[Welcome] – A Recap and An Update

The last couple months have seemed a little slower than usual, but looking back there’s still been some stuff I’m proud of.  I hope to get back to full speed, starting today with the newest installment from the faux Musique du Monde label, ‘Les Miniatures, Volume 14‘.   But to recap since mid-February: there’ve been further additions to ‘1981,’ including the 8th mix, ‘Fire;’ the first set of ‘Briefcase‘ tracks; and a new Deutsche Neue Welle in ’81 mix.   There’s was also ‘Electromance,’ an accessible electronic pop mix; another album of my own work; and a unique guest-mix covering music from the very edge of now.   I also hope you caught the “blog-swap” that resulted in this amazing guest mix and one of my favorite Musicophilia mixes, ‘Tall Stories of Evil Gris-Gris;’ and finally, the first ‘Sensory Replication Series’ mix, of which I’m really fond, called  ‘Adrift‘.

There will be more Musique mixes soon, as well as a trilogy of ‘Post Post-Punk’ mixes expanding on the original.  Additionally, I hope you’ll visit Musicophilia Daily, where I’ve been loving the freedom of posting anything and everything, and trying to say a little something about it all (here’s a sampler from the first week, and it’s only gotten better since then, IMO).  Finally, the call is still out for music by Musicophilia listeners to be featured at Daily and potentially in a for-and-by-the-listeners mix right here.  As always, thanks for listening!

UPDATE: Ok, well, still running a little busy and behind here–but new mixes will return soon.  In the meantime, I hope you’ll give recent mixes a listen.  Thanks!

[Miniatures Series] – ‘Les Miniatures, Volume 14′ (1972-1975)

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After an unintended hiatus, Musicophilia’s “reissues” of the Musique du Monde label are back, with the first of three more “10-inch LPs” from the ‘Les Miniatures‘ series following Volumes 3 and 12: ‘Volume 14,’ drawing from the years 1972-1975.  As with all the mixes in the broader Miniatures Series, the aim is to cover a lot of ground in very little time: all tracks are two minutes or less in duration; and the mixes are around 30 minutes total.  The ‘Les Miniatures‘ mixes are like morning commute-length portions of the 2xLP-length ‘Le Tour du Monde‘ mixes, so anything goes as long as it’s got a groove: funk of myriad permutations from New Orleans to Philly to France to Yugoslavia; musique concrete, psychedelia, singer-songwriter, sound library and soundtracks, proto-punk, Krautrock, early electro-pop, jazz, Tropicalia, and a little of the simply unclassifiable.  You’ll find the familiar and the new, each hopefully adding something to the experience of the whole.  (If you’ve been visiting Musicophilia primarily for the post-punk, I invite you to take a chance on some of the Musique du Monde stuff–it may be worlds apart from post-punk in some regards, but for my money, this is where the coolest sounds in the world were happening, presaging the radical artistic fecundity of the post-punk years.)

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Franco Battiato – “Cariosinesi”  (1972)

Shuggie Otis – “Happy House” (1974)

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Making up the thirty minutes of this mix are twenty artists from seven countries.  The better known include Marvin Gaye, The Residents, Kraftwerk, Big Star, Barry White, and Brian Eno.  Less well known in the U.S. but heroes elsewhere are Bernard Parmegiani (probably my favorite artist working with electro-acoustic experimentation), Franco Battiato, Brigitte Fontaine & Areski, The Aggrovators, Popol Vuh, the Soft Machine’s Hugh Hopper, and Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry.  Finally there’s key sound library figure Janko Nilovic; funk-pop prodigy Shuggie Otis; savant-garde group Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Curt Boettcher (of The Millenium, Sagittarius and the SoCal sunshine pop scene); and soundtrack maestros David Snell and Karl Heinz Schafer.  If you like what you hear, there’s plenty more where that came from: nine other Musique du Monde volumes so far, and several more in the coming weeks and months.  Full tracklist, “liner notes,” and download link after the “more…” below.

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[1981] – ‘Briefcase, Volume 1′ (2005)

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So far, eight of the nine ‘1981‘ mixes from the box set released in 2004-2005 have been “reissued” here at Musicophilia, with over 3,000 downloads between them, hopefully helping many of you hear music that’s new to you.  But there was a whole other element to the box set where the carefully sequenced and themed mixes ended: the ‘Briefcase‘ disc, which was a catch-all grab-bag from the endless corners of what could be called “post-punk” in 1981.  It added another 250 tracks and artists/bands to the box set, and while not a mix in the usual sense (tracks were simply presented alphabetically), there was a lot of great stuff in there, and the ‘Briefcase’ is what makes the box set something closer to an historical record than simply a collection of mixes.  Every weekend, more tracks from the ‘Briefcase‘ are made available for streaming over at Musicophilia Daily; but due to their apparent popularity, I’ve decided to make the tracks available for download here at Musicophilia on a periodic basis.  Here’s the ‘1981 Briefcase, Volume 1‘, with the first 20 tracks; depending on whether anyone downloads this set, another 11 or so volumes will likely follow over the next year.

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Among the highlights from the twenty artists in this collection: 1000 Ohm, Absolute Body Control, and Beranek (also featured in higher quality as part of the “1981 addendum” mix, ‘How To Say 1981 in German‘); early A Flock of Seagulls and ABC; Adam & The Ants; Alternative TV; 49 Americans side-group Avocados; pre-Bangles The Bangs; The Work-related Black Sheep; Blondie; and Cyndi Lauper’s first foray, Blue Angel, amongst others.  Tracks are in low VBR and include original cover art; download link below the “more…” link.  [My thanks to the true geeks who discovered this download last week via my little April Fools trick/self-satire/wishful thinking.]

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[Full Album] – Chalsa Nepal – ‘Let Them See’ (1983)

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A Musicophilia first: sharing an utterly out-of-print album in full!  I’ve scoured the internet, including the encyclopedic Mutant Sounds, and nobody seems to have shared it yet, so I’m happy to make a first-source contribution.  The album is truly one-of-a-kind, and unfortunately almost a total mystery: its nine tracks are untitled, and I can find almost no information beyond what is written in the liner notes of the Russian “import” reissue promo that I picked up at Exiled Records.  So I’ll simply quote the notes here:

‘Let Them See‘ is the long-lost cornerstone of the nearly-forgotten but deeply influential post-post-punk Circuscore scene based in La Digue in the Seychelles from the early 1980s through the fall of the Berlin Wall. The album was produced jointly by Robert Gotobed of Wire and Albert Kuvezin (later of Tuvan thoat singing combo Huun-Huur-Tu), and features guest contributions from bassist Lemmy Kilmister, trombonist Peter Zummo, ex-Shangri-Las Mary Weiss, and string arrangements by future Fraggle Rock music director Don Gillis.

Chalsa Nepal combine their obvious debt to Crass, the bands of Les Disques du Crépuscule, and an abiding love for classic skiffle 78s with the longstanding Seychelles tradition of Circus Music derived from the islands’ French, African, Indian, and Chinese populations’ roots. ‘Let Them See’ (a title taken from a quote by band-hero Henry David Thoreau) is a free-wheeling set of neo-psychedelic disco-dirges and xylophone-led post-Soul proto-dubstep pop confections–albeit with a tendency toward Marxist-Feminist death metal darkness.

Says Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, “The first time I heard it, I hated it; but the second time, my brain turned around backwards in my skull. It changed me forever; I think it changed all of us.”

This is one you have to hear to believe.  Full tracklist and download link below the “more…”

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