Those of us old enough to remember that being obsessed with music used to mean hefting stacks of LP-filled milk crates from high school bedrooms to college dorms also have strong memories of flipping through endless stacks of musty cardboard LP sleeves in record stores. We weren’t just looking for particular music, but discovering, constantly discovering, through accident and association, the ever-branching web of vectors between artists and genres. But more than that, we were having an aesthetic experience, happily drowning in the LP cover art that became indelibly associated with the sounds we were exploring.

Today’s online music stores do their best to reproduce that spirit of discovery. Databases and their associative algorithms are able to emulate some of the connective cartilage – and even to strengthen it – but they don’t come close to duplicating the visceral experience of suddenly finding yourself staring at the absolutely unexpected, the cover art that came out of nowhere and clobbered you upside the head with some kind of jaw-dropping amazingness – amazing beauty, amazing camp, sexy stuff your 13-year-old brain wasn’t quite ready for, graphical styles you had never seen the likes of, stuff that crossed the lines of social acceptability, etc. And then there was the stuff that was just so banal it was painful — in a good way.

Thankfully, some of that cover art is being diligently digitized and archived for generations of kids that may never have the experience we did. Utne Reader:

Matthew Glass has been collecting records for the better part of four decades. In a his Manhattan living space he has a “record room” where 10,000 records live. Framed records are his wall art. For years he sold records at the flea market on 24th Street. There are times in his life when he was frequently bringing records home by the box. None of this would surprise you if you were to spend a single short second on LP Cover Lover, the website where he posts strange record covers in daily batches. He’s got a camera on a tripod in his record room and he is forever pulling records, photographing them, and posting them to his site, which boasts a comprehensive collection of “the world’s greatest LP album covers.”

Everyone was in on the action – even pharmaceutical companies:

There was no shortage of cover art on the sexy side, playing with what was at some point in history considered “edgy” but now just appears dumb/sexist (but sometimes endearing anyway):

I have a soft spot in my heart for records specifically designed to show off your new stereo hi-fi system. Dad had records like “Sounds of Sebring” (30 minutes of race cars going around a track, bouncing back and forth between your headphone-clad ears) and “Ping Pong Percussion,” which was basically the same concept, applied to timpani.

Also: Feast your eyes on a spectacular pair, experience music for chubby lovers browse an entire category devoted to big heads. Much much more at LP CoverLover.

Zealously pining for the status symbol of the decade, the iPhone Ocarina? With a little practice, you know you’d become more studly than Ian Anderson, more virtuosic than Zamfir himself. And you wouldn’t be satisfied with breathy renditions of “Row Row Row Your Boat” or “Lemon Tree,” either – you’d go straight for the classics, like Stairway to Heaven:

(or was that Hairway to Steven?) But the sad truth is that your luxury spending coffers have been vacuumed dry after years of gambling in credit default swaps, and an iPhone probably isn’t in your future. Bad investor! No ocarina! But wait… even in these lean times, hope remains. You don’t need an iPhone to play the ocarina! Just grab a healthy stalk of organic broccoli, carve out a few holes, tune it up and let ‘er rip.

“Ah!” you say, “It’s true I took out a badly structured sub-prime mortgage, and yes, it’s true that my collateralized debt obligations have sucker-punched my liquidity risk… but it’s not true that I want to play the ocarina.” Fair enough. Sounds like the cucumber trumpet might be more up your alley:

Pinched capital flow? Try the radish slide whistle. Negative equity? The Welsh onion flute might be the instrument for you.

Underwritten securitization? Go blow an ostrich egg. Submarined by the shadow banking system? Try your hand at the cabbage slide flute.

Despite a dearth of regulatory responses or substantial loss mitigation guidance, you can have your ocarina and eat it too. iPhone be damned.

What would you say to the crazy guy in the park muttering about alien spaceship landings on the day the mothership finally beams down to bring him home? The makers of Dr. Pepper must be wondering the same thing. Earlier this year, Dr. Pepper notoriously promised that if professional head case Axl Rose finally released Guns n’ Roses’ perpetually unavailable Chinese Democracy album to the public after 17 years –and thereby deprived the music world of one of its best synonyms for incompleteness–it would give a free Dr. Pepper away to every American (except for departed guitarists Buckethead and Slash). That day has finally arrived. Any time today, and today only, you can visit the Dr. Pepper website and claim your free soda.

As I’ve never really been a fan of the band, I could ignore the media hype over Chinese Democracy if it weren’t for a few things:
• It’s messing with my sense of integrity. Back in the day, I considered the head cases in the Replacements to be the anti-Guns n’ Roses, delivering mostly heart and soul where Axl and his gang delivered mostly hype and bluster. But hell must be freezing over, because Tommy Stinson of the Replacements is now Guns n’ Roses’ bassist.
• It’s reminding me that Axl Rose is an idiot savant, not just an idiot. It wasn’t just a lucky fluke that “Welcome to the Jungle” and “Sweet Child o’ Mine” have become air guitar/ karaoke classics. As late finishers go, he’s certainly no Brian Wilson, but file the band under guilty semi-pleasure–and skip the icky power ballads.
• Since Axl Rose has been known to pen lyrics that make him come off like Ann Coulter with better hair, it’s interesting that the “new” album features a sample of Martin Luther King.
• Despite Axl’s best efforts, I still think he’s only the second-best rock degenerate to use China as a metaphor (see Johnny Thunders, below).

Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, “Chinese Rocks”

Guns n’ Roses, “Chinese Democracy”

If it’s not already perfectly obvious what Tuvan throat singing, Yul Brynner, and theoretical physics have to do with one another, feast your peepers (and your ear-holes) on this (via Boing-Boing):

Filmmaker Ralph Leighton says, “This was the highlight of my recent trip to Vladivostok, Russia, where the film GENGHIS BLUES won the Governor’s Prize at the Pacific Meridian Film Festival. It features Tuvan throat-singer ONDAR and the voice of [Nobel laureate and physicist] Richard Feynman. I hope you enjoy it.” Back TUVA Future: Ondar in Vladivostok. If you’re wondering what the hell Tuva has to do with Feynman, check this out. (Thanks, George Dyson!)

You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em… but how exactly DO you know?  Because if you’re gonna play the game boy, ya gotta learn to play it right. Most of us can recall the lyrics like aces, but if you could become Kenny Rogers for a day, would you really know what to hold and what to fold? For a taste of your whiskey I’ll give you some advice.  Click for larger…

And remember: The secret to survivin’ is knowin what to throw away and knowing what to keep.

As if you needed more evidence that Tom Waits has big ears, excellent interview (”True Confessions,” actually) with He Who Fears Giant Squid at the Anti-label blog. Excerpts:

Q: What’s the most curious record in your collection?
A: In the seventies a record company in LA issued a record called “The best of Marcel Marceau.” It had forty minutes of silence followed by applause and it sold really well. I like to put it on for company. It really bothers me, though, when people talk through it.

Q: Most interesting recording you own?
A: It’s a mysteriously beautiful recording from, I am told, Robbie Robertson’s label. It’s of crickets. That’s right, crickets, the first time I heard it… I swore I was listening to the Vienna Boys Choir, or the Mormon Tabernacle choir. It has a four-part harmony it is a swaying choral panorama. Then a voice comes in on the tape and says, “What you are listening to is the sound of crickets. The only thing that has been manipulated is that they slowed down the tape.” No effects have been added of any kind except that they changed the speed of the tape. The sound is so haunting. I played it for Charlie Musselwhite and he looked at me as if I pulled a Leprechaun out of my pocket.

Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made 12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.

Rickrolling is the Web 2.0 equivalent of the old bait-and-switch: Promise footage of Madonna covering Sonic Youth on your tragically hip music site, but instead deliver video of Rick Astley’s debut single, “Never Gonna Give You Up.” You’ve been rickrolled! The meme is apparently giving way to its bastard step-child “buttrolling,” in which the unsuspected viewer is unwittingly lured into watching Samwell’s astonishingly frank party invitation What What In the Butt (Ha Ha! Made you click!)

But where Samwell hits you over the head (with his prodigious butt, presumably), Santeri Ojala, aka YouTube trickster StSanders took rickrolling to a whole ‘nuther level when he started over-dubbing video of guitar gods Yngwie Malmsteen, Eric Clapton, Steve Vai and Eddie van Halen with his own obviously skilled but painfully bad guitar solos.

Yngwie, corpulent in skin-tight leather, riding the coattails of symphonic elegance, sounds like an air guitar hero from your junior high lunch line (don’t think back – it hurts too bad):

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Herbie Hancock’s tribute to Joni Mitchell “River” is gorgeous in every way, and wholly deserving of its recent grammy (one of only two jazz records to have won Album of the Year in the past 50 years, yeesh). Tina Turner, Leonard Cohen, Norah Jones, Joni herself, Hancock’s lush keyboards, horns by Wayne Shorter… what more could an old Joni head want? The kindling power of the album inspired Salon’s Gary Kamiya to write a moving muse on the duality of rock and jazz in his life

Luckily, around this time the rest of the high-culture spinach on my plate started to taste better, which encouraged me to stick with jazz. I had known, in a dutiful art-history way, that Cézanne’s landscapes were better than pretty ones by some officially accredited hack; now I started to actually see them and like them. As a sophomore in high school I had bought an old 78 rpm set of Debussy’s “Iberia” because I thought it was an antiquarian ticket to cultural gravitas; now I realized that you got an incredible rush out of the end of the first movement. The kicks started getting easier to find. The same thing happened with jazz. The dusty old high-culture drugs kicked in there too. I might have started out listening to jazz because it was good for me, but the more I did, the more I realized that I liked it. Those schmaltzy tunes turned out to conceal beautiful modulations — quieter, less obvious than those in rock, but with a complex logic that grew on you. As I learned to follow the mathematics of jazz, I started to be able to listen without so much interior strain.

Worth a read.

Playing a round of Scrabble (no, not that kind) with the wife tonight, needed some good thinkin’ music to get in the groove. What better choice than a far-from-pristine LP copy of Donny Osmond’s 1973 opus, A Time For Us? But lo, what should greet my hungry eyes when sliding the record out of its sleeve? This tantalizing grid of original Osmond product offers, each one better than the last (pardon the stitched-together scan).

I’ve always wondered what would happen if you actually tried to order something you found in a 30-year-old comic book or, in this case, record sleeve (assuming you had the balls to actually cut up the sleeve to get to the order form, leaving your prize records defenseless against the cardboard outer sleeve). Would your money go into a black hole? Or would some sweet old lady sitting bored at a desk in front of a warehouse full of long-unsold merch cheerfully put your order together and send it on its way? It’d definitely be the purple tank top for me.

The order form is on the reverse, and emphasizes the Osmond’s Mormon roots: “Utah residents add 4.375% sales tax.”

Always wanted a tubular fish tank that could encircle a room, maybe even go up stairs, exist underfoot… basically some way to enmesh the meditative qualities of “ambient fish” into my life. Will probably never get my wish, but while I’m waiting, the Chemical Brother’s “Salmon Dance” will have to do.

I knew from repeated experimentation — and subsequent disappointment — that Van Morrison records had stopped being worth owning sometime between Veedon Fleece and Wavelength — and even that mid-70s block was a marginal, iffy period. To have a truly psychedelic experience with Van required a large supply of candles and a Mexican Talavera candlestick, a painful breakup or some other source of profound melancholy, and an evening or two of total, incense-drenched immersion in Astral Weeks or a few of the more floaty tracks from Moondance or The Bang Masters. Van at his apex was a powerful force – the passion of Joe Cocker, mind-melded with the mysticism of Nick Drake.

Creem Magazine rock writer Lester Bangs on a live Van performance from the Astral Weeks era:

Just those words, repeated slowly again and again, distended, permutated, turned into scat, suspended in space and then scattered to the winds, muttered like a mantra till they turn into nonsense syllables, then back into the same soaring image as time seems to stop entirely. He stands there with eyes closed, singing, transported, while the band poises quivering over great open-tuned deep blue gulfs of their own.

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If I mentioned that Oakland-based guitar guru Henry Kaiser ventured into the Deep South for a recording, you might think of Lynyrd Skynyrd, or if you’re younger, perhaps the Drive-By Truckers and Cee-Lo. But Muscle Shoals and Jacksonville must seem like mid-northern outposts to the globetrotting Kaiser, who earlier this year became the first musician to record a CD in Antarctica. The CD isn’t available yet, but his website provides proof of his use of the South Pole as a guitar slide. And I recently had the pleasure of taking my daughter Amelia to see his kid-friendly triple threat performance at Oakland’s Chabot Space and Science Center, in which Kaiser simultaneously lectured about Antarctica’s fragile ecology, narrated an Antarctic video he shot underwater, and played a few guitar riffs that would be completely beyond your reach unless your name is Richard Thompson or Nels Cline.

Kaiser, whose similarly named grandfather was the father of modern shipbuilding, has a fascinatingly well-rounded life and a staggeringly eclectic musical career. I first encountered his work in the late eighties, when he joined forces with Thompson, Henry Cow guitarist Fred Frith, and Captain Beefheart drummer John “Drumbo” French for the good-natured avant-geek supergroup French, Frith, Kaiser, and Thompson. Since then, he’s teamed with hirsute fellow traveler David Lindley for two first-rate musical anthologies, the Madagascar-based A World Out of Time and the Norwegian opus The Sweet Sunny North. His Yo Miles! collaborations with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and a roving cast explore and extend Miles Davis’ seventies electric legacy.

Despite producing a New Years Day event called Icestock with a poster assist from his friend Matt Groening, Kaiser wasn’t simply slumming it in Antarctica. He’s been there several times as part of his other career as a professional research diver, and his gorgeous video footage of Antarctica’s life aquatic, filmed while swimming underneath a twenty-foot ice sheet, will be featured in Werner Herzog’s forthcoming film, Encounters at the End of the World. Kaiser’s firsthand account of Antarctica’s melting ice shelf also might help persuade the three or four people left out there who doubt the reality of global warming (all of whom seem to hold public office).

Karl Marx viewed “the economic formation of society as a process of natural history,” where individuals could not control or direct the growth of commerce. The result is that capitalism inevitably creates an infinitely complex web of social interconnections. Meanwhile, the Russian constructivists were more interested in portraying man and mechanization than they were in “fine art” (ironically, a lot of Constructivist collage is mighty fine). And so is this video by Belarussian band Lyapis Trubetskoy, whose work is so popular in Russia it’s apparently become prime karaoke fodder. The socio-economic jungle, natural history, contructivist themes, and some damn fine collage work come together in Trubetskoy’s “Kapital”:

I can only imagine the amount of capital it must have taken to produce the video.

via WFMU

Is a record not spun a record not played? Dragging a needle across old, brittle vinyl records or wax cylinders can damage them — not something you want to do with rare historical recordings. At the Library of Congress, researchers have developed a scanner that can extract audio from records by scanning them digitally – no spinning required. Images are analyzed and transformed back into audible sound. “Stuck” records magically become unstuck, while physically broken records can be pieced back together with great results.

How does it sound? “The machine is not adding its own color. It’s not adding anything of its own nature,” says the device’s developer. The samples on the NPR site are low-res internet audio, but the comparisons to the original are impressive, despite a persistent background hiss.

The technology could eventually become available to general consumers, meaning that the daunting task of MP3-encoding piles of vinyl would become way less daunting. It’s a strange and beautiful world.

Thanks Jeb

Budding guitarists (hell, all guitarists), take note: Guitar music is church, and there are ten commandments you gotta internalize if you want that axe to say something that will raise souls to the ether. Prophet / spiritual leader / ghost dancer Captain Beefheart, whose voice allegedly once destroyed a $1200 Telefunken microphone, saw (sawed?) through the blues, took them to metaphysical planes, twisted them up in old socks and dish rags, made your spine vibrate with surrealistic pleasure.

More on the Good Cap’n another day, but for now: Beefheart’s 10 Commandments of Guitar Playing:

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