted, just because it is there.

Many Beefheart collaborators,and FZ kind of stinks up the joint.

critical mass

Kind of glad that I missed this part of the Mass.

Critical Mass 12.29.06 pt 2

So after riding down Milwaukee, we follwed a couple of fixed gear riders down Lake Street underneath the El to Franklin, where we once again followed the El tracks, but this time south. Manouvering the Dahon amongst the supports for the El tracks and the Friday traffic was quite challenging. The Speed handled very well, I need to take it in for a dialing in, though. The brakes could use some adjusting. Overall, the chrome moly frame feels stiff and the SRAM shifter is a huge improvement over the 5 speed Sturmey Archer failure.

We got to Daley Center and there was a crowd, but not as big as I suspected for a New Year's Critical Mass. The weather was extremely mild and dry. Amazing for late December in Chicago.

We met our two groups of friends, two of the total group were Chicago CM first timers. They seemed pretty psyched. We heard rumors that the ride was going to head south to Hyde Park for a bonfire. None of our group was up for a ride down south and then all the way back north.

We headed out and almost immediately started heading south and west. We went past Greek Town and then headed west on the street directly north of 290. When we got to Ashland, the ride headed south. Our group was definiately not into going to either Oak Park (west) or Hyde Park (south) at that point. We called a group audible and decided to head back north and hit a couple of bars.

Based on a video that I posted, it looks like we are all wrong, and the ride did head north at some point, since the video shows some CM nonsense in Wicker Park at the North/Damen/Milwaukee intersection. We did see more than a few groups of riders heading both east and north as well.

Anyway, we headed north and stopped at a place called the Union Club,, on the edge of the hood. Judging by the bars around the parking lot, I felt that this was a somewhat unsafe place to park our six bikes. We used our Kryptos and some of our friends used a cable.

We mentioned to the door dude to watch our bikes, but I didn't feel that he gave it much priority. I came out the front door of the bar every few minutes to check. Everything was there each time that I checked. After we were done, maybe 45 minutes or so, we settled up and left. I was the first one out the door and was the first to notice that there were only 5 bikes!

f-ing thieves!!!

Our one friend had his mountain bike stolen. Not cool. We talked to the manager, and then we headed the 2 blocks to the police department. We dropped our friends there, they were going to file a report, take the blue line to the red line and go home.

We started heading east though the Loop. It was a great night to be out in the city on a bike. Pretty calm, and the weather was perfect. We went north on Clark, and then took the scenic route through Lincoln Park. Going through the Park at night on a bike is another cool thing to do. All of the familiar sights and smells from my childhood at the Zoo seem so much different. It is a quiet oasis between Broadway and Lake Shore Drive. I also almost ran over two rats that think that they have the park to themselves at night.

We continued up Broadway and evetually ended up at Moodys. Ths place has the 1966 beer joint down. Nothing has changed there since the 60s, a nice dark joint with free peanuts and $9.00 Anchor Steam pitchers! I will be going back.

We continued north and caught the Rogers Park train at 11.52. It was a long night of riding. I can't wait for next month.