Toilet Guppies

Net Nuggets 41: SWANS Live at Yesterday's All Tomorrow's Parties, Today!

2012-01-29T12:00:00.016+01:00

SWANS: Dead at All Tomorrow's Parties [.zip, 128 kbps mp3s]

In October, Young God Records was set to release We Rose from Your Bed with the Sun in Our Head—a live document of material from SWANS' promotional tour of its 2010 reunion album, My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. It still isn't out, so while we're waiting for Godot, here's a recording from SWANS' appearance at last year's Portishead-curated All Tomorrow's Parties festival, I'll Be Your Mirror, at the Paramount Theatre in New Jersey on 1 October 2011.

The recording highlights the often inadequate distinction between Apollonian and Dionysian art. A studio recording is, generally, a wholly different affair to a live concert. A SWANS gig, for instance, is very much a bodily experience. What was touted as the band's final record (two double albums ago now) was somewhat misleadingly given the title Soundtracks for the Blind. «Misleadingly», because live, SWANS make music for the deaf. You don't need to bring your ears; the propulsion of sound reverberates throughout the entire body as the slow, repetitive waves of bass, drums and noise blow against it, giving the molecules that comprise you a healthy old rattle 'n' shake. Forget about discerning words, melody. We're talking primordial soup of vibrating static, everything a painful blur. SWANS live is pure masochistic joy! The spectacle of a possessed M. Gira riding both his band and audience members' demons like a fifth horseman of the apocalypse, astray and AWOL, to wrest any control you might think you had out of your weak, little hands only adds to the gluttonous punishment.

But as has always been the challenge for live albums, they can never convey the experience they attempt to record. Sometimes that's fine. More than a souvenir, the live album can give you an opportunity to hear details you missed the first time around, in all the eardrum shattering hiss. SWANS' last live album, 1997's Swans Are Dead, contained some of the most blissful, cathartically mournful, erotically frightening and finger snapping moments in the band's recorded history.

Toilet Guppies caught SWANS on their recent European tour in Berlin and in Oslo, and can say with some authority (I said «some») that what was a near-transcendental derangement of the senses in a live setting—the sheer volume obliterating the mind/body dualism—comes across as meandering and a little self-indulgent in mp3 format. Too bombastic to be used as background music, but not pummelling enough at 128 kbps through tiny, tinny iPod headphones or speakers to satisfy the average contemporary attention span, this is not a recording anybody is likely to listen to while taking the bus in the morning or doing the dishes in the evening. Nor while they're dancing, fucking or doing drugs, for that matter. Three of these tracks run for about 25 minutes, most of which is taken up by repeated Wagnerian percussive stomps, or cycles of slowly building marching drums. Live, these give rise to fear for your ears, before finally bringing your resistance to your knees. You surf numberless waves of hypnotic, all-enveloping sound until you wake up from a trance, once the music and the pain in your aural orifice has subsided. Sweat trickles out of waxen ears. Taken out of the concert venue and its formidable PA, however, the pieces drag on a bit. The songs are great—the surprisingly funky «Apostate», in particular, shines here—it's just that by the time they're wrapping up the intro, you've been waiting a quarter of an hour. It's like a particularly conscientious lover's never ending foreplay, always promising, but when will they deliver?

On Swans Are Dead, Jarboe's occasional lead vocal duties and funereal organ lent the proceedings much-needed variety, texture and, dare I say, femininity. There is no such respite on these recordings from the phallic three-guitar, one-bass, two-prong percussion attack. The pieces become much of a muchness, really, bleeding over into one another. Everything has that same structure, always cranked up to eleven, innit?

The above download, then, is mostly a souvenir for those who have witnessed the real thing, or else a curious document for those eager to eavesdrop on the process leading up to the already-recorded, but yet-to-be released follow-up to My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. This recording was originally uploaded by NPR as one long 128 kbps mp3 file some time ago. I've split the file into individual tracks. A no doubt far superior live document—mixed and mastered, without the glitches, culled from a multitude of concerts and in lossless quality—is set for release four months ago, and should be available in our lifetime. Sign up to Young God Records' mailing list for a notification upon its release.

For more of the same, but in far superior sound quality (at once far more compelling) and with admonitions to the Spanish people to overthrow their government, download a couple of songs performed by SWANS at Barcelona's Primavera Sound festival last May (care of WFMU and Free Music Archive):

«Eden Prison»

«No Words/No Thoughts»

Best Musik Out of Germany Since Neubauten

2012-01-25T23:45:00.000+01:00

Warm Music for the Coldest Month of the Year

2012-01-17T11:21:00.002+01:00

V/A: Summertime in Wintertime
—17 More Variations of Summer [.zip]

The activity on Toilet Guppies has wound down, thanks to better things to do. But I haven't forgotten you, huddled as you must be in a foetal position, trying to stave off the bitter cold of January with heat rub, a flea bitten blanket and the remaining glow of your own inner organs. I still have various rarities, &c. to share with you all, but for now, enjoy this frivolous collection of music intended to warm you from the inside of your mind (and ear canal).

And if the above comp should soothe the chill in your bones, here's more of the same.

The Most Badass Thing I Ever Did Heard!

2012-01-10T00:49:00.002+01:00

2011 Weighed & Judged for Your Consumerist Convenience

2011-12-31T04:00:00.002+01:00

Toilet Guppies despises lists, from the top ten to the shopping variety, so bravely refuses to come up with an end-of-year ranking of the supposedly best albums of 2011. Make up your own mind. If, however, you'd like a taste of albums or tracks that may have slipped past your fleeting attention in the year that was, here's a random sampler of balmy songs/sounds/grooves/wallowing/ecstasies of the past twelve months—a celebration of the year that was:

V/A: Turner Music Prize 2011, vol. 1 [.zip] and vol. 2 [.zip]

So what happened in 2011? Toilet Guppies heard about the genre «salsa trance» for the first time and thought the 2012 apocalypse had come early. As for record releases, Mark E. Smith's the Fall took the piss… again. Lou Reed & Metallica were universally derided, even though they produced the most sonically interesting record by Reed in three or four decades, and by Metallica in their entire career. (The cruel and disconcertingly inspired lyrics were a pervert's delight. Pity there's no room for that in 2011. Critics always come around to Lou Reed's albums a few decades after panning them, though, so watch this space in, oh, 2041 or something like that.) Amy Winehouse died, and people began to talk about the singer's actual music. Nick Cave disbanded Grinderman, sadly ending half a decade of sonic depravity and lyrical men's lib. SWANS tore across the world, obliterating minds by playing music so loud it turned entire bodies into ears and ears into a constant ringing sensation as if heard underwater, every victim/glutton for punishment having to endure rippling waves of sound vibrating in the void between the molecules, atoms and particles of their tenuous beings. Just in time for the 2012 rupture of our world, then.

What else? Download the above comp and hear for yourself. Whatever you do, go buy HTRK's Work (work, work). Despite the lyrics, it's the album of the year.

XXXmas for Your Body

2011-12-21T20:04:00.000+01:00

New HTRK vid for perhaps the finest tracks off one of this year's best albums, Work (Work, Work):

A Date with Larkin Grimm's Forthcoming Record

2011-12-16T18:00:00.022+01:00

2012 will see the release of Larkin Grimm's fourth album, Soul Retrieval. A follow up to Parplar—that delightfully intimidating (and occasionally creepy) document of brutal truth and compassionate destruction—Toilet Guppies' expectations were set impossibly high. But like Devendra Banhart moved on to make less edgy, but in other ways more accomplished music upon splitting with intense producer M. Gira, Larkin Grimm has delivered a heavily instrumented, but ultimately more uplifting record after slipping out from under the influence of that same producer. The venom and bite has given way somewhat to a perfection of craftsmanship.

Soul Retrieval opens with a slew of folk songs with traditional acoustic instruments quite often playing untraditional arrangements, but nonetheless maintaining an overall rootsy Americana feel. «Paradise and so Many Colors» is a soft and soothing opener that turns into a hearty folk romp replete with cherubic joy. «Flash and Thunder Came to Earth» is—ironically, considering the title—the closest Grimm has come to progressive kindergarten muzak, all flutes, harp and lullaby melody. «The Butcher», one of Grimm's most eloquent compositions, known from her exquisite 2008 WFMU session (and also as a collaboration with Italian trio Rosolina Mar on African relief aid benefit CD Leaves of Life), is revisited and given a more uptempo, instrumented treatment that would be good, had we not already heard two superior versions. «The Road Is Paved with Leaves» offers a languid country soul feel, whereas «Be a Great Burglar» veers into Middle Eastern territory. They're both well executed, but fail to stir the confronting emotions and uncomfortable insights that made Parplar such a crushing beauty.

So far, then, Soul Retrieval is underwhelming. But then the song with the most promising title—«Dirty Heart, Dirty Mind»—comes on, a track less dense with instruments, but with eerie strings that flutter and stab at just the right moments. This is fairytale feel Grimm as we know and love her—who intimidates (and thrills!) us so. Then «Lying in a Pool of Milk» accepts the preceding song's challenge, offering an equally pared down, orchestrally atmospheric performance with perhaps the new songs' first stand out lyric, making you stop to take notice:

«Fuck that child, oh, fuck that child!»

One of Grimm's strongest qualities has always been her fearlessness and liberated pagan perspective, seeing past the Manichaean or Judeo-Christian «good» versus «evil» dualism that so oversimplifies and paralyses. Not that «fuck that child» is a call to pederasty, but most artists simply wouldn't have gone there, whether for lack of imagination, humour or balls.

The next track, «Hello, Pool of Tears» is an embellished rendition of one of the gems off her WFMU session, «One Sweet Drop». Again, the strings flit and sting as the main melody floats mellifluously along, a river beset by killer bees. Finally, a fourth song extends and ends the good run:

Album closer «I Am Not Real» confirms that Grimm is at her best when toned down and minimal almost to the point of mantras. The lyrics are a return to a more immediately accessible spirituality, the melody flowing with easily understood (but perhaps hard won) ways of viewing reality. (Good luck finding that on Pitchfork.) Mysticism is hard to pull off, demanding as it does a certain restraint and balance, lest it devolve into indulgent jiggery pokery for yoga feminists and the ponytailed, all clad in purple and on the run from sex and meat, eating, praying and loving it up all over the place. Thankfully, Grimm elegantly sidesteps the traps, and is never far from contrasting the rainbow-coloured unicorns playing with dolphins under a full moon with some visceral human urge, base and natural. «I am not real» is not an insight from the motivational self-help New Age healing industry. That said, it does provide soul—metaphorically speaking, of course—that you'd be hard pressed to find among the inane reflections of all the ambitious artists out there who only write lyrics because their stylish front person needs an excuse to do all that posturing with their hands and hair.

Soul Retrieval might not be the doozy Parplar was, but where the latter was a bit too long—a bit too much in places—the former keeps it short and sweet. (The last half being particularly dulcet.) And while Gira's production on Parplar was crisp and creepy, imbuing psychosis with lucidity, it could also be overwrought with overdubs. Grimm's own mixing is softer, every sound hidden in the same place (as opposed to competing for primacy). There's about as much going on, strings flowing and pricking, glockenspiel twinkling, but the instruments are understated. Soul Retrieval is also a very acoustic album. No hard brass, sexed guitars or brute percussion. Guitar strings are picked rather than forcefully strummed, and the string arrangements are downright psychoactive. Outside of Gira's brilliant, but primitivistic determination, Grimm's vision is allowed to breathe. Apart from showcasing her subtle, but sophisticated production values—heard through a headset, the album is the sweetest ear candy—Soul Retrieval boasts elegant and inventive arrangements, fine, fine and refined. These are the kind of recordings that grow with each listen. Which is to say buying it is a smart investment.

On her first two albums, Grimm had the tendency to get histrionic, sometimes for better, quite a few times for worse, howling like a banshee being treated to an icy bath by Freud and Jung. Perhaps she's more skilled now, as she relies less on energy and more on craft on this new release. It's one step forward, which is all you can ask of a new album, really.

Besides, pure mathematics state that half a great album makes one good album, so look out for it once it hits stores and whatnot in January or February. Provided you have a soul to retrieve, the four last songs will give you hours of joy, relief and support. You can't say that about Vampire Weekend or Sleigh Bells or whoever it is who's being blogged about this week. (Present blog excluded. Naturally.)

P.S. Should you require added incentive for buying the record, backing vocals on Soul Retrieval come courtesy of Clara Engel (among others), who Toilet Guppies had the pleasure of previewing in March. Also, renowned rock producer Tony Visconti, of Iggy Pop and, er, David Bowie fame, contributes some instrumentation (recorder!) and a little production assistance on the album. Otto Hauser, drummer for more artists than anyone would care to mention, but who has played with Devendra Banhart, Vetiver and James Jackson Toth, also plays on this one.

RIP Grinderman

2011-12-12T17:00:00.005+01:00

Grinderman vs. Factory Floor:
«Evil (The Michael Cliffe house remix)» [mp3]

Apparently, Nick Cave has just announced the dissolution of Grinderman. Which, seeing as Grinderman is half of the Bad Seeds, probably means he's taking his delightfully posturing noise manglers back to the mother ship of composed Bad Seeds balladry. More stately, high brow splendour to follow, I'm sure.

And though the Bad Seeds almost never disappoint, it's a pity, as Grinderman has given us some of the most sonically exhilarating tunes in Cave's daunting oeuvre, and lyrics far superior to those love songs that smack of trying to impress models and years' worth of well-written, yet corny murder ballads. (What would Nick Cave know about murder, and what's so romantic and poignant about tragic brutality, anyway?) As for Grinderman, are there any better lines in all of rock 'n' roll than:

Well, my baby calls me the Loch Ness Monster
Two great big humps and then I'm gone

Or:

I sent her every type of flower
I played the guitar by the hour
I petted her revolting little chihuahua
But still she just didn't want to

Then there's:

We're sick and tired
of all this self serving grieving
All we wanted was a little consensual rape in the morning
and maybe a bit more in the evening

Oh, and:

Your skin is like the falling snow
Your hair is like the rising sun
Your tongue is like a Kalashnikov
Or some other foreign gun

Not to forget «Palaces of Montezuma» in its entirety, heroin reverie and all. (Sample lyric: «The spinal cord of JFK / wrapped in Marilyn Monroe's négligée / I give to you.» Certainly beats «I don’t believe in an interventionist God / but I know, darling, that you do / But if I did I would kneel down and ask him / not to intervene when it came to you». Or: «Your face has fallen sad now / for you know the time is nigh / when I must remove your wings / and you, you must try to fly». Ah, that «Ship Song»… I hope at least he got a blowjob on the back of it.)

Also, no group has done as much for facial hair as this exceptionally bearded and moustachioed gang of middle aged delinquents. (For men's fashion, that is—Le Tigre has fought that battle better for women).

As for the music, judge for yerself:

Grinderman, you shall be missed! And as we all grieve, ever so self-servingly, enjoy one of the few Grinderman rarities out there, a B-side to limited edition, vinyl-only single «Evil», remixed by Factory Floor.

Wintertime, and the Livin' Is Hard

2011-12-11T21:00:00.001+01:00

V/A: Summertime in Wintertime
—15 Variations of Summer [.zip]

Winter has its beauty, and a roughness that's only good for you, but there's no getting around it: The cold season makes you wish there were hemispheres, climate zones and a season or two between you and it. With your body in its grip, your mind is already somewhere else, where the climate suits your body and your being actually belongs, more at peace with nature than fighting it. Some place where you're not always having to ward off the world.

And so to a compilation that lets you dream of warmer times in drier climes, especially good on a Sunday that's wet in all the wrong ways (and none of the right). So hush, little baby, don't you cry…

Rare or Unreleased 53: Aid for Helpless Children

2011-11-21T18:00:00.042+01:00

SWANS: «Ligetí's Breath/Hilflos Kind» [.zip]

Ah, Berlin! What mistress are you! This shall be Toilet Guppies' first winter in the world capital of contemptorary art. (Next to its old nemesis, New York, of course.) A city where salaries are insults added to the injury of already ripe unemployment, but where alcohol is cheap. The ramshackle hedonism, tottering beneath the myths of the Weimar Republic, is wrapped in socially acceptable left wing politics (coming in whatever shape or form leftist radicals may afford), all of it housed by rather unsightly new buildings where the destructive determination of mankind has obliterated the old, as well as old buildings that remain pocked with little bullet hole reminders. This does not intimidate the ambitious bohemian. Every day a new arrival, like so many actress-waitresses flocking to LA… Dare any of us imagine what winter shall bring?

To soften the arrival of snow and below -15 degrees in such a place, Toilet Guppies submits a guppy from way down the toilet: a 1996, since-deleted German language rendition of SWANS' «Helpless Child».

When Michael Gira decided to kill off SWANS (long before their presently ongoing reunion), the band's corpse bloated into the two-disc swan song Soundtracks for the Blind, perhaps the best summary of the varied forms of the band's ethos and aesthetic on any one album. Old loops, found sounds, various live recordings and both new and old studio ones were all jabbed, stomped and stroked into a whole (or hole, whichever you prefer).

As if the resulting two hours and twenty minutes' worth of music didn't suffice, the band also issued a 51-minute «EP» of alternate versions, «Die Tür ist zu». As the Teutonic title—«the door is closed»—indicates, two of the tracks were German versions of songs off Soundtracks for the Blind. Presumably, this was a final gesture of gratitude aimed at the band's German fan base, who absolutely loathed it, cringing at the ham-fisted American accent singing words that may sound cool in exotic English but that, they were quick to realise, aren't exactly Goethe or Rilke in German.

But though the «EP»'s opening piece, «Helpless Child», features one of the least accomplished lyrics by one of rock's most unique and underappreciated wordsmiths, the music still contains one of the most sublime expressions of the band's transgressive-transcendent, Wagnerian excess, combining as it does funereal organs with brute repetition, its third movement building towards a climax that—live, at least—obliterates any sense of the body and isolates the mind in sorrow indistinguishable from joy, elation from heaviness, and the rest of it. More clearly than most of SWANS' output, it encapsulates the band's attempt at unifying opposites into one liberating whole, taking the contradictions, paradoxes and tensions of human logic, feelings and sense experience and accepting that they aren't, in fact, real, except as a totality. One in which, incidentally, you are swallowed up, momentarily relieving you of the feeling of being a separate entity, no longer an ego kicking against the will of the world.

Or something. «Helpless Child» (or «Hilflos Kind» in German) is prefixed with one of Soundtracks for the Blind's ambient noise instrumentals, «I Love You This Much» (re-Christened «Ligetí's Breath»), and so is not merely a German language rendition of the version on Soundtracks for the Blind, but an extended opus. (You know, if you needed a further incentive to download the track…)

I'd include the German version of «I See Them All Lined Up», too, but I'll save that for the day when I'm more in the mood for lyrics like: «I see their bodies in the pyre / leaking black smoke into the flames / And all the people stand around / shaping lips into my name». In German.

«Die Tür ist zu» is out of print, but Soundtracks for the Blind is still very much available, and Toilet Guppies very highly recommends that you part with money for it at the first given opportunity.

Protest Is Best

2011-11-18T01:34:00.002+01:00

Freedom of speech, freedom of the body, freedom for women, freedom from the tyranny of humourless, neutered killjoys and prudes everywhere.

Praise be Egyptian blogger and freedom lover (because she's a lover, not a fighter), Ms. Aliaa Magda el-Mahdy.

Oh, and merry Christmas!

P.S. Not to forget Ai Weiwei, charged by the Chinese government with pornography for this act of gratuitous lewdness:

Winter Compilation 2011-20... 12?

2011-11-09T00:00:00.003+01:00

V/A: Sun Has Set V (Winter 2011-20… 12?) [.zip]

Toilet Guppies' annual winter collection is here, for what is possibly the final full winter in the history of the planet and even the universe, so download yours while you still can!

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 15: The Spooks

2011-10-31T00:00:00.022+01:00

The Spooks: 2 tracks from
Death from Beyond the Grave [.zip]

Ah, Hallowe'en… Cool for kids, but for adults, Hallowe'en merely caters to conformists who think they're being «crazy» by not conforming to standard measures of propriety by—that's right—conforming to the expectation that they get dressed up for Hallowe'en.

«Toilet Guppies,» I hear you think, «you think too much.» And you'd be right. (Especially if I think I'm hearing your thoughts.)

The best remedy for thoughts, of course, is the moronic noise dredged up by Black Lips. In this case, the three original members of Black Lips in conjunction with members of Deerhunter and the Kiwis, for the silly Hallowe'en act the Spooks:

It's not Mozart. Or Black Lips, even. But the inept vinyl transfer you'll find above—of incompetently composed and performed songs from the Spooks' one and only album, 2009's Death from Beyond the Grave—is the closest Toilet Guppies will ever come to celebrating an obnoxious Anglospherical holiday. (Yes, Valentine's Day, you're next.)

Do me a favour and at least dress up in something wrong.

Toilet Guppies Tries to Connect with People via Mixtapes, No. 6: Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing

2011-10-25T22:00:00.004+02:00

V/A: 33 Minutes in the Gutter of Sound
—Easy Listening for the Hard of Hearing [.zip]

Some time ago, I posted a mixtape containing 30 minutes of poorly engineered punk and lo-fi noise pop. 'Twas quite a doozy, if I may say so myself. And back by popular demand—if one person hinting about more of the same may be called «popular demand»—here's another 30 or so minutes of barely listenable bish bash mess. Screeching treble, ringing cymbals, pathetically thin bass, murky mixes… spanning four decades of rock 'n' roll, the common denominator here is, well, tinnitus.

If high fidelity is a form of naturalism, lo-fi noise is not inability or poverty as much as rock's own expressionism. And as naturalism is a form of sobriety, it should go without saying that low fidelity is far more fun. Hedonistic. Life affirming, as only the death wish can be. Expressionism—brute strokes and all—is hardly subtle, but who's got time for subtlety?

Of course, ineptly taped home recordings became all the rage in the early noughties. Just don't expect warbly acoustic, singer/songwriter noodlings on this comp. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) As the last mixtape stayed clear of tape hiss balladry, so this one sticks to more violent noise. But where the last mixtape veered towards the horny and/or idiotic, this one is moody and brooding and perhaps a little bit killjoy. Artsy fartsy, even.

Yet it rocks, and should you ever feel like dancing and being true to your feelings at the same time, this comp's your stop: 33 minutes to blast the wax right out of your ear and the nihilism out of your mind.

First Day of Winter

2011-10-14T00:00:00.037+02:00

Jörg Mager Ensemble:
Ultima, 18. okt. 1996, Rockefeller, Oslo [.zip]

In Norway, 14 October was traditionally seen as the first day of winter. To mark the occasion, here's an unreleased, but truly transcendent live record by one of Norway's foremost composers—a man seemingly steeped in winter, by the sounds of these monumental, monochromatic and meditative orchestral pieces.

You may curse it in a couple of months, but winter has its own beauty.

Support Larkin Grimm

2011-10-13T02:41:00.002+02:00

The formidable Larkin Grimm has already recorded, mixed and mastered her new album, Soul Retrieval, but has yet to print copies or secure a distribution/promotion deal. As far as Toilet Guppies knows, this is not being done through a label, so funds are needed. The release was scheduled for autumn 2011, now early 2012.

Larkin Grimm saved my life, and if Larkin Grimm saved your life (or got you back with your ex-wife), go here to donate whatever you can to encourage, nurture and pay the dues due an artist who delivers.

Few songwriters are able to pen lyrics like those of Kaliesque Grimm, and you won't find many who can sing with such authority and beauty either, her voice clear and strong and coming out of a cavernous, seemingly prehistoric mouth full of compassionate destruction. Still, her name isn't nearly as known as it deserves to be. Nor is it likely that she'll be hyped by the indie hipster biz any time soon. So, take charge of the marketplace; support your favourite artists now. These interweb times are no time to be a lazy consumer. There's hope beyond the record industry yet, but only if you act.

It's time, then, to stop down-/freeloading art and to give something back to those who transport you to secret places, or who bust you open, whatever needs release releasing all over the place as your cooped up energy once again flows out into the universe in one momentous, bitter sweet moment of messy bliss. Or who simply gave you some grace or perhaps brutal honesty when you thought you really needed it. Patrons who donate, via PayPal, more than U$D 50.00 to Grimm are set to receive an autographed advance copy of the album.

Perhaps one day, Grimm will be routinely mentioned in the same breath as Dylan, Cohen or Cave. But none of those guys got there by themselves...

Hate Rock Is so Successful

2011-10-04T21:46:00.002+02:00

Toilet Guppies loathes music videos. This one is the same pretentious superficial-marketing-nonsense-masquerading-as-art wank, but the song will undoubtedly prove itself one of thee stand out tracks of 2011:

Download the demo version of the song here, and—not «or»—buy the album here. You won't regret it.

And if you do, you have more money than sense anyway.

You Know... for Kids!

2011-09-30T14:00:00.001+02:00

V/A: Punky Town… You Know, for Kids! [.zip]

The son of a friend of mine heard Fela Kuti and, at about only two years of age, stated that it was, and I quote: «Dancing music!» To which I've been told he promptly started moving his extremities about. Such excellent taste at such a tender age is impressive, if not a little intimidating. (And perhaps a little disconcerting; Fela Kuti played some seriously, er, adult music.)

A musical education is not to be underrated. Parental neglect in this regard is to blame for all the rubbish on the hit lists that supplants the intense, intelligent, emotional, sincere, ballsy, gutsy, fun or funny music that is, almost systematically it seems, relegated to obscurity. And so this compilation goes out to the children…

Noise is infantile like poop and stuffing stuff into your mouth. Rock 'n' roll, although people have tended to take it far too seriously for decades now, is childish and puerile. Perfect for kids!

So here's a compilation of idiotic, fun loving music—simple, three-chord, three-minute noise pop with stupid (and out-of-tune) sing-along melodies—ideal for kids who want to shout and bang things into other things and smash toys or their parents' precious furniture rather than be quiet, obedient and bored or boring. As the song goes:

(Freak out!)
When your momma says
(Freak out!)
It's time to go to bed

And so this one goes out to Ask, Ive, Freya, Nico and all other children whose parents are trying to calm them down and put them to sleep, when all they want to do is rock out! And if you want to teach your child English, what better way to make them sing along:

I saw my sisters fight just last week
I didn't know what to do, so I freaked
I climbed the crazy mountain's highest peak
And then I kissed Big Bird on his beak

Let one of the most moronic bands of our time take you to…

PUNKY TOWN!

Larkin Grimm Announces New Album!

2011-09-29T16:27:00.002+02:00

What a summer and autumn for music: the War On Drugs just released Slave Ambient, HTRK Work (Work, Work). Guitarist/lead singer of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band released his transporting solo effort, Efrim Manuel Menuck Plays «High Gospel», and indie's finest idiots Black Lips gave us the decent, if not great Arabia Mountain. SWANS will be releasing a live document from their recent tour, and now Larkin Grimm has announced she'll be releasing her next album, Soul Retrieval, before year's end.

I refrained from using an exclamation mark in that last sentence, but that's only because I'm trying my hardest at retaining my composure in the face of such titillating news. As yet there are no details. No track listing, no release date, no record label. (Last year, Grimm, true to character, wrote that «Young God Records and I have decided to try having an open relationship. It was, at best, a mutually abusive union…») She did, however, assure us that Soul Retrieval is «the best album I’ve ever made, and I’m finally the person in control of its final sound.» We can't wait.

Never mind, then, all this Nevermind re-issue nonsense; there's too much good new stuff around. Pull yourself together, man, this is no time for nostalgia!

Net Nuggets 40: The War On Drugs Soldier On!

2011-09-19T10:00:00.152+02:00

The War On Drugs: «Live on KEXP» [.zip]

Tonight, the War On Drugs are playing at the NBI here in Berlin. Their new album Slave Ambient (and its companion EP «Future Weather») contain some of the most uplifting sounds released this autumn. I don't know how, but somehow their brand of classic rock, veering as it does towards the middle of the road, is still never boring. Listening to their latest releases on a headset is a pure, hedonistic joy any bon vivant should experience at least once. As synthesizers prepare the ground, numberless guitars swirl back and forth and in and out, the wave upon which Adam Granduciel waxes lyrical:

I hear you dish it out, dish it out
well, you want to remain
my friend, no it's not
it's not quite the same
Remember me when you dissolve in the rain
when the rivers run dry through the cold mountain range
and you turn to the name you invented to keep
your identity safe from the smell of defeat
And there is no way
to carve your righteous paths of rage
by holding the candle to those half your age
Your jaw will be locked from hornets and bees
and you'll understand why I leave so suddenly
with the breeze

For a taste of what their new stuff sounds like, check out these free mp3s, courtesy of record label Secretly Canadian:

«Comin' Through»

«The History of Plastic»

«Baby Missiles»

«Come to the City»

«Snake Tongues»

Then there are these mp3s, of Granduciel performing three Slave Ambient tracks live, solo and acoustic in the studio, courtesy of radio station WXPN:

«Brothers» (live acoustic)

«Best Night» (live acoustic)

«Black Water Falls» (live acoustic)

And if that's still not enough for you, go to the top of the page and download recordings of the War On Drugs playing live in the studio for KEXP, back in 2009 as a three piece, promoting liberating debut long player Wagonwheel Blues (albeit without Kurt Vile). There's a blissful rendition of «Show Me the Coast», and Wagonwheel's five-minute «A Needle in Your Eye #16» is transformed into the 12-minute workout «A Needle in Your Eye #24».

Monday 19 September 2011 at
Neue Berliner Initiative
Kulturbrauerei
Schönhauser Allee 36

Groovin' without Movin'—Trippin' Garage Rock

2011-09-15T12:00:00.001+02:00

V/A: Trippin' in the Garage
—16 '60s Low Budget Highs [.zip]

Enlightenment, people! That's what it's all about, though none of us can ever achieve it. From the Beatles' Tibetan Book of the Dead-by-numbers vision of becoming one with the universe (in «Tomorrow Never Knows»), through the Rolling Stones' marketing ploy response («2000 Light Years from Home»), to familiar '60s staples such as «White Rabbit» (Jefferson Airplane), «Eight Miles High» (Byrds), «Have You Ever Been» (Jimi Hendrix) and «Break on through» (Doors), the radio waves from 1966 to the heroin daze of the early '70s spat out many a wide eyed song about minds being blown, hearing the taste of invisible beige—always brought on by a miracle chemical (usually only alluded to or implied in the lyrics).

The fad saw many embarrassments, of course. The Temptations' psychedelic phase, hypocritically balancing bandwagon celebrations of mind expansion with cautionary tales of bad trips (both equally ignorant of the reality of psychoactives), was a particularly cynical attempt at cashing in (though the music produced some of the most ear tingling sonic textures ever put to tape). And the Hair musical was only the nadir of exploitation films that began in the '60s with Psych-out, The Trip and other unintentionally hilarious misrepresentations of the psychedelic experience.

But these were the success stories among the sell outs. Other hopefuls recorded songs they hoped would catch on, tune in and drop out. Some were sincere in their beliefs that entheogens could free their asses, minds and society as a whole. The 13th Floor Elevators, the Grateful Dead and Golden Dawn thought so. Then there were the garage bands that penned acid anthems more in the hopes that the wave would carry them on high to the very top of the Billboard charts. Or who tried to convey something profound, but whose talent, originality or eloquence never quite matched their ambitions. Others—Kim Fowley and Frank Zappa, to name but two—were merely taking the piss.

This compilation collects not the famous anthems you all know from Hollywood films about hippies, but low budget '60s rock odes to chemically enhanced revelation. And it's sequenced to trace the trajectory of a trip! The whole ordeal kicks off with incitement to ingest illegal substances, followed by descriptions of the first surge of heightened sense experience to tickle your mind & body. Then things settle as the trippy hippie thinks he's getting used to the high, finding his equilibrium, before things start getting weird and not groovy at all and the trip goes bad. Or he just panics (as you do). It doesn't last of course, and in the end, though it's not a happy one, the frazzled tripper finally settles back into his own skin, not enlightened but perhaps a little wiser for it.

All to the scuzzy strains of garage rock!

Thanks!

2011-09-07T22:00:00.000+02:00

Recently, I spent three weeks in a town I no longer live in, and sorely needed someplace to crash. Many friends were out of town, others busy or out of space, and I didn't know how or where I would go. Certain people—some friends, others barely acquaintances—took me in when I really needed it, and for that I'm very grateful.

So grateful, in fact, that it warrants Toilet Guppies compilations, one tailored for each of my generous hosts. The honour roll is as follows:

1. Second Wave of Bossa Nova [.zip]

To Katherina, who was listening to a whole lotta João Gilberto when I was staying with her, and to whom I promptly promised a collection of Brazilian bossa nova from the generation of artists following the more suave originators Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinícius de Moraes. This is listening less easy on the ears and more confronting to the emotions. Proves that bossas's not bland.

2. Profoundly Shallow [.zip]

A collection of miscellaneous singer-songwriter indie, mostly quite downtempo (if not downbeat), a lot of it rather recent, all of it for perfect host Karoline. If you like dreamy melodies, this is your stop.

3. Reptiles Are Still Running the World [.zip]

A compilation of vaguely political and at times paranoiac music about empires, the environment and untrustworthy baby huggers for freedom fighter and home entertainment aficionado supreme, Mattias.

4. Nothing Left but Goodbye [.zip]

Another singer-songwriter compilation, from rock through country to folk. Contains a definite streak of manly 'tude. Dedicated to Håvard, connoisseur of Nazi jokes and classic men's fashion.

5. Ba(d)con [.zip]

Fresh and recent music for unrelenting bacon enthusiast Wenche.

6. Who's Prince William & Who's Kate Middleton? [.zip]

A tricky compilation to compile, as it's meant for two: Matt, a distinguished gentleman hip to what's hot, and Howie, the man who only has room for Kate Bush in his heart, but always lots of room (and rum!) in his home. A lot of funny, silly stuff on this comp, but also flashes of serious brilliance.

7. Trigging Dreams [.zip]

I didn't end up staying with Thanushiga, but was offered shelter by her, which, considering we don't know one another that well, was extremely nice. It's always the kindness of strangers that tugs and pulls at the strings tightly tangled around your heart. I didn't know what music she likes, but as she said she likes anything that «triggers daydreams», here's a rather random compilation of songs about reverie.

Can You Take 12 Inches of Hate Rock?

2011-08-17T02:47:00.005+02:00

350 copies only. Of the vinyl edition, that is. Of course, you could just download two of the three tracks for free (and legally) here:

HTRK: «Eat Yr Heart» [mp3, via Ghostly International]

HTRK: «Sweetheart» (Suicide cover) [mp3, via Ghostly International]

Producer Series #3: Hip Indie & Hip Hop

2011-08-04T22:00:00.001+02:00

V/A: Dark Soul of the Night [.zip]

Toilet Guppies' team of DJs, writers and graphic designers is too busy with other things currently to put much effort into the blog, so here's another filler post to give you all something nice to put in your ears while you wait for us to come up with some bona fide rarities.

This is a comp compiling various tracks by miscellaneous artists guided by the expert hand of a superstar producer who first caught the greater public's ear as a hip hop conceptualist, but who's currently renowned for his '60s retro stylings, helping flesh out soulful and bluesy indie with his trademark instruments and arrangements. (No, it's not Mark Ronson.) His work spans said hip hop and indie to folk, punk disco, spaghetti Western and psychedelia, all of it dressed in his distinctive retro-futurist style.

I compiled this with my brother in my mind, who has an ear tremendously sensitive to sounds, levels, mixing, arrangements and rhythmic precision. He should be a producer, really (besides producing his own stuff). If you, too, have a keen ear revelling in sensuous aural delights, Toilet Guppies urges you to download the above sampler ASAP.

Toilet Guppies Tries to Connect with People via Mixtapes, No. 5: «Elitist» Just Another Word for «Better»

2011-07-14T12:00:00.017+02:00

V/A: Toilet Elitism
—Music for People Who Don't Hate Ears [.zip]

A few weeks ago, a wine importer/amateur chef served yours truly a

luncheon of exquisite Spanish sausages and rather civilised French cheeses, followed later in the day by a two-course dinner with his own metaphor-laden composition for starters: sliver of whale served on a purée of green peas. All the while, we were sipping the finest wines I've ever sipped. (Including one from 1930, the name of which I've forgotten. But who cares, it was 81 years old.) Let me tell you, snobbery doesn't get much better, people.

Of course, my palate is that of a senseless zombie brute who smokes, to boot, and I have no head for wine, but Toilet Guppies does consider it-

self something of a connoisseur when it comes to music. And so, as a token of gratitude to the distinguished gentleman who took me on a trip through my own taste buds, I've compiled a collection of music snobbery. Listening to my acquaintance rail and rant quite unreasonably against culinary mediocrity and the common man's ignorance of œnology almost brought a tear to my eye, as I could hear in them my very own words—only his were about French wine rather than music. How sweet is arrogant rage! With the spittle of misguided ire dribbling down his chin, he was like my brother from another mother.

I also want to save him—as he saved me (from inferior ingredients, cheap wine and an unawareness of the pleasures contained within my very own tongue). He mentioned plans to attend a Foo Fighters gig. Which, as we all know, is the musical equivalent to a bottle of 2007 Berberana Evergreen Dragon Tempranillo Shiraz. It simply won't do. Foo Fighters is frozen pizza, sprinkled with E. coli. They're not even worth mentioning, so let this be the first and last time their moniker appears on this blog. (Toilet Guppies hereby refuses to participate in any activity that might lead to their being remembered in any way by future generations, should future generations survive in the kind of culturally vacuous environment that would permit such a group to be curated once they're too old or dead to personally push their insipid stadium plop on us.)

Also, the wine importer my acquaintance works for had installed a CD player that automatically started up every time someone entered the toilet. Its CD was a compilation of the most predictable common denominator hits of the '70s and '80s you could think of, if you weren't already trying so hard to forget them. It made the whole toilet experience even more objectionable than it already has to be. (More crap, as it were.) Imagine the jukebox in a small town gay bar run by a portly, old queen with no head for music, but a nose for youngsters passing through, playing them the hits of his own youth simply because he hasn't really heard anything else. I could scarcely believe that æsthetes with such impeccable taste could sabotage their own ambitions of sensual refinement with this merde! 'Twas a disgrace. You can't listen to ABBA whilst drinking superior wine. Nor Foo Fighters, for that matter.

So I've mobilised my already considerable elitism towards compiling the most snobbish collection of rock the genre will allow and still shimmer with excellence: Refined lyrics replete with astute observations and complex emotions set to subtle musical accompaniment, mixed to reveal delicate aural textures, with both style and substance rich in detail! These are intelligent and sensitive words brought to life by stately arrangements (preferably with strings, or at the very least a piano).

Prepare yourselves for pompous music that manages to avoid being pretentious, simply because the artists are able to pull it off. This is high class, people, from the few singer-songwriters who actually drop in to see what condition the human condition is in without utterly embarrassing themselves. Best enjoyed with a tongueful of decent wine or whiskey.

Speaking of elitism, Toilet Guppies' favourite, most liberatingly snobbish quote of late is DFA/LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy pointing out, quite rightly, that «That black eyed peas [sic] dirty dancing thing is worse than raping a cat. What is wrong with people? Do they hate ears?»

Toilet Guppies Tries to Connect with People via Mixtapes, No. 4: Blues for the Legless

2011-07-12T20:00:00.001+02:00

V/A: What's Pink and Smells Like Fish?
—The Legless Blues of Prof. Salmon [.zip]

A friend of mine back home was a a klutz the other week and slipped and broke his leg. Now he's probably laying about doing nuffink, bored out of his wits. So I made this compilation for him, to distract him from the stasis.

Besides being a fan of hip-hop, dub/reggae and afrobeat, our friend is a bit of a pervert (with a cheeky chauvinist twist, natch). It's not your typical Toilet Guppies fare, but should you like syncopated grooves with a frisky (at times wrong) edge, this collection could be for you, too.

Singing through the Dark—Blind Blues & Gospel

2011-07-09T16:00:00.008+02:00

V/A: What's That Smells Like Fish?

—Blind Blues 1927-1957 [.zip]

You can't trust anyone in the music business. And by that I don't mean the record companies. As a music lover who turns to words and sound with which to harmonise your feelings, you can't trust the impulse of artists who may, for all you know, only be in it for their name in print, face on TV, free drugs, easy sex, the roar of the crowd, assistance with their hair and money. Perhaps they just want to be better than people like you (nevertheless having the nerve to ask you to worship them). You can turn to the underground, but there's absolutely nothing to support the prejudice that the indies are any more sincere than the hit list whores.

And, you may ask, where is the music in all this? Remember music? That primal energy conjured to comfort you, cheer you up, transport your mind and bring you closer or even at one with eternity? Yeah, I'd forgotten it, too…

So no trendy, possibly phony recordings for this post. The artists on this comp recorded music in a time (1927-1957) before such massive attention and cash was lavished on song and dance men and women as it is today. In fact, they made music because they had to: being blind, they had to work for their food somehow. And so the history of country blues and gospel is littered with blind singers and players. They'd busk from town to town, playing sinful blues for the adults and switching to gospel whenever the constable was near. (Doesn't look good to arrest a man or woman of God.) Many recorded songs and even had modest hits that since have become legendary among academic blues listeners. And though they might not have been nearly as pious as they often pretended to be, this music has soul.

There's barrelhouse song and piano pioneer Arizona Drane, husband-and-wife teams AC & Blind Mamie Forehand and Blind Benny & Pauline Parrish. There's Blind Willies Johnson and McTell, Blind Joes Taggart and Reynolds, and Blind Boys of both Alabama and Mississippi. Blind Gary Davis was a reverend and street corner preacher. Harmonica whooper Sonny Terry was blind, as was white fiddler Alfred Reed. Of course, legends Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Boy Fuller are on here, as is the obscure Blind Teddy Darby, for good measure.

This is not charity music for your sympathy vote. This is deeply heartfelt singing through the dark. Music you can trust… in chronological order.

Shut yer eyes and listen.

While We're Waiting for the War On Drugs

2011-07-07T16:30:00.057+02:00

… to release their new album next month, here are some old & new, free & legal mp3s for the uninitiated:

There are the four mp3s courtesy of label Secretly Canadian:

1. «Taking the Farm»
(from Wagonwheel Blues)
2. «Comin' Through»
3. «The History of Plastic»
(from the «Future Weather» EP)
4. «Baby Missiles»
(from «Future Weather» and Slave Ambient, out 16 August)

Also, Pitchfork is currently offering a free download off Slave Ambient, «Come to the City»

Then there's Rcrd Lbl's free mp3 of Wagonwheel Blues highlight «A Needle in Your Eye #16»:

Taken together, that's one hell of an EP, all for free.

You know that insanity you slip into when you fall in love that feels so great you don't care it's stupidly delusional? Perhaps it's even in summer, when the climate is carefree and everything is bright and buoyant. MDMA can't recreate this ecstasy, nor can the War On Drugs… quite. But they're as close as sound can come. These songs will lift you up when you're down, convince you you've nothing to lose when you're worried about gain. Make you feel like you're free. They're the wind beneath Icarus' wings. Which is only a temporary escape, of course. But what do you expect? Songs don't last forever… What are they, three to four minutes?

Slave Ambient is out 16 August. Should be good.

Whatever Happened to Hal Hartley?

2011-07-06T23:08:00.002+02:00

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 14: Hate Rock

2011-06-28T03:00:00.008+02:00

HTRK: «ksext» [mp3]

A long time ago, Toilet Guppies posted a vinyl rip of «ksext», a menacingly sultry instrumental off Hate Rock's split 10" with Duke Garwood, Keep Mother, vol. 6. The levels on the rip, however, were a bit high (though not more in the red than on the vinyl release), so Toilet Guppies has ripped it anew. No need to have listeners startle every time the song comes on.

Desire is a necessarily unfulfilled state, requiring as it does something not yet had. As such there's a certain unhappiness to sex. A current of dissatisfaction—perhaps despair, bitterness or contempt even—that still carries within it a twinkling hope of fulfilment, even as it makes that fulfilment an impossibility.

This is as close as I can get to describing the emotional space that Hate Rock creates. Lust and dejection in equal measure. Hate Rock negate what they create. Or you could say they negate such a negation. (It's a chicken-and-the-egg type situation, whether the lust is sabotaged by despondency or despondency's alleviated by lust.)

Be that as it may, whether you've got a lust for life or a death wish, this music shows the interconnectedness of the two, giving you a reason to stay if you've got the latter, a dose of reality if you're feeling the former. Pleasure and loneliness, this is masturbation music.

Did I mention damn sexy?

New Dirty Beaches 12"

2011-06-27T11:00:00.003+02:00

La Station Radar/Atelier Ciseaux (France/Canada) and Night People (USA) have just released a Dirty Beaches/Ela Orleans split 12".

Dirty Beaches has a tendency to release his material in infuriating formats (tapes and vinyl), but I suppose many of you indie hipster types dig that kind of exclusive materialist, consumerist connoisseur thing infused with trendy retro nostalgia. Good news is that you get the songs on mp3 as well. Bad news is that these are at a paltry 128 kbps. But Dirty Beaches' music sounds loin stirringly transporting, as usual:

Sexiest music currently out & about?

More Hate to Come

2011-06-24T19:30:00.007+02:00

HTRK: «Eat Yr. Heart» [mp3 via Pitchfork]

Hate Rock's forthcoming album has a release date: 6 September. Pitchfork just debuted a song off it. Sonically the band has evolved. (Shame about the lyrics.) They're doing something right when in the current art/music climate, every new release of theirs comes as a relief.

But there's no point in reviewing or promoting the song with some blog marketing press release liner note spiel. Download and listen for yourselves. Highly recommended, as always.

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 13: The Entrance Band

2011-06-21T19:30:00.007+02:00

The Entrance Band: «I Want You» 7" [.zip]

[Download disabled. Mp3s of A-side & B-side now commercially available.]

Before singer-songwriter Kurt Vile grabbed the mantle as liberating one-man resistance movement against the emotional onslaught of demanding/annoying/soul destroying lovers (cf. the biting lyrics to «Heart Attack», «Dead Alive» and «Runner Ups»), Toilet Guppies' darling used to be Guy Blakeslee a/k/a Entrance, who was equally indomitable. But when this wailing, stomping, feedback feeding, banjo mangling freedom fighter went from soulful solo artist to fronting noodling bloos trio the Entrance Band, Toilet Guppies' man crush ended. Enter '70s funk rock riffage, completely unnecessary gee-tah solos at every turn, politically naïve lyrics calling for social change (see their ode to Martin Luther King, «MLK», worthy of a primary school essay, the likes of which we haven't heard since the superficial politics of soul music in the '70s—or that time Primal Scream sang their obituary for US civil rights legend Rosa Parks, only eight years before she was actually dead). All of the above relegated Entrance to irrelevance.

But earlier this year, Black Tent Press released the vinyl-only single «I Want You», b/w «A House Is Not a Motel», which vindicated Entrance and gives us hope that we may still expect terrific things from his camp.

«I Want You» is a cover of the Troggs' scuzzy garage rock classic, primitive to the point of brain death and absolutely brilliant as only the most basic can be. Blakeslee imbues, even elevates the original with his signature quaver of desperation and forlorn lust, as only he knows how. Blakeslee's voice will haunt you forever… Nice!

«A House Is Not a Motel» is a cover of one of the high points on Love's classic, but somewhat overrated Forever Changes record. You can't beat the original, but the Entrance Band brings it as close to doing just that as you could possibly expect. And there's hardly a guitar solo!

Fittingly for covers of '60s songs, these tracks are only available in the most annoying music format known to man, vinyl. If you're into such techno nostalgia, buy the 45 here. 500 copies only!

«I can't stand it alone on my own!»

Annual Summer Romp Comp, Plus Word that Cannot Be Formed

2011-06-05T10:00:00.191+02:00

Don't you love receiving a surprise in the post? Not from the tax man, electricity provider or some marketing dick/cunt, but a package with your name and address lovingly handwritten by what surely has to be someone with warm and good intentions?

Every year for, well, a few years now, I've been sending friends mixtapes in the post to celebrate the coming of summer (which, to a sun-starved Norwegian, is a big deal). By now it's become a tradition/compulsion. However, bubble wrap envelopes and postage to all sorts of weird countries run a surprisingly high cost. So from now on, although I favour the delight and surprise of physical objects, I can only afford to give away these mixtapes digitally. Here, then, is this year's summer compilation, for your downloading convenience:

V/A: Summer Soundtrack 2011 [.zip]

This collection visits sixteen genres in three languages. What unites them, I don't know, except that I imagine they all work best in a park, on a porch, or perched atop a bicycle. To someone in a snow-strewn country, summer is a time for simple, sensual pleasures unavailable in wintertime—the rustle of leaves, the pricking of grass, rays warming your skin (and a breeze cooling it), the sweet explosion of strawberries in your mouth, the smell of burning flesh… Some have said these summer comps are a bit on the laid back side (laidback side, not laid backside—no pun intended), but summer to me is not about vomiting at some street party. Summer is a dreamy, languid time for relaxation and regrouping. Nevertheless, amid the gently psychedelic lounge music on this mixtape I have included occasional bursts of feisty rock'n'roll, lest the listener fall asleep in the sun.

May this summer live up to your grand expectations!

And now for something completely different:

WORD THAT CANNOT BE FORMED

Toilet Guppies is not a literature blog, but the book excerpt reproduced below was written by a musician and instrument maker (of such musical innovations as the dingulator, a kind of guitar made from cars). Besides, it's fucking brilliant writing and it's beyond me why the author's name should remain buried in obscurity. Here, then, is the first chapter of Charles Martin Simon a/k/a Charlie Nothing The Artist's memoir Speeding through Satori: Sex, Drugs, Macrobiotics and Death—in the 60s:

Sakasa Bokei

The wicked doorbell rings, tearing me back from somewhere else, like from an unremembered but nevertheless disconcerting dream.

It's 1965. The middle of November. I'm 24, and Beth Ann, my wife and best friend, also 24, has gone and done it, the one thing finally to which I have no answer, the one thing that cannot be undone, accepted, retrieved, altered, forgiven, mitigated, or in any way fixed. We always used to be able to fix anything. The thing that can't happen has happened. I cannot form the word.

I am at my parents' house, in Clifton, New Jersey, where we came when she got so sick we had to do something; and today is her funeral.

Diiing dong! I forgot about the bell. It's ringing again.

«I'll get it!» I say it loud, so the parents will hear me, but it hurts to raise my voice.

The parents are upstairs. I remember when I was little, they were always upstairs, closed in their room, getting ready to go out or something. Or they were out. Or they were just getting back and busy about that. Whatever, they were always unavailable.

They'll hear me or they won't; it doesn't matter. They're available now, now that it doesn't matter, now that nothing matters and they can't do anything about anything.

«I'll get it! I'll get it!» I say it again, this time to myself. Besides, I need the exercise. I'm ninety-two pounds; and at five feet, ten-and-a-half inches, I look like I just got out of Auschwitz. It's been an ordeal, but it's over. I don't care what happens anymore, and that makes it over.

It takes me a couple of tries to get up out of the chair. The simplest, most every-day movement is difficult and painful to the extreme and requires a focused effort. But I manage to make it to the door and open it up.

There is a blinding wash of light out of which materialize two big men in suits holding badges up in front of my face.

«Clifton P.D.—t' see if yuh want p'leese perteckshun fer de fune-rul.»

Nothing can surprise me anymore, so I am not surprised.

«If you're here asking,» I say, «I guess that means I better say yes.»

«'kay den,» one of them says. «Will be back in time t' take yuh.»

I close the door, and they disappear. Did that happen? The mother's voice, from upstairs, a question mark.

«Police, Ma. Apparently they're giving me protection for the funeral.»

She says something. I don't hear what, but it could very well be, «That's nice, dear.» Because anything she doesn't quite hear or understand, she will always interpret as something good.

Then the father's voice. I can't make out his words either; but with him it will always be the other way. Even the definitely good, he will find the bad in it.

I work my way back to the den and back down into the chair and stare into the hole in the world, the place where she is not. I see her lying there on the day bed where she died. I have so much to say to her. I only need to go back a couple of days, just a couple of little days… Why does that have to be so impossible?

I pick up Ohsawa's last letter to her and read it again for the fiftieth time. There was mystic significance in the way it came to me, but I don't understand such things. I don't understand anything.

Two days after the end, I was walking around the block, when I noticed an envelope on the ground in the middle of a front yard two houses down from my parents'. The incongruity was what caught my eye, the small white rectangle luminous against the green expanse of lawn.

I was not thinking it could have anything to do with us, but something made me go and pick it up. Unbelievably, it was addressed to her, from Japan, from him. And it had not been opened… Why this letter? Of all the letters in the world, why had this one gotten lost? … But no, not lost. It was in my hand—not its intended destination, but its destined destination.

I took it home and opened it, and this is what it said, what it still says, what it is always going to say: «I have made a terrible mistake in your case. Immediately go off the diet. Reread my books and start all over again from the beginning.»

RIP Gil Scott-Heron

2011-05-28T11:22:00.002+02:00

Net Nuggets 39: Tape Worms from Dirty Beaches

2011-05-23T10:00:00.013+02:00

Dirty Beaches:
Gone to Hell Come Friday
—Essential Cassette Recordings, 2009-2011 [.zip]

Have you of late lost all your mirth, allowing yourself to sink into despondency and fantasies of suicide made all the more pathetic because you have absolutely no intention of going through with them? Not to worry! In such times of emotional paralysis—every thought in any which direction just another imagined road to futility and regret—there's only one thing for it:

NOISE!!!

… some tape hiss to dredge the shallows of your consciousness, plus a little guitar twang and '50s aw-shucks! trembling vox to sex up the muscle memory, make you come alive again, bucking and rearing to go! If all your desire has gone limp and withered up, dissolved into the nothingness you'd like to follow it into, these sounds should do the trick. Things are never so bad kicks can't be had. (Well, not always, anyway.)

Here, then, is Dirty Beaches. They—or he, young master Alex Zhang Hung-tai—started out making homespun, lo-fi instrumental noodlings that were a little unremarkable, but exploded in 2009 with worded songs springing forth from the point where the caveman stomp of rockabilly, the motorik of krautrock, the shit of shitgaze, the aesthetic of Suicide (the band) and the ethereal, yet twisted sensuality of early David Lynch films all converge in a sultry murk of rambling, suggestive sound. Eerie, creepy, sexy sounds—the mutterings (and occasional yelps) of a confused pervert driving his lonely lorry at night, kept awake by speed and reveries I think it best not to mention.

There are few cocktails as potent as lust, fear and confusion. Did I forget fun? Man, I did not forget fun. And if you ever wondered what a grown man crawling on his hands and knees towards the custodian of his pleasure sounds like, wonder no more.

Before releasing their latest album, the highly recommended Badlands, out now on Zoo Music, those Dirty Beetches had a penchant for releasing their music on magnetic tape, and in very limited editions. Here's a sampler of the finest songs and soundscapes from those discontinued releases, starting in 2009 until more or less the present (with the exception of readily available CDs/digital albums and singles, such as Badlands, a split EP with US Girls and the «No Fun» single).

GONE To HELL COME FRIDAY:
Like Dreamers Do
Paris
Black Horses
White Sand
Golden Desert Sun
Motorcycle Rumble
Shadows
Coast to Coast
Low Rider
Forever in Gold
Shangri-la
Gone to Hell Come Friday
The Singer (a/k/a The Folksinger)
Teenage Queen
1, 4, 8, 9 & 11 from Dirty Beaches (2009)
2 & 7 from Night City (2010)
5 & 10 from Solid State Gold (2010)
3, 6 & 14 from Omon Ra II/Dirty Beaches split C-30 (2010)
12 & 13 from Dirty Beaches/Conor Prendergast split 7" (2011)

A Mixtape While You Wait

2011-05-21T10:00:00.013+02:00

V/A: DJ Sheik Yerdix'
Best & Most Detestable Mix
(winter 2009) [.zip]

Please excuse the inactivity. More rarities to come. For now, here's an old mixtape from the back of the hard drive. It exemplifies a regrettable axiom of art: That the best is the worst, while the worst makes for the very best.

Doctor, Doctor!

2011-05-12T20:57:00.000+02:00

V/A: Mixtape for Dr. Cardiac & His Art Attacks! [.zip]

Toilet Guppies' dear friend and very own GP recently had a little setback. He's almost a fully licensed doctor, so he can take care of himself, whether through treatment, self-medication or just the fact that soon he'll be filthy, stinking rich and stalked by gold diggers and hot, lonely women who've read one romance novel too many. Still, a little pep talk never hurt anybody. Here, then, is Toilet Guppies' ode to a very good friend and the best doctor no money can buy—a compilation of catchy ditties and comedy routines about doctors, patients, ailments, surgery and, er, pharmacy…

So, if you're a doctor, nurse or just plain sick, go no further. In the immortal words of Dr. Nick Riviera:

The kneebone's connected to the… something
The something's connected to the… red thing
The red thing's connected to my… wrist watch
Uh oh!

Toilet Guppies Celebrates the Arrival of Summer!

2011-05-10T09:00:00.008+02:00

V/A: Sunny Sounds of Música Popular Brasileira [.zip]

The other day, honorary toilet guppy Maja Nilsen sent me a reminder of the occasionally sublime tones of (probably involuntarily) psychedelic Brazilian girl group Quarteto em Cy. And since the music of Brazil immediately evokes in the northern European images of tropical forests, deserts, beaches and sun, it's the lazy man's summer sounds. Shorthand for park times. (The safe, daytime kind.) And what do you know? All the way up here in Norway, summer is finally here! You only need to smell the sizzling sausages and bushes fragrant with latex to tell.

As it happens, my brother is a distinguished connoisseur of all music Brazilian, so I went through his extensive collection of classic and obscure records to compile this little doozy of instant sun. I've avoided the obvious—bossa nova and tropicália—and settled for less famous MPB («Música Popular Brasileira», an umbrella term for post-bossa pop and rock). The comp is limited to what is arguably MPB's golden age, from 1969 to 1972. From the trippy to the poppy, a lot of gems, never noticed in Europe (and probably forgotten in Brazil by now), came out of the vast country in those years. Not as fucking suave as bossa nova, but not as hit-or-miss experimental as tropicália, this is effortlessly melodic music of substance and texture, avoiding the perky pitfalls of stereotypically «tropical» music, exploring instead the deeper, more sincere feelings of ecstasy, anxiety and political resistance to dictatorship—often to a samba beat!

Don't expect any oil drums or out-of-tune vocals from beautiful, but insipid chanteuses singing about «heart» this and «heart» that, all set to easy listening arrangements redolent with soccer, carnival, G-strings and heartache on the sand. There's more to Brazil than bananas, sex and street children, you know.

But there's always sun in Braziliana somehow. Enjoy the rays!

Amazing

2011-05-09T21:23:00.001+02:00

Free Tickets to see SWANS & James Blackshaw Live in Oslo!

2011-05-04T14:00:00.002+02:00

James Blackshaw: «Live on NPR» [.zip]

For anyone in Oslo this weekend, Toilet Guppies has two spare tickets to the SWANS gig on Friday (6 May), to be given away for free to the first man, woman, beast or child to claim them.

If the transcendent din, so loud it might make you forget who and where you are, of Michael Gira's curious brand of oddly disciplined, yet excessive and decidedly perverse derangement isn't your cup of tea, note that James Blackshaw plays support. I'm loath to use adjectives such as «meditative» and most of all «magical», but Blackshaw's delicate, ever-ascending blend of instrumental bluegrass and classical guitar actually qualifies. You will be transfixed. For a little taste, download the above mp3s, recorded live in studio for NPR a couple of years ago. Just know that he exerts a far more mesmerising effect live.

And afterwards, SWANS will give you the greatest release this side of sex.

Send Toilet Guppies an email to claim one or both tickets.

Net Nuggets 38: The Walkmen

2011-04-24T12:45:00.003+02:00

The Walkmen: «Lemon Hill» [mp3]

[Upload deleted by MediaFire, for «copyright infringement». The track had originally been distributed for free on the Walkmen's MySpace, and has never been commercially available. But you can still get it over at Stereogum.]

Ah, Sunday in Spring! A day owned by a band like the Walkmen. And so here's a rarity—an mp3 you could download for free off their MySpace back in 2008. It's an instrumental jam that sounds like a song sketch (probably from the sessions that produced You & Me).

Rare or Unreleased 52: Ak/Fam

2011-04-20T00:30:00.010+02:00

Seth Olinsky:
Selections from
Sparrow Trout Heart Sprout—Best of Seth [.zip]

In 2006, Seth Olinsky, singer-guitarist in Akron/Family, released a homespun solo album called Best of Seth, which was not only his first ever solo release but also a triple CD. The voluminous debut of greatest hits includes what could perhaps be called demos for songs given the full Akron/Family band treatment on the Angels Of Light/Akron/Family split CD («Raising the Sparks») and Meek Warrior («Meek Warrior», «No Space in This Realm», «Love and Space»). Olinsky's first and only solo album has since gone out of print.

Of course, two hours and 43 minutes of out-of-tune hippie whimsy can be a bit much. A man can only stand so much Dzogchen Buddhist imagery backed by campfire strumming, front porch banjo picking, strained singing, mystical drones, kitchen sink electronica and the recorder. Toilet Guppies is proud, therefore, to present the best of Best of Seth—a one-stop volume of delights and highlights. And if the above didn't come across as a particularly glowing blurb, if you like your music with a spiritual quotient—and by «spiritual» I don't just mean sincerely emotional, but curious, inquisitive and downright soteriological about this life business and all the big mysteries that come with it—give this comp a whirl. It's beautiful:

THE BEST OF BEST OF SETH: SPARROW TROUT HEART SPROUT

The Littlest Horse
Meek Warrior
If on the Path
Raising the Sparks
Dirt Road Cloud of Light
I've Had Enough
Space/Love→Space Is Love
Lord Open My Heart (a/k/a Love and Space)
Rinpoche Said
Noah
What Point Has Come
No Space in This Realm
Sun Goes Down
Death Sparrow Blues
World of Difference
Ghost of Katie
Saddest Turtle

Rare or Unreleased 51: Helge «Deathprod» Sten

2011-04-17T10:00:00.002+02:00

Helge Sten: The Comfort of Objects [.zip]

Toilet Guppies has made it a point of order to make available to the obscure Norwegian noise loving internet masses—all four of them—any and every out-of-print rarity ever committed to a recording device by producer Helge Sten, a/k/a ambient noise composer Deathprod. (Except recordings never printed in the first place.) Not that there are many; there's the majestic live percussion piece «Komet» and one spoken word collab with American expat poet Matt Burt.

And now «Microwave 1-5», five short pieces of ambient noise made, according to the liner notes, «using the same source material» as two additional tracks by John Hegre and four by relentless noise pioneer Lasse Marhaug (all on the CD, but not included here), both of Jazzkammer fame. What that source material was isn't mentioned.

Whatever the original sounds mangled far beyond recognition, you could do worse on a foetal Sunday than listen to these snippets of typically meditative (but never New Age-y) Deathprod. atmospherics. Curl yourself up, bub. You don't stand a chance.

Toilet Guppies Tries to Connect with People via Mixtapes, No. 3: Punk Slime

2011-04-15T18:00:00.004+02:00

V/A: 30 Min. in the Gutter of Sound
—Superfuzz Bigscuzz from Four Decades of Noise Pop [.zip]

This is a mixtape for a mighty fine Catalan fellow named Alfred, who truly understands the greatness of bratty, fratty, pissing, screaming, drinking, drugging, indecent exposure-ing Black Lips. For those who don't know who or what Black Lips are, they're a rowdy band of flower punks who never quite put their obnoxious adolescence behind them. If Jesus died for our sins, they're ignorant for our bliss.

This is not a Black Lips comp, however, but a collection of likewise fuzz-frazzled scum rock, shitgaze, etc. (Yes, we now officially have a genre called «shitgaze».) The sounds on this mixtape are the rock'n'roll created when glorious noise music smashes into catchy pop tunes. It's the warm voice of a lover, faintly heard in a freezing blizzard. The sweet delirium of endorphins in a mangled car crash. Catchier than noise music, but grittier than the sound of marketing. An unlistenable, yet anthemic mess is what it is! The sonic equivalent of playing in your own pooh.

Why such noise? In every music obsessive's life, there comes a time when he can't find solace in or even listen to music. Something so sickeningly irreversible has happened that any pathetic self-pity becomes, unfortunately, a bit justified. To then listen to balladeers and troubadours emoting and poking around in there with their useless pathos and pretentious empathy is out of the question. Suddenly an entire music collection seems irrelevant and inadequate, every song a bearer of memories reminding him of a world that not only no longer is, but can never be again.

What he needs at that point is a total retooling. Something noisy and idiotic, to drown out the squelching pus inside and to get it out of his system by making him dance and shout and jump and drink and smoke and fuck and snort and laugh and fall over. Buzzing static, screeching treble, rumbling hiss, hissing rumble, head(w)ringing feedback, shrieking cymbals, unhinged screams, disintegrating melodies and collapsing performances to wash the mind clean.

Hey, it worked wonders for me! When some guy introduced me to the wretched squall of Black Lips back when I was suffering from «shock» or «Post-traumatic Stress Disorder» or «depression» or some other diagnosis otherwise known as life, it was just what none of the doctors had thought to order. Touchy sentimentality is for when you're OK—when you're bored and can't find any other way in to the vicarious thrill of empathy. Silliness, however, is for when you're fucked—not for when you're already happy and smiling. So let's get stoopid.

Welcome, then, to the gutter of sound, where you'll be content to not even look at the stars. Enjoy the tinnitus racket for all its triumphant rejection of meaning, reason and innocent joy. It's a liberation, kids!

Producer Series #2: Norwegian Noise vs. Scandinavian Design

2011-04-10T17:05:00.003+02:00

V/A: Scandinavian Design meets Norwegian Noise [.zip]

Here's a producer who, in a way, would be Norway's equivalent to Nigel Godrich (producer of Beck, Air and «sixth member of Radiohead»). His style is typified by glitches and bursts, but also by spacey electronic sounds whose sources you can't quite identify, but that seem to have come from the future—or sometimes your childhood: There's a lot of comedy, with kitschy, '70s home organ sounds and rhythms, not to mention sudden blips, scratches, etc. reminiscent of cartoons. One of his trademarks is slapstick noise music, played with the the same kind of absurdist mischief of Nurse With Wound or Add N To (X). It's arty, but never pretentious, and a lot of the time there seems to be no discrepancy between «moving» and «funny». And why should there be?

Norwegian music possesses two general trends: that few artists have anything interesting to say (or sufficient talent to say them), and that the Protestant work ethic and Germanic meticulousness result in an obsession with detail that makes most of the music sound sleek, either in a perfected (but soulless) mimicry of some internationally hip style or just in terms of the production values. Consequently, the most noteworthy Norwegian music tends to be music that, a) doesn't try to say anything and, b) doesn't copy a style but pays careful attention to sound. In other words, experimental instrumental music. And it's perhaps these qualities that make Norwegian noise music among the most accomplished in the noise field.

This producer is an accomplished noise artist who often uses his near scientific audio chops to help produce inane, Norwegian pop artists (Sondre Lerche, the National Bank, Sissy Wish, Morten Abel, Magnet), a couple of alternative bands whose ambitions dwarf their talent (Datarock, Kaizers Orchestra, Emmerhoff & the Melancholy Babies, Ralph Myerz & the Jack Herren Band), the odd well-schooled and well-oiled jazz pop act (Helén Eriksen), a couple of metal bands (Trinacria, Deride) and experimental (Spunk) and noise (Jazzkammer) outfits. Thankfully, apart from the artists mentioned above, some of whom are middling or even terrible, he has also produced artists who negotiate the precarious balance between prog and jazz, art wank and noise, to yield albums like so many giddily enthusiastic ADD children. You'll find it all here on this compilation.

The more commercial records this guy has produced are too straightforward and safe to do justice to his ideas, and the noise stuff, although a breath of fresh ear in the blandness that is Norwegian culture, is too chaotic to really showcase his studio skills. So here's a collection of songs that find themselves somewhere in the middle. Some melodic stuff not entirely impervious to noise, and some noise stuff not impervious to melody. Many of the pieces on this compilation are what happens when easy listening meets something it would be easier not to listen to, but that's the way Toilet Guppies likes it. This guy somehow manages to combine the sterility of Scandinavian production values with the violence of noise in a best-of-both-worlds kind of way. The best albums he has produced are journeys of discovery, every second and every listen bringing a new revelation. God is in the detail, people. Enjoy.

(For more exotic music from the far-away land that is not the capital of Sweden, check out these Toilet Guppies compilations:

Ambient noise [.zip]
&
An introduction to Norwegian non-instrumental music [.zip])

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 12: Sonic Youth ∞ Locked Groove!

2011-04-08T14:14:00.019+02:00

Sonic Youth: «Madonna, Sean & Me
(The Crucifixion of Sean Penn/Expressway to Yr. Skull)» (∞) [mp3]

One of the areas in which post-punk was an improvement on punk lay in its willingness to look beyond nihilism. Artists like reformed hippie Michael Gira of SWANS and former Deadhead Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth weren't above contemplating eternity rather than oblivion. Sonic Youth saw noise as liberation, not as destruction per se. A positive more than a negative. Unlike grumpy punks, Sonic Youth and SWANS were about rapture, their ecstatic vision of sound psychedelic but for the '60s trappings of sitars, vocal harmonies and lyrics about smelling the purple of rectangles. At least punk had been good for something, stirring everything up after the old counter-culture had been coopted by the establishment and turned into a kitsch irrelevance, as hypocritical as it had become escapist.

In 1986, when Sonic Youth were still on a journey of discovery, they came out with evoL. On vinyl, of course. And with infinity on their minds, the last track was fitted with a locked groove at the end, the idea being that the drones finishing the song «Madonna, Sean & Me (The Crucifixion of Sean Penn/Expressway to Yr. Skull)» would go on forever.

Of course, the limitations of matter and physics, not to mention the impermanent nature of reality, ensure that it never could, whether it'd be the player or the needle or the vinyl or the energy source that would give first. But you get the idea. It's like, you know, conceptual. And fun. (Like the solo release by Lee Ranaldo where he'd punched holes in the vinyl at certain intervals, so that the needle would come crashing down on the surface of the turntable, creating jolts of shock noise.) To give you a feel for the song as it can only be experienced on vinyl, Toilet Guppies has ripped a 70 minute version. (One minute more would be excessive. No need to overdo things.) Note that if you do get through the entire thing in one, attentive sitting, you really should seek professional help.

But Toilet Guppies digresses again! Being 1986, postmodernism hadn't yet become the academic yawn it is today. And regardless of intellectual fads, Sonic Youth always did enjoy their references. «Madonna, Sean & Me» is no exception. (One might even say referencing and name dropping has been one of the band's career strategies, in order to position themselves as credible in an environment as commercial as it is artistic. Thus they've not only managed to garner acclaim by association, but even made friends through flattery. Clever bastards.) As for «Madonna, Sean & Me», the punk/hippie love/hate relationship is vented in a nod to Charles Manson's infamous connection with the Beach Boys («We're gonna kill the California girls»). Then there's Sonic Youth's familiar obsession with Madonna. How Sean Penn and Madonna's celebrity marriage connects to hippie murder I don't know. But I do know this: paying too much attention to Thurston Moore or Kim Gordon's lyrics is a waste of time.

evoL certainly is not.

Songs Bangkok Taught Us, or, Hookers, Crystal Meth & Justin Bieber

2011-04-07T20:00:00.002+02:00

V/A: Rude Boys, Single Ladies, Sexy Bitches, Beautiful Girls & Babies [.zip]

The nightclub, open all night, is where johns who haven't managed to score with a prostitute in any of the bars, brothels or strip clubs go to hook up with hookers who haven't managed to score a john in any of the bars, brothels or strip clubs. The brand new glass, steel and plastic interior, complemented with flashy neon, black light, lasers and strobe, give the impression you've just stepped into a nu-R&B music video. Except the place is tiny—a fact concealed not only by disorienting lighting, but by the distraction of eyeing so many beautiful women in one place, all swaying for attention, about as arrhythmically as the Western clientele of gawping, awkward men who were obviously never the centre of any party or else we wouldn't be here (and in any case you can tell just from the way we move)…

Ah, but you think the girls are beautiful, until the strobe—which against all sound neurological advice flashes continuously, without pause—is cranked up to coincide with one of those near-climactic, trademark techno DJ bursts of beats signalling an imminent change in the music. The strobe begins to flash so rapidly it defeats itself, the flickering near invisible as if the house lights had just been turned on and for the first time you properly see the morning-after face of the woman with the flawless body, in all its winking, grinning, half-toothless, crooked and pockmarked glory.

This revelation is soon forgotten as you turn around and a girl grinding to the beat raises her already minimal mini-skirt to flash you her clean shaven slit in a come-hither pattern of slow, suggestive thrusts, her hips rotating as she lowers her curves to hover over the dirty dance floor, practically sweeping it with her clean and taught Lolita skin, and you catch yourself thinking, «What's in a face, anyway?»

There are screens on the walls and music is always accompanied by its video clip, so the DJ is obliged to play singles. The DJs in this town all play the same songs. It's a crash course in more or less current hits, and you end up hearing—perhaps for the first time—the squeaky clean voice of teen idol Justin Bieber, his adorably childlike face adorning the wall. All of a sudden the hookers go weak at the knees, squealing, giggling. Finally, it's their turn to fancy a minor.

The room—and the club can best be described as a room—has a typical group of young, male upstarts travelling together in a group on their first venture to the other side of the world, as well as older hooligans and businessmen and nerds and perverts and hopeful writers and even an old age pensioner—this one geezer of about 70, waving his arms in the air to hip-hop beats and sidling up to a 20-something Thai girl who can't help but smile at his indomitable zest for life. It's an unlikely place for the face and sentiments of young Justin, whose squeaky clean sneakers are far too neat for this floor.

But you haven't really experienced Justin Bieber until you've had a head full of ice in a room full of hookers and johns, your eyes and mind dazzled and confused by epilepsy-inducing lights and lasers, a girl on the other side of the room trying to feign one of those «shared moments» by giving you a cracked look of desire, all serenaded by the machinery behind a sexless baby face from Stratford, Canada whose balls dropped only last week, singing, «I'll buy you anything / I'll buy you any ring / 'Cause I'm in pieces / Baby fix me / And just shake me till you wake me from this bad dream / I'm going down, down, down, down…»

And when the spectacle that is a discotheque at the heart of a Bangkok Red Light District has sunk in, you notice the girls in the periphery. Girls just standing there by the wall, immovably, alone and never in groups, not even talking. They're not wallflowers. They're waiting, scanning, planning, working (always working), the look on their faces the same as anybody's who'd rather be elsewhere, doing something else.

Whatever semblance of fun there is in this room comes courtesy of the discipline and manic contrivance of those pay-to-play ladies trying to make the best of it out there on the dance floor, and of the men telling themselves that this is the life! They're not convincing anybody, least of all themselves. Yet still they try, their awkward dancing and forced smiles fading with their level of drunkenness until eventually the unwanted men's faces are unmasked, revealing bitter and menacing, primal looks, fixed on you—as if there were such a thing as a rival in a place where everything may be bought.

It's then that the most perverse song ever recorded comes on—that happy-go-suicidal radio anthem familiar from the insides of taxis worldwide: «Damn all these beautiful girls / They only wanna do your dirt / They'll have you suicidal, suicidal…» You decide against getting another drink and start thinking about running along home, meth dick between your legs, to grind in your jaws all those thoughts, fragmenting as reason disintegrates. Sleep approaches in the slowest of motions; the nervous system is numb, but the eyes flit uncontrollably behind their lids until consciousness, some ten hours later, finally releases its grip, too spent to produce dreams of Justin Bieber and suicide…

Smash! Hits of the '80s

2011-04-06T10:00:00.002+02:00

V/A: Boys Don't Just Want to Have Fun—Songs that Saved the '80s [.zip]

Yours truly was too young in the 1980s to appreciate its culture, mainstream or otherwise. My father didn't play tapes of the Fall in our car on holiday trips; my mother didn't breastfeed me while listening to Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats. In terms of '80s music, my most formative memory was feeling psychedelically terrified at the sight of the black lights in the music video for Wham!'s «Wake Me Up Before You Go Go», and feeling similarly freaked out by the singer in Fine Young Cannibals. With Sting, Lionel Richie and Stevie Wonder bogarting the TV screen, the young me was left no other option than to seek refuge in my parents' obsolete record collection of mainly bland Beatles records. (At least they didn't sound so flaccid.) Like the dayglo fashionista hipster kids postmodernising new wave, I can only appreciate the 1980s in hindsight. And in hindsight, the yuppies and whatever cultural momentum it was that propelled grown human beings into sporting pastel, fluffy hair and shoulder pads made the '80s one of the most obnoxious and least redeeming decades in recorded history. In terms of its sound, the production values polished every edge down to a nub, making everything sound wet and limp. Pop music reached its absolute nadir, from which, thankfully, it has since made great strides (all things being relative—Kylie Minogue is no match for Rihanna or fierce Sasha).

In the 1960s, before record companies had truly honed their industry, there was no distinction between major label mainstream music and independent underground. The industry didn't understand its demographic and so just threw money at anyone they thought might possibly be considered hip by the kids. As the corporate confusion and dust of desperation settled, the '70s saw the artistically excessive (and so less commercially viable) artists increasingly displaced into a newly defined underground. By the 1980s, the schism between art and entertainment was as complete as it has ever been.

Thanks to the major labels' devious marketing in response to the masses' growing boredom with the '80s pop formula, the '90s sowed confusion as to what was mainstream and what was «alternative». Nirvana? Faith No More? Pearl Jam?! (I think it was Jon Bon Jovi who once remarked, «An alternative to what?») The greatest trick the major labels ever pulled was convincing the world Nirvana were alternative. By the '00s, indie was no longer strictly independent, and internet literacy and entrepreneurship made trendy underground acts more competitive in the market place, sometimes blurring the distinctions between «mainstream», «independent» and «underground». Hardly anyone can tell who the Man is any longer, or who is really underground.

Perhaps more than any other, the '80s stands as a decade of near complete musical hegemony of the establishment, with relatively little crossover between the commercial and the avant-garde. Its legacy is a monument to blandness: Madonna, Cyndi Lauper, Blondie. And that's who nostalgic indie kidz adulate. In karaoke bars all over the world, people ineptly sing along to artistic atrocities committed by Phil Collins, Elton John, Bryan Adams, Rick Astley… You name it, it's dreadful. And then there are the goths, with their corny Cure, Depeche Mode, «Love Will Tear Us Apart» and all those awfully brooding synths. White culture has always looked to black culture for coolness, as straight culture looks to gay culture for style. But the '80s was a nail in the artistic coffin of James Brown, and disco's undertaker, too, giving us instead Luther Vandross and Whitney Houston, Frankie Goes To Hollywood and George Michael.

Oh, and the production values… The decade of synthesizers, '80s sound engineering and mixing rendered everything plastic. Noise or even just dry, fuzzy texture were relegated to a repressed memory of the '60s.

The '80s saving grace was post-punk. Punk was always a bit shit, really. Not as gritty or noisy as its invigorating precursor, hormonal '60s garage rock, '70s punk typically featured higher, clearer fidelity, just with sloppier performances, most punk amounting to little more than incompetently played boogie-woogie. The music that wasn't performed less energetically than garage rock—perhaps due to the pretentious use of heroin as a kind of adolescently Nihilist statement—was performed impatiently—perhaps due to the speed. Punk was essentially blues without the syncopation, the groove, the sex. Eager to hit the three-minute completion mark as soon as possible, punk was essentially the musical equivalent to a premature ejaculation. «Heigh ho, let's go,» indeed…

But the '80s saw a more sonically adventurous—not to mention emotionally uncompromising—genre that was never even given a name. For want of a better word, bands like the Fall, Birthday Party, SWANS, Sonic Youth, Butthole Surfers, Jesus & Mary Chain, et al. have merely been lumped together into the «post-punk» bargain bin. It's a measure of these artists' sense of individuality and experimentation that a sobriquet was never invented that could sum them all up, despite being fish in the same pool. Unlike new wave, grunge or punk itself, «post-punk» was not a movement. The artists were too intelligent, self-sufficient and confident to join any ranks, despite not being above collaborating or touring together.

In general, however, the playing was tighter, the sound noisier, and the feelings expressed beyond the poetics of mere junkie disgruntlement set to sloppy bar rawk. Let the punk stew in his beer-and-glue stupor, covered in his neglected dog's excrement there on the floor of some uncleaned squat wherein he somehow feels morally superior to the people who originally bought the sandwiches which leftovers he picks out of the dumpster (emptied and paid for by the people who actually pay taxes for the basic services everybody enjoys), and let somebody interesting say something.

The only question is, can a decade that spawned Huey Lewis & the News, Robert Palmer and Bros. ever redeem itself?

Yes, it can. Here's a comp comprised of the best '80s acts I can think of. Obviously, other good music came out of the '80s (Devo! Grace Jones!), but I've stuck to artists specifically associated with that decade, while avoiding the one hit wonders and guilty pleasures (as if guilt and pleasure have anything to do with one another).

The result of such a collection is telling: With the financial boom and the excessive optimism it encouraged, the underground's response became ever more perverse and determined. The cleaner the sound and content of the hits, the dirtier the sound and content of the obscurities. The chirpier the one, the pissier the other. The noise of most '60s rock was a consequence of limited technology and funds; by the '80s any scuzzy noise was entirely deliberate. The results are monstrosities in sound, and Toilet Guppies dares you to name any young band making the rounds today that possesses even a fraction of the intensity of many of the acts on this Super Hits of the '80s collection!

Yeah!

Toilet Guppies Tries to Connect with People via Mixtapes, No. 2: Banjo Madness!

2011-04-04T10:00:00.007+02:00

V/A: In Defence of… the Banjo! [.zip]

Marty Trix—one half of the DJ duo with the indisputably wickedest wigs in all of western Norway, I'll Buy You A Husband To Match Your Earrings—has bought a banjo!

In celebration of this event, and as a further encouragement to Old Trixie, Toilet Guppies would like to extend to her—and to anyone else who might care for a helping of music featuring one of the most ridiculed instruments in world history—a collection of prime cuts employing the infamous guitar-drum-thingamajig. There's folk, psychedelia, Americana, experimental rock, blues, singer-songwriter balladry, medicine show music and a piece from a soundtrack score. And no, the latter is not from Deliverance. Let's put a stop to the rumour that the banjo is an instrument played predominantly by inbred, toothless, sadist homosex offenders in the rural outskirts right now.

Still… because it's such a stellar scene, what the heck:

Toilet Guppies will be back with more compilations dedicated to defending our most maligned musical instruments at a later date: the accordion, the fiddle, bagpipes, perhaps the pan flute… hell, maybe even the recorder! (I bet you'll be watching this space now…)

Rare or Unreleased 50: The Dodos

2011-04-03T14:00:00.002+02:00

Meric Long: A couple of songs off the «Dodo Bird» EP [.zip]

Been browsing the old iTunes library for something rare but Sunday-like, and came across these dreamy, currently out-of-print ditties. Before the Dodos became a band, its singer-guitarist Meric Long recorded an EP, «Dodo Bird», in 2006. It's basically the same musical universe: bluegrass fingerpicking, syncopated acoustic strumming and percussion inspired by West African rhythms, all bursting from within the melancholy bounds of wistful words and soft melodies. Happy Sunday, people.

Toilet Guppies Tries to Connect with People via Mixtapes, No. 1: Black Music for a White Woman

2011-04-02T12:00:00.002+02:00

My main squeeze has an iPod, but no music to put on it. Not enough, anyway, and has requested some. So below are a couple of .zip files of music, posted here so that you, too, may enjoy its vivifying vibes. Each is an introductory compilation collecting the best of a band within a certain period. If you like current, somewhat independent bands who play the blues, but use the word «Black» in their names, feel free to have a click at the links below:

[Raw, drum driven, soulful blues, .zip]
[Nasty, bottom heavy psych-blues grooves, .zip]

Go, Go-go Girls, Go!

2011-03-29T12:00:00.002+02:00

V/A:
The Whip on the Strip—«Exotic Dance» Sounds
by Strip Joint House Bands of the 1950s & '60s [.zip]

Sandwiched between '50s cocktail lounge and '60s garage rock—between the suave and the scuzz, as it were—you get this: Sides recorded by house bands with residencies in strip clubs and go-go bars before the advent of disco, nu-R'n'B, techno and other scourges of the sexual impulse forever banished decent music from houses of ill repute. Not as sedated by painkillers and umbrella drinks as exotica, nor quite as dishevelled by raging hormones as garage beat, this is music for whiskey swillin' business daddies to occasionally let loose to, remembering, through liquor's hazy prism of lowered inhibitions and loss of control, his youth and his natural drives, lusting for tits.

Most of the songs in this obscure sub-genre are instrumentals, and there's typically an added catchphrase, or suggestive giggles or a few lewd haw-haws, repeated throughout. They tend to contain the kind of dated humour that appeals so much to people who are nostalgic, yet too self-conscious to admit so, dressing their admiration up in ironic pop culture references instead.

Which is easily done, because the jokes—tame and corny by now—retroactively castrate whatever edge there may once have been to this music. The songs become quirky, and there's nothing sexy about quirky. Instead of inciting people to fuck, the songs have been turned into just another escape from the frighteningly delicious appetites rumbling in your base animal gut…

Yet not all the recordings of this genre are novelty songs. If you like your sex with raunch rather than laughs, sensual pleasure rather than abstract ideas, there's plenty to be had: Raw, sexmongering saxophone from a time when the guitar was not yet the phallus of choice… sassy rhythms that alternate between grinding and pounding… the sloppy, overly eager playing of lusty musicians who have something more urgent to get out of their systems than musical notes.

This collection eschews the cutesy half-ironic/half-nostalgic recordings all too common in such retrospectives, in favour of the tracks that have stood the test of time to remain hot. The ones instantly evocative of flesh on your hands, soft, warm texture on your fingers, various fluids on the tip of your tongue, skin 'tween your teeth, etc. etc. This is the sound of hips, thighs, breasts, nipples, napes, shoulders, clavicles, bellies, backs, wrists, chins, lips, eyes, labia, rosettes, feet, all in frenzied, shaking movement (when not slowing to a sweet, aching grind). And that's just the beginning; no less than two of the tracks on this comp feature the bullwhip as an actual musical instrument!

This music wasn't intended for cuddling on a bed of rose petals and scented silk sheets. This is all flesh and fluids; the sound of straight male fantasy. What men seek, whether they're flicking through the Bible for passages about the whore Magdalene or they're at the strip club, gawking up at the vixen atop the table, his desires lost in a conflicting mix of the will to power and willing servitude, best expressed by that master perv, Russ Meyer:

… violence doesn’t only destroy; it creates and moulds as well. Let’s examine closely, then, this dangerously evil creation, … encased and contained within the supple skin of woman. The softness is there, the unmistakable smell of female, the surface shiny and silken, the body yielding yet wanton. But a word of caution: Handle with care and don’t drop your guard. This rapacious … breed prowls both alone and in packs, operating at any level, any time, anywhere and with anybody.

The danger and challenge of the untamed savage—shaking her primal nudity up there on her pedestal, in touch with nature's forces in ways men think they can't even imagine (yet nonetheless try to)—gives rise to a tension between wanting to control and to be controlled, to tame and to be tamed, leaving the voyeur at her feet a drooling mess of confused horniness, desire going off in every direction. It's the moment for which every businessman lives and breathes… He may have the money, the vote, the driver's licence, the freedom, but, baby, you possess the only thing he really wants.

And the only thing you need to make that man crawl, is a soundtrack such as this.

Another Beatle's Death, or, How Idol Worship Can Benefit Self-serving Grieving Now!

2011-03-23T18:15:00.007+01:00

New Hate Rock

2011-03-18T19:00:00.011+01:00

HTRK: «Synthetic» (demo) [mp3]

While we wait for the album currently most anticipated here at Toilet Guppies', HTRK's Work (Work, Work) (to be released in about five months' time), the band is currently offering a live album, recorded in 2008, over at their website.

Not very well known—nor will they ever be if they continue to explore, in such a stubborn manner, what most people would rather avoid, all the more so because it's always there, that hum underlying your very existence—HTRK is still the most interesting «art rock» outfit since Flux Information Sciences. But unlike Flux Info, HTRK doesn't dilly-dally with things like distracting or ameliorating humour. Their music is not the type to cowardly put on a brave face, forcing itself to qualify, always unconvincingly, «… but it's not that bad.» Or to find other ways of looking away.

You can be indifferent about many things. Most things. Sorrow and sex are not among them, which is what gives HTRK its emotional currency. While other indie bands tend their hairdos and seek out people with whom to schmooze like so many gold diggers at the yacht club, so that they may better peddle the ditties they've slapped together with a view to becoming rich and adored by the snivelling and the stupid, HTRK takes care of business. Music was made for dealing with these things—pain, boredom, desire—and not for certain people to have their narcissistic exhibitionism indulged, their desperate need for validation met or their pointlessly ambitious greed gratified. When you've lost all faith in music—when every recording artist comes across as either a scenester or just plain bland—a band like HTRK comes around, offering you hope with their brand of hopelessness.

I'm sure that wasn't their intention, but there you go. Take it as a gift. Then go buy their live album.

[The above mp3, by the way, has nothing to do with the live album. It was a free give-away, downloaded off their MySpace some months back. Although a demo, it's as good as the songs on their records (and certainly boasts higher production values than their debut). Fuck the hyperbole, it's really very, very good. One of their best. So far.]

Producer Series #1

2011-03-17T23:00:00.003+01:00

This collection is not about songs, or even music, but about sound:

V/A: Fridge Buzz from the Basement [.zip]

There are certain producers, studios and record companies best known for being producers (Phil Spector, Lee «Scratch» Perry), studios (Sun Studios, Studio One) or record companies (Motown, Factory Records), with a distinct sound overriding the individual talent. But most producers flit around from album to album, band to band, record corporation to record corporation. With some albums selling well and others rarely if ever to be heard, and few of the bands likely to appear on the same record, most people miss the connection. The producer's contribution goes largely unrecognised, which is why Toilet Guppies is launching a series of comps collecting the scattered work of such sound whisperers.

If you listen to the various projects a producer has overseen in one set, you'll appreciate how a good producer makes his mark on the work, guiding the listener through the music by way of the mix, challenging, pushing or manipulating the emotional state of the performers, adding (or subtracting) arrangements… A producer worth his mettle becomes an artist in his own right, bringing to the mix his own textures, philosophy, judgment, demands and perhaps instruments. Thus George Martin was known as the «fifth member» of the Beatles, &c. &c.

The subject of the above comp is the «sixth member» of an English environmentalist art rock-techno prog group that has pioneered Internet music distribution. He has also worked with the finest folk/hip-hop mixer upper to come out of the Church of Scientology; an offensively bland but eminently competent French duo applauded for their interior design muzak (such as their robotic, paradoxically sexless hit about a sexy boy); the actress daughter of a legendary Judeo-Gallic fun boy; a knight of the realm who once used to be in the best known rock/pop group of all time; a slacker alt. rock band inexplicably adored by the sonic youth underground mafia as if they were deities; some blips on the hipster radar that vanished like UFOs; and Travis.

Regardless of the merits of the artists he has produced, what this musician and sound engineer brings to the mixing table is sublime: The crisp and warm synthesizers, the glockenspiel punctuation and those languid strings he coats the music in all make you feel like someone's gently spreading honey laced with opium across your eardrums.

And the mixing! There's always something happening. Details abound, tickling your cognition, yet nothing ever competes for space or attention. Everything in its right place. Not afraid of noise, he's also deft at somehow making something loud and uptempo come from a place of great sensitivity, almost delicate. And unlike the unimaginative polish applied to hits, there's not a boring sound in this guy's sonic universe. There's a kind of futurism to his craft: If Kraftwerk succeeded in conjuring the music of an unconscious, mechanical machine, this bloke predicts what an artificial intelligence might one day compose.

Enjoy.

A Secret Rendezvous Between Folk, Classic Rock & Indie, or, «hit the road with a gun in the boot»

2011-03-14T00:00:00.009+01:00

Blackberry Songs [.zip]

If today's Toilet Guppies mystery primer isn't your bag, then I must profess ignorance as to why you're even visiting this blog in the first place. In fact, it's hard to imagine anyone not liking this artist's music. But then I suppose that's what Usher thought about Justin Bieber, so that particular argument goes out the window…

Anyway, this singer-songwriter is not only a finger-picking sensation in the tradition of John Fahey; a lo-fi indie rock arranger making Sonic Youth et al. sound decidedly unadventurous; an occasional dabbler into atmospheric noise and electronica; and a pop sensibilist shamelessly inspired by the classic '70s FM radio rock of the Boss, Bob Seger(!), et al. He's also one of the most wry lyricists you're likely to hear anytime soon, making you chuckle at workaday griefs, relationship challenges and good ol', all round people hatin'.

This guy knows how to appreciate the unintentional poetry in overheard snippets of chatter, as well as in throwaway comments of near and dear ones who inevitably go through moments where they despise you, every now and again. A fine guitarist but a middling vocalist, he turns this drawback into an advantage by acting more than singing, drawling—deadpan and Dylan-like—everyday phrases pregnant with passive aggression. There's a slight air of melancholy, but don't worry: it's not the insufferably maudlin and exaggerated kind peddled by, say, Nick Drake. Call this non-pathological blues. Never before has a songwriter been so self-pitying and managed to stay this unpretentious. And rarely has a lyricist so bitterly comedic managed to avoid clever irony, salvaging his sincerity all the way…

The best music is usually a tightrope walk: Inconspicuously balanced, seemingly unremarkable and deceptively boring, staying well clear of the bombast and cheap tactics of the extremes, it just keeps on giving, new shades revealing themselves upon every listen. As an old chum said, this music will make you want to «hit the road with a gun in the boot». Give it a twirl, bub, then go buy his albums.

Net Nuggets 37: Vile Promotion

2011-03-08T00:00:00.072+01:00

Kurt Vile: Vile Promotion [.zip]

There are ten tracks on Kurt Vile's new album, Smoke Ring for My Halo, out today. Five of them are great.

That's a respectable 24 minutes and 20 seconds out of a total 45 minutes and 48 seconds of uncomplicated music for complicated emotions. Unpretentious down home classic rock feel, perfect for Sundays. Swirling acoustic melodies with odd drips of cocoon noise psychedelia to fully secure the introversion of compositions penned by a guy who does for serious heterosexual males with periodic bouts of social phobia and/or disabling misanthropy what Blondie or Joan Jett did for girls who just wanna have fun and who have to ask, «What does 'misanthropy' mean?»

So, if you're full of sadness and frustration as brought on by friends, lovers and other enemies, get Smoke Ring for My Halo now. As the man sings on the album opener, «I will never, ever, ever be alone / 'cuz it's all in my baby's hands… / I get sick of just about everyone / and I hide in my baby's arms / 'Cuz except for her, you know / as I've implied…»—be that «baby» drink, drugs, work, a hobby… or music, such as, say, the songs on Smoke Ring for My Halo. Hey, whatever gets you through the day.

If you're a cheap Charlie and need even more coaxing before parting with cash for Vile's new record, here's a little compilation of various more or less recent Internet radio & TV recordings of the troubadour plugging this and his previous album (the equally worthwhile Childish Prodigy)—though I'd go with the official studio releases, if I were you:

On Tour
Jesus Fever
Amplifier (a/k/a You Was Alone)
The Hunchback
Overnite Religion
He's Alright
Dead Alive
Red Apples
Runner Ups
Ghost Town (a/k/a Sad Ghost)
In My Time

1, 2, 9 & 10 with the Violators, live on Pitchfork's Don't Look Down
3 & 6 with the Violators, live on WXPN's Free At Noon
4, 5 & 7 live on QTV (4 & 5 with Robert Robinson)
8 & 11 live on WFMU's Best Show

Happy International Women's Day, by the way:

Net Nuggets 36: Clara Engel

2011-03-05T09:00:00.004+01:00

Clara Engel: «Lick My Fins» [mp3]

Sometimes, it's hard to tell whether the spiritual impulse of religion is really the lust to be one with the world beyond your lonely self—like those medieval nuns visited at night by ecstatic visions of the «light» of Jesus «penetrating» them—or whether you're just a single minded, one track degenerate for ever thinking so in the first place. Pervert.

Regardless, scripture is a great source for loophole pornography—suggestive literature heavy with similes and symbolism from a time when people were too bashful, prudish or classy to be outright and crass about it. Because, you know, like Sparks sing, «Chicks dig dig D-I-G dig dig metaphors / Use them wisely, use them well / and you'll never know the hell / of loneliness». I'm sure a lot of those guys who penned the Bible got laid. They would've been the rock stars of their day and age.

And why not? As any fan of gospel music can attest to, the raptures of religion and of rumpy-pumpy are closely related. The Bible's Song of Solomon, for instance, is one long, bawdy allegory for wanting to be one with God, trying to convince us faith can feel as good as fucking. Turning this onto its head are singer-songwriters who show us that fucking can feel as meaningful as faith. And what better metaphor than the Holy Ghost, with its tongue and tendency to fill people?

Let the Holy Spirit lick my fins
I want to crawl back to the ocean
For you
Lose my limbs and my lungs
My agility of tongue
For you

This sultry little couplet is sung by Canadian cabaret mermaid Clara Engel. Imagine if burlesque was still innovative and alive and relevant as an edgy art form, sexual once again and not just kitsch, quaint and cute, this is the type of song you might hear at a show. Far more literate than the old Betty Boop-oop-ee-doo/«teach-me-tiger» schtick, it would actually stir something in you.

Other than the burlesque-esque jazz of the arrangement, the composition hints at Middle Eastern melody and so, by extension, the crazy Judeo-Christian religious frenzy that is, despite everything else about it, actually quite sensual… Hips swaying, bellies dancing, pelvises grinding, slow and determined… Thankfully, the backing band is more focused on sonic texture than on squeezing in as many notes and rhythm changes as possible. It's jazz as played by perverts, which is exactly what that particular genre needs more of, cerebral and stuck in a time warp as it is.

Women routinely go weak at the knees just at the thought of a man who can sing or play the guitar, but it's not often a man is given cause to go weak at the knees upon hearing a female performer. Sure, there are men drooling over hit list divas given music video make-overs, but that's not about the vivifying music, mesmerising charisma or shimmering eloquence as much as the lighting, clothing (or lack thereof) and Photoshop. So it feels good to hear the powerful, confident singing of a succubus challenging and perhaps even scaring you a little bit with the sheer force of her voice and convictions, sensual to the point of obliterating mysticism. Personally, I haven't felt a sensation quite like this since I heard PJ Harvey command me, through the speakers, in no uncertain terms to lick her legs.

And tell me true: Is there any sexier image than that of a woman crawling on her hands and knees through the hot sand towards the beckoning waves and slow ebb of the undulating sea? This woman wants to go back all the way to the birthplace of life for you… to seek out the original life force for you… go bathe in the primordial soup with you…

Don't you want to go with?

[«Lick My Fins» is from Engel's 2009 album, Secret Beasts.]

Mixtape for a 25 Year Old's 29th Birthday

2011-02-24T18:00:00.001+01:00

Mixtapes… the nerd's favoured method of seduction and surely the most awkward form of communication between lovers, next to the lazy and unfair question, «What are you thinking?»

But then I knew you loved music. And now, every once in a while, I hear music I think would've tickled your bubbly and contagious fancy. Stuff you never got to dig. Here's some of it:

V/A: You Only Live Once (Try Anything Twice) [.zip]

There's your beloved wild style delinquent juvenile rockabilly 'tude… silly lyrics… vitriolic lyrics… sing-along melodies… wretched fuzz scuzz… kitsch psych & '70s riffs… go-go syncopation… rugged male voices… sultry female voices… Chris-Isaak-making-sandy-love-to-Helena-Christensen style surf lounge guitar… head bobbing rhythms… at least one hippie punk Manson Family reference… the odd pop hook—even a soft hearted ballad. (You weren't fooling anyone, with your stinging wit and feisty opinions.) There are some of your trusty heroes—the boys and girls who fired your imagination (amongst other things)—and some songs and artists you'd never heard… A couple of your favourite melodies, in new renditions… A couple of songs that, quite frankly, make for guilty pleasures for me—but then you always recommended not being guilty about any kind of pleasure.

This comp encapsulates the joy you taught: It's OK to have fun, your mind doesn't have to be switched on all the fucking time, and happiness is allowed. So, with these insignificant little songs old memories stay alive, even when the songs are new. They invoke instant images, questions («What would you have made of this?») and the old in-jokes, so in now that only I am still in on them.

You're not all gone, then. Let's celebrate the day you came in to the world. Chin-chin…

Friendship vs. Music!

2011-02-21T03:30:00.018+01:00

Better than Friends—A Sampler for Friends of Toilet Guppies [.zip]

Are you ever awoken at night by calls from friends with thoughts of suicide? Or some impossibly drunk friend cursing you and telling you, amid the unintelligible sounds barely qualifying as syllables, that she hates you, only to call you up the next day to apologise for anything she might have said or done that she can't remember anyway? Do you have some arsehole friend who is, after all, your friend, but who nonetheless needs to be endured as he disrespects your friends and everyone and possibly even you? Or worse, up to several friends too stupid to be liars as such, their disappointing untruths and rash, unkept promises based on lack of insight into self rather than devious cunning (which at least would've hinted at some intelligence)… One friend who dares you to «take it outside», another threatening to kill you? Maybe you visit an old friend, only to find an alcoholic shell of the charismatic, handsome daredevil you used to know? Or see a past soulmate, fat from medication and for some reason toothless now, spending his days riding the bus, trying to pick up the 14 year old girls with incoherent sentences punctuated by unnervingly unmotivated bursts of ecstatic laughter?

People come and go. All those people… Cleaning out your things, maybe you come across an old letter by someone you once had a crush on, a lifetime ago, but whose existence you're reminded of only now. Or someone tells you about the recent activities of some long estranged friend. Or chance throws you into the path of some stranger, soon to be calling you at all times of the day and night with their nervous breakdown. Maybe you're wondering if you should call that person who once used to be so terribly close to you, but who both of you know is better off without you? Or perhaps you are the one to receive a cold call? Perhaps you're nursing a guilt for not making that one phone call to your friend in need, all those weeks ago already? (Everything just seemed to «get in the way».)

Can you keep track of all the people entering and exiting your life? Is there even any point in trying to hold on to anyone, when this door just keeps revolving? Friends that drop away and friends that won't go away, friends that annoy, friends that cheer you up, friends that sacrifice, friends that abandon, friends that just can't help it, friends that die, friends that cling, friends that use, friends that give, friends that can't, friends that forget, friends that are forgotten, friends that misunderstand and friends that are misunderstood. Strangers who step up, acquaintances who bring grace, professionals who help out. Friendship is a concept, but people are real, and in abundant supply. You'll never be alone, though you'll always be alone.

This is the secret allure of music, forgotten by fame whores, but understood by those who know to truly appreciate the medium: Whether you're all by your lonesome self or you're surrounded by people and somehow it still doesn't take, the right music can always bring you home. Music is more reliable, forgiving and giving than people. (Than the people who make it.) It's more understanding—and comforting, if need be. The other day, I saw a mother putting her wailing baby to sleep, a spontaneous melody slipping unthinkingly from her throat. And it worked!

So, to all friends present, past and future, here's something no friend and at least not this one could ever give you: The languid, almost mystical solace—when most of the people populating your life are sources of drama and upheaval and you have no one to turn to who isn't already a stone—of one of the most soothing, yet in no way escapist voices Toilet Guppies knows of. She used to sing in a legendary cult outfit of the '90s, and has been the go-to voice of the Jesus And Mary Chain, Massive Attack, the Chemical Brothers, Death In Vegas, Air, Vetiver, Bert Jansch and Le Volume Courbe. But where many of those artists foil the intimacy she's capable of with layers of grandiose and alienating strings, samples and beats, her own two-man band with her husband (the drummer in an equally legendary '90s band) is the perfect antidote to a restless, wallowing mind. A helping hand for whenever you should raise your mitt up from under the choppy sea of all this consciousness.

This is music for when you're coming down at sunrise, everyone too tired to converse… road music for when you don't feel like dealing with the fellow passengers anymore and all those questions and bad jokes… music to transform a desperately lonely night into much needed alone time, whichever bed you're sleeping in this time into a womb, rendering the past and the future into something entirely OK to just leave where they are, and do you really need anyone anyway?

This music could be your BFF. Get it here, now.

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 11: Sister Grimm

2011-02-16T08:30:00.001+01:00

Larkin Grimm: Selections from «Time Is a Spiral #2» 10" [.zip]

Here's a vinyl rip of the highlights from an obscure, vinyl-only EP by Larkin Grimm, recorded live in studio for the Dutch radio station VPRO in 2006. I've already written too many words, words, words about Grimm on this blog. Enjoy the songs:

3. «Little Weeper»
5. «Bollweevil»

Songs Lux'n'Ivy Taught Me

2011-01-30T04:00:00.021+01:00

V/A: Songs Lux & Ivy Taught Us [.zip]

This is a comp I think you toilet guppies would love the most. This blog has no genre specific profile, but I know some of you like music that's part of some social history or greater cultural context, while some of you like good time rock'n'roll, and some the escape of novelty music. Some of you like the bizarre, and there are those among you who can't get enough of the perverse. And then there's a bunch of you who just like the safe and plain quirky.

Of course, quirky music is only ever good despite being quirky. All the tracks on this collection are valid for some reason beyond wretched cutesiness. And they're not just pop culture references. This stuff isn't
novelty music. It's not fodder for your nostalgia, nor a target for your irony. This is by turns mean, fun, funny, nasty, clever, raunchy, sad, wilfully stupid, inadvertently profound and in every way evocative music. Often incompetently (or at least over-zealously) played, quite frequently silly and occasionally carefree, this is a decent playlist for parties, but the perfect palliative for bad days. When you no longer feel like waiting for the proverbial bus that may hit you tomorrow, touchy-feely singer/songwriter fare or uncompromising experimental music only helps digging a deeper hole. What you need is sex, fun and humour—which, incidentally, is what this comp is made of.

Before the retro stylings of Quentin Tarantino, and David Lynch even—around the time «Pope of Trash» John Waters was the most clever American filmmaker spreading the pulp/exploitation gospel—were the Cramps. Hell, I don't need to tell you about the Cramps. Suffice it to say, their core duo of Poison Ivy Rorschach and Lux Interior were avid collectors of '50s and '60s trash. Their impeccable bad taste has been documented on such compilations as Songs the Cramps Taught Us (volumes 1 to 5), the 14 volume(!) Lux & Ivy's Favorites series, Black Christmas, The Cramps' Jukebox, The Roots of the Cramps and the Bad Music for Bad People—Songs the Cramps Taught Us anthology. That's a whole lot of music, even considering the overlaps.

The bulk of the Cramps' influences is in inferior sound quality. If being cheaply recorded and produced in the 1950s and '60s weren't gritty enough, many of the songs are non-restored vinyl transfers of probably original pressings, all crackle and hiss. That is as it should be—rock'n'roll was never about polish (not until the 1980s, anyway)—but on the sizeable Lux & Ivy's Favorites and the Christmas album, the injured fidelity on most of the tracks is further insulted by a miserably low bit rate. So for the songs I liked, I went CD and mp3 hunting. Nothing here has a bit rate below 192 kbps.

In selecting from such a large pool of recordings I needed criteria: There's none of the tracks I already knew of, none of the artists I'd already heard of and no '60s garage rock (of which I'm far too obsessive a collector already). Thus I was left with material refreshing to this blog: Original '50s rock, the rockabilly that wasn't too naff (that country rhythm is embarrassing!), sci-fi/schlock horror Hallowe'en novelty songs, the kind of surf instrumentals that were precursors to speed metal, absurd (and sometimes unsettling) doo-wop, faux-ethnographical exotica, ol-R'n'B, and at least one blues number played by a preacher. Hundreds of songs were whittled down to an eclectic mix of 27 largely forgotten obscurities that don't deserve to be so.

There are delightful surprises at every turn. Pure joy of sound and energy. A lot of creativity and imagination, from a time before obese fame and fortune imbued most music with the spirit of narcissistic ambition and an unashamed selfishness that has little or nothing to do with the spontaneous, mystical energy once at the core of music, long since replaced by the brittle weaknesses inherent in the egos of whores more focused on photo shoots and hairdos than anything to do with sincerity, humility, beauty or truth, near killing the prehistoric impulse of soulful expression with not even money, just their own petty need for validation. Children fantasising alone in front of the mirror, destined one day to die empty idiots without insight, more stupid at the end than in the beginning, having learnt nothing from this life and only deserving pointless deaths. May the hurts of mainstream and «indie» artists alike feed our deepest pleasures evermore! Music is a contract between musician and listener, except that most performers don't even remotely mean with any kind of sincerity the emotions they manipulate in you, just so you'll fork over your cash (and adoration) for their product. You've been gypped, mate, but it wasn't always like this. Back when the financial, hedonistic and social rewards weren't flabby and obscene, it wasn't uncommon for musicians and songwriters to make music out of a genuine impulse. Which is one of the reasons the songs in this compilation work so well.

Not that this is worthwhile music because «they don't make music like they used to.» (There's always great contemporary stuff—even if you have to sift through the waste products of an entire industry that encourages the self-obsession of pretty and vacant dunces dribbling feelings about as relevant as their thoughts are insightful.) And this music isn't good because it reminds us of a time we're too young to even remember—that we can only fantasise about, imagining what the good old days must surely have been like, the music supposedly reflecting the innocent times we're foolish to even yearn for. There never were any «good old days». (Besides, if you listen a little more closely, you'll find this music is anything but innocent.) These songs are just good, period. Enjoy it already—and for all the right reasons: There
isn't a pretentious moment on the whole mp3 album. Just a journey through the weird and wonderful so wonderful you realise it's not really weird, after all.

So, take a quick dip in Rorschach and Interior's magical time capsule. Laugh, cry, dance, fuck. And if you like what you hear, enjoy this extra little comp I've uploaded just for you. Trust me, it's a doozy…

Desert Island Mixtape + Contest w/Prizes!

2011-01-25T00:00:00.101+01:00

V/A: Desert Island Mixtape [.zip]

Recently, one of my superiors—best known for writing and singing songs for a kids' TV show that proved more popular with speed freak inmates in the capital's gaol than with the children of the nation—told me to compile a CD-R of the music most important to me. I don't know why. Presumably my mind and body for eight hours a day isn't enough; she wants my soul, too.

It was a ridiculous task. There are far too many excellent recordings in the world, all of them impossible to quantify or rate, to select a paltry 74 minutes' worth. In the end, a not very short shortlist had to be brutally whittled down to its bare essentials and, after a series of unhappy compromises, the entire thing was sequenced by hitting the «Random» button. (To reflect the unpredictability of day-to-day mood swings, y'unnerstand.)

Anyway, I thought I'd upload the compilation here because, well, though there's more music I'd recommend, there isn't music I'd recommend more. And this is a music blog.

Feel free to upload and email Toilet Guppies your compilation of absolutely unmissable essentials. Anyone who submits an mp3 album of their ultimate favourites (totalling no more than 100MB, please) shall receive a reading, consisting of a detailed analysis of their personality and predictions for the future, entirely for free. The person with the most moving/impressive/confounding/unsettling or unintentionally funny compilation shall win two tickets to see SWANS in Oslo, Norway on 6 May 2011.

Rare or Unreleased 49: Poverty in My Heart for the Marketing Exec

2011-01-15T00:00:00.018+01:00

What kind of beast are the Black Angels? They stand for many things easy to despise: They promulgate shameless time warp nostalgia—in their case, idealisation of a one-dimensional, cartoonish idea of the '60s. (Songs even reference the Vietnam War, ferchrissakes.) Like good children of postmodernism, they appropriate the art and image of more famous or street credible artists of the past in order to further their own career. (The band name was derived from a song by the Velvet Underground, and they use an iconic image of Nico as their logo.) Their lyrics are often embarrassing—more like a sequence of rhymes than actual poetry, with little substance to indicate any of them are older than 13. Nico it ain't.

But despite their corny yet perfectly po-faced «turn on, tune in, drone out» psychedelia revival schtick (employing Native American imagery, presumably to automatically render the whole thing somehow «spiritual»), the Black Angels' first slew of self-produced EPs and albums combined primitive rhythms, scuzzy bass grooves, sultry tremolo guitars and tambourines like rattlesnakes, occasionally punctuated by neck hair-raising screams, making for eminently danceable rock'n'roll that made you gag for the sex and drugs to complete the equation. For all the bullshit image bullshit, the music was great. Devoid of silly little pop hooks, it had a slightly menacing, creeping underbelly feel, lurking beneath the rhythmically hypnotic swagger. It's so hard to find music to dance to that isn't yet another fucking celebration of this, that or the other, or just pacifying and diverting and completely irrelevant to any human emotion with grit. Live, the Black Angels made you want to grab whichever person was immediately next to you and fuck them up against the nearest wall. They had balls. (The band, I mean, not the person you may or may not have been fucking up against the wall. But with that soundtrack, who cares? Buy copies of Passover and Directions to See a Ghost and hear for yourself…)

For their third full-length, the Black Angels enlisted a producer. (The guy behind this.) The result—last autumn's Phosphene Dream—isn't as raw, is a bit more uneven, but at least it's more varied, expanding upon what could easily have become a formula.

There was a promotional push where you could pre-order the album. You got a couple of mp3s at once, then a little later the digital album as you waited for the CD in the post. After the release date, however, four other versions of Phosphene Dream were unveiled, each with its own set of bonus tracks—none of which came with the version purchased directly off the band's website. iTunes' edition featured two bonus tracks («Melanie's Melody», «Ronettes»), Amazon's another («My Boat Is Sinking»), ShockHound's yet another («At Night») and Napster—where you have to buy an additional subscription just for access—offered an additional two («Choose to Choose», «Raindance Song»). In all cases, the bonus mp3s were only made available if you bought the entire album. That's four copies of Phosphene Dream (not counting the regular edition perhaps already purchased in other record stores or on the band's website). If you have a US credit card, that is—most of these «exclusive»/«deluxe» versions aren't even available elsewhere.

It's a puzzling marketing ploy that's becoming more and more common among indie labels. The artist is exploited and the music lover fucked, just so that a few distributors may cash in—marginally. Worse than unethical—there are more important things in the news—it's stupid.

For the Black Angels, it was a continuation of an unfortunate trend that began with their sophomore album, which was similarly pushed before its release date with an offer any obsessive completist couldn't resist: pre-order it and you got an exclusive, limited edition EP. An EP that may currently be purchased through the group's website, just like any other CD. I'm looking forward to the episode of «Mad Men» where they invent the use of the words «exclusive» and «limited
edition» to move product. It would've been in the 1960s, judging from the Black Angels…

In any case, if you're miffed or feel gypped by the Black Angels' shifty record company Blue Horizon (which doesn't even have a website), here's a little something to cheer you up:

«The Man's No Angel, Not Even a Black One»

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 10: Free Tonetta!

2011-01-11T15:00:00.022+01:00

Tonetta: «Get It Going» b/w «Mmm Mama!» 7" [.zip]

Are you on Facebook™? Well, so was Tonetta, until they banished him, simply for being himself (sometimes herself). The only thing he ever did was post clips from his YouTube channel. (YouTube also excommunicated him once, but they let him back in. It just wasn't the same without him.) The images aren't even explicit, and there's no malice in his words, so what Facebook's problem is, is anybody's guess. Like YouTube, the social networking site should welcome him back, if not for good taste, then for the sake of free speech (and all that). There's enough gentrification in the real world, we have to clean up our virtual world as well? What would the Internet be without porn? (That was a rhetorical question, but the answer is: «Still just a military communications network.»)

Naturally, we can't have this. So to sneak Tonetta back in—through the back door, as it were—Toilet Guppies has created a Facebook Page© for the Facebook™ Tonetta Appreciation Society. Like™ it now, then share your favourite Tonetta videos, stories, thoughts, feelings, downstairs tingles and/or musically inspired bowel movements with like-minded individuals!

«Who is Tonetta?» I hear you ask. He's the finest 60-something recording pervert currently operating out of Canada, that's who, and probably the most prolific degenerate allowed to operate on a website owned by Google. (At the time of writing, Tonetta's YouTube channel contains 161 music videos.) He dresses up in what is obviously his house, not in fancy dress or high fashion, but in seemingly random get-ups (he's more a Lord Dada than a Lady Gaga) and sings about stuff that would go down very well in a kindergarten—when he doesn't sing about stuff that would go down well in a gay bar. He's the man, he's the shit, he's the man shit! Some scholar is bound to label him an «outsider artist», so let's nip that one in the bud right now by saying once and for all that Tonetta is not crazy, is not clueless, is not unintentionally funny, is not coincidentally good, is not some idiot savant. Tonetta makes rock'n'roll for the child inside. He kicks arse, grinning. He's the song in your throat as you sing in the golden shower. He's the twinkle in yer daddy's eye while your daddy is getting his feet tickled by a feminist transsexual. Perhaps his record label put it best when they said, «Very little is known of Tonetta.» To quote the Mighty Boosh: «Some say he once read the mind of a pelican and then fainted.»

Tonetta has one album out, 777, vol. 1. Black Tent Press are taking pre-orders for Vol. 2 now. They're very gracious; even though the albums are in vinyl format, you get a CD version with each purchase.

The exception is this release—a 7" with two non-album tracks, «Get It Going» and the spectacular «Mmm Mama!»:

You erupt my volcano
You simmer me down
You do all the things from dreams
Right through to reality

But fear not. These 192 kbps mp3s enable you to listen to the above tracks as you sit among the deviants on public transport, Tonetta's lascivious drawl cuddling your piqued ears as you begin to sense the secrets of the other passengers fill the air…

Of course, Tonetta is still on MySpace.

Mp3 Killed the Vinyl DJ 9: Larkin Grimm

2011-01-10T06:00:00.015+01:00

Larkin Grimm & Rosolina Mar: 7" double A-side [.zip]

I thought this blog would be inactive by now. The plan was to upload everything I had that was rare, then kill the blog dead, leave it to the scavengers of the Internet. Alas, it's 2011 and I'm on it again, still. Sorry. I've been lazy, I know… slow at uploading what remains of bona fide rarities on my computer.

These two obscure A-sides, for example. It's because they're in vinyl. I hate vinyl, and I hate transferring it, so I've been putting it off. It's all too technical and time-consuming. I've not bothered to restore the sound. If vinyl is so fucking great and superior in sound, one shouldn't have to restore it… But you can't take your record player and vinyl collection with you everywhere you go, so here are 192 kbps mp3s for your listening convenience, crackle and all: two songs performed by the venerable Larkin Grimm, backed for the occasion by Italian trio Rosolina Mar.

The first track, «Los Angeles», is a cover of an Old Time Relijun song. You've never heard Grimm this rock'n'roll. (Larkin goes electric!) The second is an alternate version of Grimm's own «Anger in Your Liver». The Rosolina Mar-backed rendition actually beats the album version on Grimm's Parplar (itself one of thee albums of the noughties). It's a good'un, Rosolina Mar's spacious Americana backing taking you on a road movie through your immune system, as Grimm diagnoses you: «Trouble in your heart / Worry in your spleen / Anger in your liver, darlin' / Metal in your lungs». Still, Grimm's confident, almost triumphant (and certainly gorgeous) singing makes you think you'll be all right…

The real gem, however, is the B-side, the only proper studio recording of one of Grimm's most accomplished compositions, «The Butcher». The reason I haven't included it here, is that I'm not in the habit of stealing food out of the mouths of starving babes—the very same recording is available on the various artists compilation Leaves of Life, proceeds of which go to the World Food Programme, available on CD or as mp3s, sold separately. Get it now, you freeloading downloader; as well as the aforementioned must from Grimm & Rosolina Mar, it's got contributions by Devendra Banhart, Marissa Nadler and one of the members of Fire On Fire, one of Young God Records' house bands (kind of), which features heavily on the aforementioned Parplar. Speaking of which, go buy that album, too.

When writing about anything pertaining to Larkin Grimm—one of the best things to happen to music since banging rocks together—I tend to gush transcendental. Forgive me if I can't be bothered this time. Just listen to the music already.

Free, New Music

2011-01-07T17:57:00.035+01:00

Toilet Guppies is loathe to be the scurrying, little errand boy of record companies and marketing hipsters, but here are some free, legal downloads dropped by some of our favourite artists' record companies to promote hotly anticipated albums:

Kurt Vile: «Jesus Fever» [192 kbps mp3, via Matador Records]
Kurt Vile: «In My Time» [192 kbps mp3, via Matador Records]

Both from Smoke Ring for My Halo, out on 8 March. These little tastes, as well as last year's «Square Shells» EP and «In My Time» single, indicate Kurt Vile is going the way of inconsequential Sonic Youth family values indie listening; here's hoping there are moments scratching deeper than the surface (as on all his previous, truly terrific albums). At least these tracks are a little dreamy, reminding us that there is such a thing as summer and that this winter business won't last forever. (While you wait, I strongly suggest you download early radio session versions of two of the tracks slated for release on Smoke Ring for My Halo—«Ghost Town» and personal favourite «Runner ups».

Oh, and don't forget Vile's former band's new digital EP, which comes highly recommended, with the record label already magnanimously distributing two of its tracks, entirely for free:

The War On Drugs: «The History of Plastic» [320 kbps mp3, via Secretly Canadian]
The War On Drugs: «Comin' Through» [320 kbps mp3, via Secretly Canadian])

And then there's the family of Ak Ak:

Akron/Family: «So It Goes» [320 kbps mp3, via Dead Oceans Records]

From S/T II: The Cosmic Birth and Journey of Shinju TNT, out on 8 February. Pretty song. Akron/Family are a bit hit-or-miss these days, but at least they're a bearable and not least intelligent voice of positivity and innocence, for those days when you need a break from the loathing. And where else are you going to get that?

Don't believe the hype, but enjoy the music. Sweet, free music…

RIP Cap'n!

2010-12-19T19:32:00.005+01:00

Take some notice, people, because eccentric singer/painter/hermit/cult figure/cult leader/all round legend Don Van Vliet a.k.a. Captain Beefheart just passed away.

4.5 Million Native Speakers Can't Be Wrong

2010-12-10T01:20:00.037+01:00

We may seem mighty international here at Toilet Guppies, but actually we're born and based on the fringes of Europe, in Norway—the land of wood and minimalism (and now black gold, motherfuckers, ha ha!). It's a language group of only 4.5 million people, so any verbally based art such as song, film or literature is doomed to obscurity.

In most cases, that's just as well. But sometimes, just sometimes, it's a pity. A wrong we here at Toilet Guppies intend to right with a few introductory anthologies of Norwegian music. First off, Norwegian-language songs, brought to us by the hardy few Norwegians who resist English on the radio, English on TV, English at the cinema, English on the Internet, English on blogs(!), English in your band and Swedish in the service industry.

Some of these songs are bad melodies with good lyrics. Some are good melodies with bad lyrics. Some are even good melodies with good lyrics! But I've tried to avoid bad melodies with bad lyrics, which is why you won't find any black metal on here, even though it's Norway's main cultural export. I've likewise snubbed our second musical export, designer electronica. But those wreckers of soul usually sing in English, anyway. Besides, you're all modern guys, of course you've had Röyksopp in the ears before…

But there's rock, pop, punk, post-punk, new wave, shoegaze, hardcore, trip hop, folk, world, spoken word… jazz… We do everything here in Norway.

V/A:
Made in Norway, vol. 1:
18 Lessons in Norwegian + Some Ethnic Shit [.zip]

[All mp3s are ID tagged. The titles and artist names should show up when you unzip the download. If you're curious about context, meaning and all round gossip, please consult the track-by-track liner notes below.]

1. «But One Day, When the Rains Come» (2003)

This singer/journalist means to Norwegians what Johnny Cash means to North Americans. Should you spot a Norwegian crying, chances are
he or she's been listening to one of this TV personality's tone deaf sea shanties.

This track was inspired by a trip to the Kalahari Desert. Despite a thumb piano lending the song an exotic «world music» feel, the scraping fiddle echoes traditional Norwegian folk tones as it laments and hopes against hope for a reunion with the one that got away:

I know it is you,
my love,
passing me by.
But I cannot see you
through the heat, dust and wind.
Merciless is today!
I have no song to sing,
not a word to say.
Although I know it is you,
my love,
passing me by.
But one day, when the rains come!

You know it is I,
your love,
passing you by.
But you cannot see me
through the heat, dust and wind.
Merciless is today.
You have no caress for me,
not a word to say.
Although you know it is I,
your love,
passing you by.
But one day, when the rains come!

Norwegian has no language for the erotic. Sexual terms are either obscene cuss words or medical Latin, the space between the filthy and the sterile an unimagined blank. But Norway values nature above all things, so the suggestive metaphors you have to resort to when trying to be sensual tend towards natural imagery. Here, as the scene is set in the «desert» of lovelessness, it's only natural that rain should take on an air of almost mystical ejaculation:

And rain will come!
The clouds will melt together
into one mighty, heavenly heart
that graciously squanders, pours
its pure and clear, celestial blood
and gives life
to this earth that suffers.
Then we may meet, you and I,
with laughter, song and kisses,
so that our cracked lips
burst and bleed.
And we shall call out
to men, verdure and beasts:
Look! Our love, too, lives.

2. «The Death Song»/«Flowers for Genet» (1976)

When the day has arrived and the hour's arrived
And you shall be stood up 'gainst the wall to bleed
And those who once loved ya
Have long since left ya
Then you shall see: Dying is lonely indeed

For the day shall come, and the hour will come
When the sand beneath you is red as a dye
And when they come for ya
Recall how I implore ya
O brother, it is strangely lonesome to die

This recital was laid down in the studio just days before its author took his life. He was one of few sorely needed mavericks in Norwegian cultural life, from the 1950s until his suicide in 1976. An anarchist sympathiser, convicted pornographer, closet homosexual and Anthroposophist, it's not surprising that the poem to follow «The
Death Song» in this medley is a prayer to the Virgin Mary, for grace on behalf of «pimps and sodomites, flashers and transvestites, pederasts, fetishists, poets and masochists, drunkards and junkies… thieves, whores and Genet»—all those who hung crucified next to history's most admired martyr, alone on his cross but for the dregs of society who, the romantic liberal's old trope goes, are the only ones truly able to appreciate the passion of the Christ. (If you disregard all the sociopaths and idiots hidden among the ranks of the unlucky, he may have a point.)

If you ever wondered why Norway's such a hotbed of noise music, note that, in accompanying «The Death Song», even jazz musicians created shrill, metallic soundscapes worthy of industrial music—a genre only invented the year before.

3. «I Wet My Dagger» (1980)

The most common murder weapon in Norway is the axe. Still. In 2010. We have guns.

In this little ditty, a breathy 70 year old sings, a little too lustily, «I wet my dagger in your hot, brown blood!» Blood is never described as «brown». It's always «crimson» this and «red» that. The effect of describing it as «hot» and «brown» conjures an eerie titillation—as if you'd actually stabbed someone for the first time, only to find it's not at all like you were made to think, but an experience that far surpasses any imagination or expectation! Then there's a line towards the end that translates into something like, «The yearning hunts you like fire in your loins»… Wow. I wish I'd had a grandfather like that to guide me through life… It makes me think of the guy I once worked with in a cemetery, who took me aside on my first day to tell me, «You ain't a man until you hear the groans of pain turn into moans of pleasure.» He peered into my eyes, held his stare, then walked off—the only time I ever saw the eyes behind the sunglasses he always wore…

But I digress. According to Wikipedia, this old man's the best selling Norwegian recorded artist ever. Perhaps his status as best selling artist and the murderous prevalence of the axe are somehow connected?

4. «Advice to Hobo's Model (from Tarantula by Bob Dylan)» (2001)

Here's a rare recording; an obscure collaboration between electronica duo Xploding Plastix and Oslo's resident old beat poet, Jan Erik Vold, best known for his countless odes to the tram(!) and a rather idiosyncratic recitation style: a lazy drawl complete with bizarre intonation that makes everything sound like a comical moan, delivered in the working class sociolect of east Oslo.

Naturally, this was the go-to guy when they needed someone to translate Bob Dylan's unreadable novel, Tarantula, into Norwegian—an especially superfluous enterprise, seeing as even Dylan didn't much care for the book's speed freak gibberish. (The original won Spin Magazine's «award» for most unintelligible sentence in a book written by a rock star, with the doozy, «Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns.»)

Yet Vold and the Pastix' performance of the chapter «Advice to Hobo's Model» works. The Oslo beatnik's inimitable wry wink of a voice is set to a cinematic score like a detective rifling through the lines, searching for clues in Dylan’s amphetamine burn out bullshit prose:

paint your shoes delilah—ye walk on white snow where a nosebleed would disturb the universe… down these narrow alleys of owls an flamenco guitar players, jack paar an other sex symbols are your prizes—check into the bathrooms where bird lives for when he comes flying out with a saber in his wing—a country music singer by his side—digesting a carrier pigeon… ye just might change your style of fornicating, sword swallowing—ye just might change your way of sleeping on nails—paint your shoes the color of the ghost mule—the paper tiger's teeth are made of aluminum—youve a long time to Babylon—paint your shoes, delilah—paint them with a sponge

look! like i told you before, it doesnt
matter where it's at! there's no such
thing. it's where it's not at that you
gotta know. so what if tony married his
mother! what's it got to do with your life?
i really have no idea why youre so unhappy.
perhaps you ought to change your line of
work. you know. like how long can someone
of your caliber continue to paint pencil
sharpeners… see you next summer, good to
know youre off the wagon.

prematurely yours,
Funka

5. «Gods of Nature (Hanging valley mix)» (2001)

I said this would be a Norwegian language compilation, but I'm including a song in Sámi because it's a language family just as indigenous to the country as Norwegian (if not more so). There are nine living Sámi languages (four of them spoken in Norway). This singer simply says she sings in «the Sámi language», which probably means it's in Davvisámegiella, by far the most spoken Sámi language in Norway. Other Sámi tongues face dire challenges; Ume Sámi only has about ten (10!) fluent speakers left—and most of those guys actually live in Sweden. (Try having a decent conversation in that language.) In any case, I have no idea what the words to this song mean.

This singer is the most famous Sámi artist. That doesn't mean she makes traditional music. Usually it's jazzed-up, ethno-fusion «world music» with New Age leanings. But this track has been remixed by a Norwegian pioneer of ambient techno who graduated from chill-out music for frazzled ravers to a more experimental and accomplished science of sound. Here, he transforms the New Agey world jazz of the original into something at least hinting at the spiritual release promised by the singer's considerable talent, yet rarely delivered by her arrangements.

But not a bad word about the woman who declined an invitation to perform at the opening ceremony of the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, because she didn't want to serve as an ethnic alibi, and who did a little yoik towards the end of the Christmas carol(!) she sang at the prince and princess' royal wedding, live on TV, full well knowing that yoiking in church is about as offensive to pagans as it is blasphemous to Christians.

6. «The Cunt Was a Wild Animal» (1926)

This number is from a collection of field recordings of curses, invocations and dirty ditties sung by descendants of Finnish immigrants to the southern forests along the Swedish-Norwegian border, ever since the 1500s. The Forest Finns have an official status as ethnic minority in Norway. This particular song was recorded in 1926, and is not a curse or invocation, as this approximate translation from the Finnish makes abundantly clear:

The cunt was a wild animal,
the cock a crooked fellow.
Come, my sweet, straighten 'im out,
like you did last eve.

Ibsen it ain't, but the static from the wax cylinder recording can compete with the best of Norwegian noise music any day.

7. «Crazy Horse» (1981)

This post-punk outfit from the country's rock capital, Trondheim, was the Joy Division, Birthday Party or Scratch Acid of Norway. The track rocks harder and better than most any other recording that's ever come out of this country. The lyrics are unintelligible, so don't ask. Something about social pests and raging like a crazy horse.

8. «You Are a Shit» (1980)

This is 22 seconds of pure punk, and with words like that— «You're a shit» made to rhyme with «Crush yer face»—there's no need for one second more, really. (Would you even want this muck to last any longer?)

I'd translate the lyrics, but the poetic acrobatics this would require are sure to botch up the simplicity—well, let's be honest: the idiocy—of this song.

9. «Sick & Tired» (2006)

I already mentioned my gig at the graveyard. One day, a man came in to fasten the tombstones to the ground, to stop them falling over brittle, little children playing in the cemetery. (Norway—where playgrounds are graveyards!) The guy mentioned he played drums in a hardcore band whose name can only be translated as «Brutal Cock». Thus they are contenders for best band name ever, after Norwegian death punks Turbonegro.

In this band's adopted home town of Trondheim, the poison of choice is what locals refer to as «karsk»—bootleg liquor/moonshine/white lightning, with just a dash of cheap, acidic percolator coffee in it. This music is the soundtrack to the kind of unique inebriation this engenders, as well as its hangover. In a sense, this is moonshinecore.

The lyrics?

Sick & tired of me job!
Sick & tired of me job!
Sick & tired of me job!
Sick & tired of me job!

Sick & tired of me band!
Sick & tired of me band!
Sick & tired of me band!
Sick & tired of me band!

Sick & tired of yer mug!
Sick & tired of yer mug!
Sick & tired of yer mug!
Sick & tired of yer mug!

So sick & tired!
So sick & tired!
So sick & tired!
So sick & tired!
So sick & tired!
So sick & tired!
So sick & tired!
So sick & tired!

Feels so good to be at work!
Feels so good to be at work!
Feels so good to be at work!
Feels so good to be at work!

It's so cool playin' in a band!
It's so cool playin' in a band!
It's so cool playin' in a band!
It's so cool playin' in a band!

I am so fond of yer mug!
I am so fond of yer mug!
I am so fond of yer mug!
I am so fond of yer mug!

All is well!
All is well!
All is well!
All is well!
All is well!
All is well!
All is well!
All is well!

So sick & tired!
All is well!
So sick & tired!
All is well!
So sick & tired!
All is well!
So sick & tired!
All is well!

'Nuff said.

10. «Accepted» (1981)

This solo artist is best known for having penned her autobiography in automatic writing, confiding in us that she'd been in touch with extraterrestrials—contact of the very third kind, indeed. (Of the fourth and fifth, even!) But in 1981, she was still just a teenager who wrote lyrics in an unorthodox half-Norwegian/half-Swedish hybrid, inexplicably delivered in what sounds like an English accent. Nothing was trendier in Norway at the time than new wave and reggae, so this teen just as well combined the two.

In the song, the narrator goes to work—a job she hates, on account of all her miserable, backstabbing colleagues who «have never learnt to smile»—only to hear from her boss, «You don't fit in here, we're letting you go.» The chorus then asks, apparently in all earnestness, «Why am I never accepted?!» It's an absurd and shit piece of writing, but what she lacks in literary prowess she makes up for with feeling.

In Norway she's considered a bit of a joke on legs, but this song has far more energy and attitude than most Norwegian artists could ever muster in all of the recordings of their careers, put together. It lacks the self-consciousness that inhibits most Scandinavian music, trying so hard to be effortlessly cool.

11. «Strange Bird» (1984)

This song—from a rocker most famous in Norway for sporting a bold 'tache, shameless mullet and over-sized, red eye glasses—is the «Billie Jean» of Norwegian pop music. Which is no mean feat, considering it features an accordion.

Recorded in 1984, this was a time before budget airlines, so Europe still held an exotic sway over the imagination of inhabitants tucked away on the corner of the continent. The lyrics here reflect the alienation of isolated Norwegians, «Europe» just another word for «homesick» as the narrator sings of his sorely missed loved ones. You wouldn't think it to look at us now, but Norway was once the poorest country in Europe.

12. «Disaster» (1994)

If David Byrne had an IQ of only 50, Talking Heads may have sounded something like this:

Let me tell you about the day when Roald went out to buy some fruit
Everything went wrong that day

My jacket! My jacket! Where is my jacket?!
My jacket! My jacket! I cannot find my jacket!
My shirt! My shirt! My shirt! My shirt's gone missing!
My pants! My pants! My pants! I've misplaced my pants!
My pants! My pants! I seem to have misplaced my pants!
My socks! My socks! My socks! My socks are gone!

Someone's hogged all my clothes!

Roald didn't dare go out on the street
naked to purchase some fruit
He draped himself in a sheet
Better believe he looked lame, when down the road he skipped
But there was a banana peel—and yes, he slipped

I hurt myself, hurt myself, hurt myself! Ow! Ow! Ow!
Fucking banana peel, it was in my way!
Shit! Shit! It fucking hurts like hell!
Shit! Shit! Shit! It fucking hurts like hell!

Someone's laying traps for me!

Eventually he reached the square
and not a moment too soon
'cause the stalls were about to close up
Would've been too bad if he'd have to leave with unfinished business
But Roald ended up one big mess

Pears! Pears! Don't you have any pears?!
Apples! Apples! Apples! Don't you have any more apples left?!
Bananas! Bananas! Don't you have any bananas?!
Bananas! Bananas! Bananas! Why doesn't your stall carry bananas?!
Peaches! Peaches! Why don't you have any peaches?!
Peaches! Peaches! Peaches! Why doesn't your stall carry peaches?!

Someone's bought all the fruit I want!!!
Someone's hogged all my clothes!!!
Someone's bought all the fruit I want!!!
Someone's laying traps for me!!!
This is a complete disaster!!!
This is a complete disaster!!!

Fans love this song so much, incessantly calling out for it during concerts, that the guy who wrote it penned a sequel called «Anti-disaster»; a subdued and awfully boring song where everything goes well with our beloved protagonist.

13. «Thor the Cook» (1993)

This middle class pop band is beloved by students. Generally, their music won't rock your world, but the singer is a considerable literary talent with a keen eye for social realism. I'm not even going to try and translate the lyrics; the flow and humour are too difficult to transpose.

The narrator is out eating with his girlfriend and her father, a sailor, when they meet Thor, the cook on the father's ship. Thor the cook is the kind of drunk given to sentimentality and paranoia, extending embarrassing compliments one moment and disconcerting threats the next.

Norwegians know the words and belt along to this song, because everyone's met a guy like Thor. Women tend to complain about feeling unsafe, telling guys we can't possibly understand what it's like to be a poor, little girl in a world teeming with rapists, not being able to walk down city streets by yourself or go travelling alone, etc. But such girls have no insight into the dynamic between men, and don't realise that guys behave differently to each other than they do towards women. The threat of rape is often replaced by the threat of violence (when it is replaced). Upon meeting a sexually confused and not-so-gentle giant packing a knife in his jacket and 'roid rage in his bloodstream, your Y chromosome won't protect you. On the contrary; other men are often considered legitimate targets when a guy can't take his sexual frustration and emotional humiliation out on the woman who just spurned him. On the bus, in the bar, on the street, you're likely to meet some guy like Thor, who tells the protagonist:

«Hey you, I love you, you bastard!
You have so much sensuality
But soon I'm gonna punch your teeth in
'cause ugly boys are the absolutely worst to me»

The protagonist has to suffer the indignities of being cornered into a conversation with an emotional cripple forever vacillating between the maudlin and the hateful:

He clenched his fist and his eyes were mean
He said, «What you need is more discipline»
and I strongly resented his dedication

Finally, the hapless young man snaps himself, in the gloriously cathartic last refrain:

«Hey, Thor, I think you're a right bastard!
You ain't got much sensuality
I ought to punch your rotten teeth in
But it's too late, it's plain to see…»

14. «Dead Man's Tango» (2002)

This is a band from Stavanger, in the west of Norway. Trendy Norwegians tend to disdain them, while students of the hard sciences and, er, Germans love them. With antiquated instruments and metallic percussion, they take the most obvious elements from Tom Waits and Einstürzende Neubauten and normalise them, softening the edges.

Still, the twang & tremble of this guitar is sure to make you want to sway & grind. With sultry string work like that, I'm prepared to forgive just about anything. And it's not every day you hear a banjo like that…

As for the lyrics, they're a dispatch from some war, by an officer who's losing his religion—and his sense of rhythm: the chorus goes, «There's no life to my tango!» Although I suspect this has more to do with the NATO alphabet and his radio communication set-up than dancing—«My tango's dead!» Don't ask me about army lingo, I politely but firmly declined my invitation to be conscripted by the Norwegian Armed Forces (and all I got were papers stating I'm certifiably insane).

15. «Party» (2009)

Social realist singer/songwriter fare, with Gothic Americana arrangements and words to the point, about life in country towns. As this guy proves, it's entirely possible to be funny whilst remaining sincere:

Twelve o'clock, in came my ex
and pestered us with her complex
She was pissed, said «I'm breaking up with you»
It's been over since '92
She said, «You used to set fire to stuff
Now you've a bike with a bag on the rack
Hairline's thin—and you're fat
You big bluff»

16. «The Ballad of Ole P. and Bente L. (with a Later Remark about Astrid Å.)» (1972)

In 1972, this Norwegian singer/songwriter—still young, virile and inspired at 25—churned out this dizzyingly fast-paced set of Dylanesque lyrics tracing the downwards trajectory of a relationship turning sour. They describe the dynamic between a boy and a girl more than midway between mutual infatuation and reciprocal disgust.

Unfortunately, the heavily structured lyrics are so dense with clever rhymes that any attempt to translate them would be a nightmarish and futile enterprise. This song is best enjoyed by people who understand Norwegian, but here's a taste of the last few lines—rather simple and tame and not nearly as smart or funny compared to the first part, but still written by Norway's most poisonous pen:

You may wake up alone
or wake with he, she or it
Stay with whomever you like
I just don't give a shit
Put on your favourite threads
Dance on your favourite floor
But the clothes that you got from me
won't fit you anymore

You are alone
We have arrived at the end
You've had your chance
You got your song
There will never be
another one
My friend

17. «Kissing» [A/K/A «Gonna Shoot Myself on Christmas Eve»] (1985)

Contrary to popular belief, Norway is not the world capital of suicide. It's Lithuania that is undisputed master of self-deliverance, followed by Russia, Belarus, Hungary, Slovenia, Kazakhstan and Estonia. Still, for such an affluent, egalitarian and peaceful country, Norway does nurture a bit of a tradition for «the gentleman's way out».

Mr. Per Bergersen, for instance—although it's been disputed whether it was assisted suicide or homicide, seeing as the singer/songwriter was in fact shot and killed by a mate (who was subsequently convicted of murder). To be fair, though, the singer/songwriter had penned several tunes about offing himself, the most infamous being this Christmas song.

Per Bergersen has been a cult figure ever since the above debacle, with his one record of demos and live music—a charity release for the local small town youth club, limited to a thousand copies only and released in something like 1990—being quite the collector's item.

(And yes, he was from the coldest place in the country.)

Here's a quick and dirty translation, just so you get the picture:

Gonna shoot myself at Christmas, there'll be quite the spray
Don't you try and stop me, we all die anyway
I'll do it by the Christmas tree as soon as the bells chime
because I'd like to celebrate in a way that's mine

Granted, I can see why you think this idea is crap
but my head is empty, so you can shut your yap

The best part is imagining all the resulting mess
Hope those who come to clean it up will start to obsess
'Cause I'll be using a shotgun—instant lobotomy
and as my own added twist I'll shove it up in me

I aim to use both barrels, to see how far it goes
Think it will go to my head, let's see how far she blows

We'll decorate the Christmas tree with brain mush and with blood
A bit of piss, a couple of guts and spinal cord in a hood
Hope those who find the mess see something to appreciate
And if they don't, well, I guess it's a little too late

And here are some shakey junkies out of the capital performing their version of the song. It's not got the manic, venomous energy of the original, but I love the reactions they get from their fellow fiends:

18. «The Shadow of Doubt» (1987)

This group's singer is one of the finest rock lyricists out of Norway, but the band's music is uneven. This is an exception: Standard and forgettable «dying love» lyrics are set to dreamy drone rock of the first order, four years before Loveless. If you like the Brian Jonestown Massacre or Spiritualized, you'll love this.

19. «Pantheon» (1994)

This band started out as Norway's answer to Tool, but has ended up an unseemly mix between Nine Inch Nails and Scooter. Their lyrics were always a bit adolescent, the teenager's idea of profound—vague and grandiose imagery that gives the impression of saying something:

I see the white of the eye
I see the black in the soul
I see a temple 'tween the trees
I see a tower in many colours

And on it goes; you get the gist. But that's no reason to turn your nose up at the music, swirling, harmonious and atmospheric.

20. «Child of the Forgotten Race» (1961)

This track is a kind of field recording, made in 1961 by a Norwegian fiddler and silversmith who paid a 43 year old female «Traveller» (Norwegian Romani) in silver jewellery to sing for him in his house. The recordings languished for 39 years until someone finally released them. The singer was never a public figure or recording artist.

Romanis officially referred to as «Romanisæl» or «Tatere» arrived in Norway in the 1500s. Traditionally, they were nomads. They speak Scandoromani, although that's conspicuously absent from their recorded music, which is in «Svorsk»—a hybrid of Norwegian and Swedish. Much is made of their musical tradition, but recorded output generally limits itself to hymns, psalms and traditionals well-known in other countries and languages. (With an odd predilection for Christmas carols.) Relatively few are Romanisæl compositions. You will, however, find songs that distinguish themselves from Norwegian folk music, in that they're wailing, teeth gnashing, chest beating laments—a character trait that's kind of frowned upon in a Protestant culture that values stoicism and «not burdening» others with your shit.

There are no such coy reservations with the Romanisæl, who, to be fair, have had more to complain about. These days they're associated with the state persecution they were subjected to for decades: forced settlement, abortions, adoptions and displacement of children, lobotomy, etc. Coerced sterilisation was practised by the state from 1934 until 1977, and the Romanisæl have levelled accusations of ethnic cleansing. Scrutiny into records, however, shows that less than 0,3 per cent of men and women sterilised by the state—125 out of 44,000 people—were Romanisæl. Currently there are an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 living in Norway. (Settled Norwegians were also sterilised, lobotomised, etc., but as that motley crew of eccentrics, promiscuous women, the mentally disabled or ill, the destitute, orphans and the Lumpenproletariat don't belong to clearly defined groups, there's no one really to speak on their behalf. Victimisation belongs to the Sámi, Romanisæl and war children.)

This song a not a standard hymn, but a Romanisæl composition, taking the listener through the travails of Travellers—and a lot of other tribulations that have little or nothing to do with being Romanisæl. («The seducer came and I surrendered,» she sings.) There's love (lost), imprisonment, destitution, ostracisation, religion… all the ingredients to make a compelling story, sung in a relentless a cappella—an unyielding voice that saves the music from the self-pitying sentimentality otherwise indicated by the words.

Don't you admire someone who doesn't need a single instrument or visual aid to bolster or hide behind, just pouring it out there?

Awrightee, that's it for now. Toilet Guppies will be back with more Norwegian should-be classics in 2011. Dæffen sjteike!

Norwegian Winter/Scandinavian Minimalism

2010-11-25T12:00:00.023+01:00

-8°C and occasionally snowy, 'tis the season of frozen monochromatics! Say goodbye to the colours of the rainbow, say hello to white snow and black night, the tidy distinction between the two non-colour colours increasingly blurred until the snow is a polluted grey melting on top of everything beneath those grey skies, which are neither day nor quite night. Need a pick-me-up?

Crystallised [.zip]

The download above is pure winter music. It's got the industrial atmospherics of a city, yet sounds more like the cosmic hum heard only in an arctic landscape, between winds. The static made by molecular clouds of atoms, the waves inside a stone, a snow crystal or anything else you might care to think of. There aren't any familiar-sounding instruments or other recognisable sounds that otherwise give rise to associations or prejudices, limiting your experience. This is audio as meditation, without mantras, words, melodies, rhythms, patterns or other emotional cues reducing the complex into just one perspective, feeling, thought, memory or hope. This music is a sliding scale free of absolutes, which is what makes it not only difficult but wrong to try and describe it. But if you're skeptical of the old Scandinavian Minimalism, so often neat, sterile and functional, this is minimalism as mysticism, rather than design. If less is more, then the least is the most.

These recordings are by a Norwegian artist whose specialty is sound—an audio savant with an ear that seems to be able to capture what escapes ours entirely. (The record company that releases his music refuses to make its catalogue available in mp3 format, due to the inferiority in sound.) He started out as a minimalist noise/ambient solo artist, but is now almost exclusively a producer who no longer records or performs his own solo material. He once said in an interview that the pride of Norwegian New Age jazz, the internationally acclaimed Jan Garbarek, should be shot for what he's done to Norwegian folk music. (I don't recall him elaborating, but I'm sure Garbarek playing Norwegian folk schematics in the insipid tone of the soprano saxophone and dipping it liberally in synthesizers, taking any grittily sincere significance it may have had and reducing it to housewife demographic «spirituality», would do it.) Now he's making a similar kind of atmospheric jazz himself, as member of an acclaimed improv outfit. He has also worked with Garbarek's artistic kissing cousin, Nils Petter Molvær, who does exactly what Garbarek does, only with a trumpet, condemning the soul of Norwegian music to easy listening for urban dwellers with a nostalgia for nature.

This compilation, however, focuses on our noise artist's solo music, which doesn't err on any side of such bland existentialism. You can buy all of his albums in one box set now (even the ones initially limited to editions of 500 copies), as well as a dreamy remix project CD, all of which come very highly recommended. You can't find better music from Scandinavia (or finer ambient noise from anywhere).

This compilation collects none of those readily available recordings, only the non-album tracks that you can't find in one place or release, and which are more likely to disappear in the respective obscurities of its special interest compilation albums, remix projects, EPs and singles. Most of these tracks tend towards the subtle, insular fuzziness of the artist's later recordings, rather than the more grandiose noise of his early stuff or the experimental instrumentation of his mid-period pieces. Much of it may not be his best material (although some of it comes close), but it's the sound of winter. They're saying this year's going to be a cold one.

So curl up in a ball to conserve your warmth and let your mind drift off to the sound of inside…

Easy Listening Nightmare

2010-11-22T15:00:00.000+01:00

Am getting a bit lax, I know, with few uploads and all these viral YouTube clips, but somebody sent me this for the second time and I simply have to acknowledge the immensity of it:

In my restless search through the world of music, I've had my dalliances with easy listening. Bossa nova, exotica, cocktail lounge soundtracks, sleazy soul, big band crooner type stuff… and I only became convinced it's all absolutely psychotic music. It's what sociopaths lacking the emotional cues will put on, because that's what they think other people would like. It's what neurotic, pill-popping alcoholics use to drown out all the failures of their life, constantly muttering at the back of their minds. I mean, what do the hired hand studio musicians feel when they play this stuff? What did the writers and arrangers think when they put all of this together? Is there any discernible human emotion at all, apart from a most audacious denial of the facts of life? Who are these people?

Nothing illustrates these misgivings as much as this piece of Soviet stylee easy listening. I suspect there are no lyrics because any lyrics might get the writers, performers and producers in trouble with one or the other ideologist, fickle and sadistic Marxists partial to internecine power plays that put everyone else at risk of ending up in the GULAG. And so a man with a decidedly unhealthy vodka pallor who already looks like a stiff stiffly walks in, smiling bravely as he croons a song of utter denial of the grim, meat hook realities waiting there outside the studio, and which is keeping a close eye on this man, even here and now as he lip syncs to the least expressive music possible, eschewing not only words but even any kind of sincere human emotion that could possibly reflect the reality of any human being, anywhere in the world.

This is the sound of someone asking you if you're happy, when you know that if you don't pretend to be content they'll cart you off to a torture chamber, because discontent equals dissent—an indictment of what they believe to be true and correct, and if it weren't, they will have been so horribly wrong and have wreaked all this tragic havoc for no good reason, so it's better to force people to smile, smile, smile! and keep up the pretense. That way you ward off guilt and maintain your power.

It's an easy listening nightmare.

Get Ready for the Big Squat!

2010-11-19T23:45:00.006+01:00

Today is World Toilet Day! And in the event of the Big Squat, we here at Toilet Guppies are posting our absolute favourite track by incredibly prolific 60-something pervert of distinction, Tonetta:

You can have your Milton and your Shakespeare and Ginsberg and who-have-you, I'll take this any day:

I came across a blanket of shit
Guess some dimwit did it
Not only scat, but piss to boot
When I looked in the mirror, I saw it was you

…

Well, I protest the wrongdoing
And made me eat the whole damn thing
I learned my lesson about where I shit
And now I sit and do it on the toilet

Like the best of art in history, it's educational for the kids and funny for the grownups. Unfortunately, the schizo-scat track is not yet available for purchase. But for other, almost as mesmerising songs from Canada's finest semi-cross dresser past middle age, go straight to noble enablers of deviation, Black Tent Press, who also carry solo efforts by Paz Lenchantin of longstanding Toilet Guppies favourite Entrance (currently the not-so-favourite Entrance Band) and Papa M A/K/A David Pajo.

And while we're on the subject of toilet business, do you remember this one?

Happy Toilet Day! And remember: Open defecation hurts women the most.

Net Nuggets 35: Red Money

2010-11-09T20:00:00.002+01:00

Red Café feat. Diddy & Fabolous: «Money Money Money» [mp3]

Toilet Guppies isn't rap's biggest fan. But if you need a break from touchy-feely singer/songwriter fare, cathartic rock'n'roll, catatonic ambient, mindfucking electro or spine-warbling noise, here's one of the very few rap rarities in Toilet Guppies' collection—a yet to be released track from 2008 by Red Café. I have no clue who he is, but apparently Diddy a.k.a. P. Diddy a.k.a. Puff Daddy a.k.a. Puff a.k.a. Puffy a.k.a. Sean John a.k.a. Sean Combs makes an appearance (seen below, shocked at the appearance of a one dollar bill among his regular, heavyweight denominations).

I know, I know… but the track is actually good. It's easily the best song about money Toilet Guppies has ever heard, with eminently quotable lines such as «Blocka blocka blocka / Money money money / Any given day I'm pourin' honey on your money and I murder everybody»!

Never Mind the Salsa, Here's... Hispanic Garage Rock!

2010-11-07T16:00:00.003+01:00

¡España! A land untouched by Toilet Guppies… Most of the people who check out this blog do so from IP-addresses in Indonesia (hello, Indonesia!), so in an attempt to break Spain and the 30 per cent of South America that isn't Brazil (no offense, Indonesia), I have put together a primer of Spanish-language rock'n'roll, as a tribute to all my Spanish friends (all three or four of 'em—and that's counting the Catalans), one Mexican acquaintance, some Peruvian regrets and three Norwegians I know who are trying to learn Spanish.

For a northern European infected with Protestantism, it's immensely beautiful to see how in Spain people know how to enjoy life and the moment they're in. Like when they're indulging in an absolutely delicious cuisine (one of the world's tastiest!) that, once you take a bite, sends a message throughout your entire body that this shit is unhealthy, the mortality it reminds you of making you feel more alive, not like you're merely preserving your body with all these nutritionally correct foodstuffs.

Spain! The land where they still indulge in bloody, brutal animal sacrifice in public. (Still in touch with what it is to be human, warts and all…) Where you can buy witchcraft paraphernalia in run-of-the-mill specialist shops that aren't even considered weird or unusual. (Keeping the mystery alive…) Where the brown eyed girls' voices are as sensually rough and gravelly as the coffee is smooth and rich… Where the sun actually warms!

Even in the bars, they give you napkins made out of paper that doesn't absorb, so that you have to use a ridiculously extravagant amount of them. And due to a complete and systematic lack of bins in these bars, like a naughty child you have to gleefully throw all those discarded tissues right onto the nasty floor, until at the end of the day you're sat in an oversized ashtray and they finally sweep up the rubbish and the ashes and cigarette butts (because no health freaks refuse you to smoke in public in Spain!). Only then will they put all of that trash in a bin liner that, in more practical cultures, it all went straight into in the first place… And let's not forget the siesta—two hours of sleep or fucking in the middle of the work day, which snowballs your schedule to the point where you don't eat dinner until ten at night—again, against the express advice of your physician.

These self-indulgent, non-functionalistic routines, rituals and ways to go about everyday life, some of them bordering on the idiotic, all amount to one defiant rebellion against the grinding boredom, grim inevitabilities and unhappy accidents of human existence. Rationality's got nuthin' on the complexity and immensity of life, to the point where living your life sensibly isn't sensible at all, so you may as well move to Spain and enjoy yerself!

Or, in lieu of that, listen to some great Spanish-language music, from Spain and equally groovy (if not more so) South America—where mothers pushing prams sexually harrass you in the street and little Lolitas on scooters wolf whistle like hardened construction workers as they drive past. Where the girls are fiery and prone to a violence that defies the dull demands and expectations heaped upon their gender.

Naturally, in the long run the Latin passion, heat, possessiveness, faked intimacy and lack of both punctuality and a neat social order will prove grating on a northern European, but let's pretend I'm not Norwegian for now and that the New World of South America is the Promised Land. In such a promised land, I would like the soundtrack to sound something like this:

V/A: ¡Atención! Rock y roll en castellano [.zip]

These dilettante rockers didn't invent or even re-invent the wheel, but they made something that lasts to this day—a mix of fun, sex and anxiety that's unaffected by nostalgia, irony, pretentions of cool, etc. In addition to a couple of deranged Peruvian originals (check out the cojones on track 21! And 22 gives Norwegian black metal a run for its money any day), there's the unexpected rendition of Desmond Dekker's golden ska oldie «Israelites», as well as a whole host of Spanish language covers of British and US American garage rock staples like «Hey Joe», «Gloria», «Pushin' too Hard», «Little Girl», «Take a Heart», «19th Nervous Breakdown», «For Your Love»… There's the ultimate version of «Wild Thing», rather freely translated as «Loco te patina el coco», performed by some joker calling himself Juan El Matemático (who competes with Los Johnny Jets for best artist name on this comp). Bo Diddley's no-nonsense warning «Mama, Keep Your Big Mouth Shut» becomes even less of a compromise as «Hey, monstro».

Incidentally, there's only one group on here from Spain (I think—some of them I don't know where the hell they're from). Others are from Mexico, some Colombia, some Peru, one from Brazil. I suspect Argentina, Chile and/or Uruguay (or was it Paraguay?) may also be represented, but who knows and who cares, it's all in Spanish and it kicks culo. Some of these tracks are so obscure you wouldn't even be able to find them on secondhand vinyl—you're lucky to get them as low bitrate mp3s after thoroughly scouring the Internet for amateurish Third World music obsessives' dodgy uploads, so don't come pissing and moaning just because some of the tracks are as low as 160kbps and full of vinyl crackle and hiss. The wildest music most true to the spirit of rock'n'roll was never about high fidelity, anyway.

So, roqueros y roqueras, bring out the tapas, cocaine and sexism, and rock out to these scuzzy southern sounds of the '60s. ¡Viva España! and all of her former colonies and la revolución! Rock y roll!

Hate's Back!

2010-11-05T18:00:00.004+01:00

For all you toilet goldfish lucky enough to live in or around London, one of the most notable young bands making the rounds these days—no-nonsense bludgeoners of ennui, HTRK (pronounced «hate rock»)—is back, after recent tragedies such as the suicide of bass player Sean Stewart and the death, from cancer, of producer and collaborator Rowland S. Howard. On Saturday 27 November, the band, now a duo, premiers its new material at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, with added visuals by Conrad Ventur.

The purveyors of oversexed sounds that conjure the feeling of lazily masturbating to take your mind off of everything that's lined up to be digested, dealt with or simply endured, are back!

Something Awfully Hip

2010-10-30T04:45:00.004+02:00

A hippie friend/enemy—apparently in the throes of psychosis at the time—once sent me the question, «Mr. Posh Punk Sex Symbol, are you ready for the Duke?» Cryptic, you might say, but still my all-time favourite question anybody's ever asked me. Didn't quite know what to reply, or even what the question was supposed to mean, but I surmised my confused or visionary friend was trying to call into question my credibility and sincerity as a human being—to call me, in a word, a «hipster», and to prepare this hipster for the violence of a revolutionary revelation that would baptise my soul in a fire of undeniable truth, its timelessness banishing all that soon-to-be-dated stuff from my fickle mind and returning me to great integrity, saving me in the process.

Still, being called a «hipster» is an insult, even to hipsters. Especially to hipsters: It's like being accused of following trends when, as a follower of trends, your secret dream is to actually be a trendsetter. Consequently you loathe the implication that you are, in fact, a mere sheep in the contemptible flock, whose irrelevant anonymity and humiliating subservience it was that made you want to rise up and be different (yet adored!) in the first place. It's the hipster's eternal dilemma. In the words of the great Ken Nordine, the hipster wants to «be different, yet stay the same».

Be that as it may, hipsters are universally despised, even by themselves. So much so that no one ever called himself a «hipster». Admitting to being a hipster is tantamount to implying you're following rather than setting trends, which is hardly hip. It's like the Messiah claiming to be the Messiah; ain't nobody gonna buy it. Now, I'm not going to sully my dignity by rejecting the implication that I'm a hipster. (Someone who has to protest to others he's not a hipster obviously is one.) Instead, let me draw your attention to the funniest website on the entire World Wide Web and what they have to say about hip folk:

The picture above is hilarious as is, but the article it illustrated is even better! I found it on a reactionary Christian/satirical website (take your pick, I can't possibly decide whether the comedy is intentional or not) called ChristWire. It's the very best in out-of-touch tabloid Christianity. There's a plethora of articles with titillating titles such as «Obama Is Literally Hitler», «Do Gay People Have Feelings?», «Do Mormons Think They're Better than Christians?», «Science of Homosexuality: Lesbian Mice FucM Genes Reveal Why Gay Males Are Moody and Dysfunctional», «History of The Beatles Haircuts: Hairstyles Directly Correlates Approximation of Drug Use», «The Anti-masturbation Movement’s 14 Greatest Inventions», «Afro-Saxon Rage Caught on Tape», «Is My Child’s Schoolteacher a Secret Sex Addict?», and so on. Then, just when you've been perusing the site long enough to become convinced that, sadly, this is in fact a serious website, you come across this:

This website truly is a godsend; say goodbye to boredom, people. I mean, who put this collage together?! Who actually sat down to find all those pictures, then to invent those categories? It takes a big freak to entertain, and this is very entertaining… In one article—the hot topical «Dressing Up as Lady Gaga This Halloween Is a Sin Against Jesus»—you can read that

October is the cruelest month for Christians in America. The summer is over, school semesters are underway and we look forward to the special joys of Thanksgiving and Christmas. The one tragic distraction in the middle of all that cheer is the institutionalized celebration of a pagan festival. Many will throw themselves wholeheartedly into this barbaric affair, spending hours making effeminate costumes, stocking up on overpriced sweets and decorating their homes with pentagrams and skeletons. Why do so many Christians willfully engage in this vile, hedonistic ritual?

Priceless writing from one Stephenson Billings, «Investigative Journalist, Motivational Children's Party Entertainer and Antique Soda Bottle Collector». Two of his pet hates are hippies and hipsters. Yet the two terms' root similarity can be confusing, so Stephenson lays out the difference between the two:

Hipsters, while also predominantly Caucasian, tend to come from more affluent backgrounds [than hippies] and their sophistication shows. The hipster rebels against wealth and power by slumming in urban, ethnic ghettoes. They use family money to create farcical careers as unpublished authors or fashion designers. They tend to be far more sexual and consequently likelier carriers of herpes and genital warts. Hipsters fetishize clothes above drugs, while for hippies it’s the opposite. There are far more homosexuals in the hipster demographic, for the hippie does not enjoy expensive hair products and tight clothing. Hippies are more often overweight and unappealing physically, as hipsters use more cocaine and cigarettes than their peers and remain lithe and active. Both groups are unnecessary distractions for children and should be avoided with a concerted, parental effort.

Snort some of that coke, light that cigarette and scratch those genital warts just beneath your tight clothing, dear reader, here's something awfully hip: a sampler of some of the most notable music of 2010. Are you hip to it? ARE YOU READY FOR THE DUKE?!

V/A:
Here Comes the Duke—A Year in the Life of Good Music: 2010, vol. 1 [.zip]

Here Comes the Duke—A Year in the Life of Good Music: 2010, vol. 2 [.zip]

Merry Hallowe'en!

2010-10-19T08:10:00.000+02:00

2010-10-17T16:13:00.000+02:00