L'ITALIE

Putain mais RITA PAVONE la classe !

CLASSIC

THE KNIFE's next album is still two months away. Fortunately there's enough back material to listen to and wait patiently.

THE WAIT IS OVER!

CANTO MORRICONE

Somewhere, in the basement of my former building, there is a huge box full of CDs I left behind. Among them, a compilation named CANTO MORRICONE based on a great idea: showcase Il Maestro's talent as a songster. I bought it fifteen years ago to get MINA's SE TELEFONANDO, but ended up discovering many other gems, and performers I'd never heard of (like CHRISTY and TRIO JUNIOR) which convinced me that Ennio is one of the finest composers of madly sophisticated yet catchy pop songs in the world, next to your Bacharach, Jobim, and the like.
And now, far away from my precious CD, I listen to these tracks on youtube. And don't you just know it, like it happens so often, there are images to go along with the music.

LUCKY!

Another weekend, another find.
This year apparently my luck is in Italian soundtracks. And I found one I'd been looking for since 1998, when I first saw this incredible Ettore Scola movie with an unforgettable score by Armando Trovaioli.

L'ITALIE

Springtime, that time of year when people empty their basement and sell LPs in the streets for a handful of Euros... Here's last weekend top finds:

WITH YOU

ROBERT GORL's solo album is to DAF what ALAN VEGA's solo albums are to SUICIDE.

ONE MISSISSIPPI

This is just one out of a million jams I discovered thanks to MISSISSIPPI RECORDS' mixtapes series (75 volumes so far and counting).

This is electronic dub from Sweden.

NEW BEAT MEETS HIP HOP

In 1990, Belgian Abdel Hamid Gharbaoui, better known as BENNY B released VOUS ETES FOU!, which would become the first hip hop hit single in French. Very quickly, more "serious" rappers will follow and they will all, without a single exception, dismiss him as a big joke, like, say, Vanilla Ice. Sure, he was not "street" enough, appeared in many family-oriented TV shows, didn't have a "message", and so on.
However, with 20 years insight, after the first wave of French hip hop has been followed by many acts that were also messageless jokes, we can reassess this song with more indulgence.
I would even go further than that: while the "serious" rappers of the time were all essentially apeing Public Enemy, BENNY B was the only one showing his true colors and repping the sound of young Belgium, since he was basically rapping over NEW BEAT jams.
You be the judge:

Because I enjoy this track so much, I had a little fun and made my own version, using the best bits of the "Wild Mix" and the Acapella, both on the B-side of the 12".
Enjoy VOUS ETES FOUS! (Whistled & Tasted).

L'ITALIE

Italians do it better they say. Well they sure don't do it worse.
Only an Italian band could get away with using that much digital piano, fretless bass, chimes on every bar, reverb on the snare, over the top melody, over the top guitar, over the top everything, and still manage to touch me right in the heart in the end, when "ironic listening" is swept aside.
This is a guilty pleasure I don't even feel guilty about. Cheesy? No way. Italian music should be judged on whole different terms. It is beyond cheesiness.

NEW BEAT MEETS CUMBIA

If you've been reading older posts here, you already know I feel THE MACKENZIE is the best band in NEW BEAT, that Belgian bastard son of Acid-House, born in the late 80s when, by mistake, a DJ played the 12" of FLESH by A SPLIT SECOND at 33 RPM instead of 45.
What I hadn't said is that I perversely play these MacKenzie 12" at 33 RPM so that they play even sloooooower than they already are.
Today I recorded and upped one of them; and I added a cumbia on top for good measure.
THE MACKENZIE - HIGHER IN THE SKY (Whistled & Tasted)

MCMXC

We really wanted to be on the forefront of that ENIGMA revival but goddamn Lou-Reed-lookalike Ben Stiller has two years on us.Though truth be told, he used the original album mix of SADENESS, I'd have chosen the superior B-sided US VIOLENT MIX.

SPANISH ROSE

Great, another Krautrock-influenced band... I thought I would have had enough of these by now, but it turns out I don't. Lüger are good. They represent the Pan-European axis as they are from Spain. And the song is called "Swastika Sweetheart".The album this song is from is self-titled, it exists on vinyl, and it contains other great tracks - like "Bedlam in a Sugar Plum Fairy Reception".

REVISIONARY #3: TANGERINE DREAM

HOT TURKEY

So İ am now ın Turkey, and like eveytime I go somewhere, I try to dıscover a glimpse of the local musıc scene.
And so I gıve you HASAN YILMAZ, whom İ'd describe as the Turkısh equıvalent to Syrian OMAR SOULEYMAN.

A NEW STYLE OF MUSIC

So in all this time, and in spite of the sad and untimely death of the great blog new-beat.be, I've discovered quite a lot of NEW BEAT. Lately I've been touring again and had the pleasure to come back to Brussels, where I went straight to the cheapo bins, where all the forgotten new-beat 12" patiently wait for someone like me, someone who still cares about them. I came out with an awesome comp called NEW BEAT TAKE TWO which featured as a bonus a song that is neither new beat nor Belgium, plus it predates new-beat era by a good ten years, but it's great and sortof rare on vinyl, so I'm really glad I got it: MAX BERLIN's ELLE ET MOI!
Lots of greatness on this comp, many discoveries among classics by KINGS OF AGREPPO , EXPLORERS OF THE NILE, or PUBLIC RELATIONS... and then, one of the most succesfull hits of the genre knocked me off my socks like it does every time I play it... Yes, no matter how much I search, I will always come back to CONFETTI'S' THE SOUND OF C.

BUCAREST

So I played a gig in Bucarest this weekend, in a big ass place that used to be Ceauşescu's palace (pictured up here). Romanian people are really nice, their food is really heavy, DAN DEACON was headlining and entertained the shit out of everybody, and thanks to the runners who picked me up at the airport and were playing a CD in the car, I got to discover a sample of the local electronic scene. The compilation they were spinning was put together by Romanian bloggers called FRESH GOOD MINIMAL. The highlight of their comp was a dude called BOGDAN. Enjoy.

L'ITALIE

If you say LUCIO BATTISTI, most people will answer, "Ah, ANCORRA TU".
Sorry, but as much as many would like to see Italian singers as pleasant in a cheesy, almost ironic way, most of Lucio's songs actually display genius melodies and arrangements, sometimes psychedelic, and more often than not, genuinely enjoyable without nudging and winking. Case in point: NON E FRANCESCA. A great song to begin with, with a magical coda that elevates it to masterpiece status.

L'ITALIE

Before Kraftwerk, before Manuel Göttsching, before Giorgio, before just about everybody really, there was PIERO PICCIONI.
I usually don't trust Library LPs collectors. Traditionally they are sort of weird and they have an annoying tendency to overrate their records based on how rare they are more than on how they sound.
But ADD (N) TO (X)'s BARRY SEVEN is an exception. His two long-out-of-print European library compilations (one focused on France, the other on Italy) are amazing from start to end.
I don't know what this music was used for (if at all), but I know it was recorded in 1970, and it sounds about 20+ years ahead of its time.

ALEGRANZA!

Okay let's go a thousand miles away from SISTERS LOVERS, ALEX CHILTON and all things depressing.

EL GUINCHO is my favorite musician that ever came out of the Canary Island - and I've heard so many of them. His album ALEGRANZA was released two summers ago and it still fills me with joy just as much as the first time I heard it.
And like other sample-heavy albums that educated me when I was younger (finding the songs sampled by, say, De La Soul or the Beastie Boys made me discover so much good music I otherwise wouldn't have known of), it allowed me to find these two pieces of great exotic music, sampled respectively in the two opening cuts of his album, PALMITOS PARK and ANTILLAS.
Both these songs are magnficent.

The first one is an early-60s Cuban doo-wop, Y SABES BIEN by LOS ZAFIROS apparently a huge band and a huge hit in their native island, I must admit I had never heard of them.

The second one, surprisingly, is not a Zouk from les Antilles like the title of EL GUINCHO's tune suggests, it is actually a Kenyan duet called ORIANGO & KIPCHAMBA, and the song is called PELINA. Courtesy of AWESOME TAPES FROM AFRICA.