If Reagan Played Disco

IRPD is CLOSED for Business

2006-07-22T11:42:00.000-07:00

Hi folks. I am shutting this project down for the time being, as I have way too many irons in the fire at the moment.

These archives will be resurrected in some form or another at Kill Ugly Radio, usually with full or partial album downloads.

Thanks for stopping by.

Rich.

The Arm of the Lord

2006-03-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

Cabaret Voltaire
Mute

1985's The Arm of the Lord finds Cabaret Voltaire at the crossroads between their early experimentalism and all out dance and nascent techno, and certainly much further down that latter road than Red Mecca and 2 X 45 or even Micro-Phonies.
But as 'normal' as it sounds, it's much weirder than most eighties pop records with many samples of Charles Manson, movie clips and lots of signature Cab-Volt noise. This is definitely the record that served as the template for a young Alain Jourgensen, when creating Ministry 1.0.
And this record actually served as a point of entry for me to Cabaret Voltaire's intimidating discography, as it was the first Brit-dance-pop thing that my brother played for me that really turned my head.
Check it out.

The Evolution of the Dark Side of the Moog

2005-09-13T07:25:00.000-07:00

Pete Namlook & Klaus Schulze
Ambient World (Germany)

Not only is this my first listen to any of this long running series, but I also got it just days prior to hearing about Robert Moog falling ill due to a brain tumor. His passing compelled me to give it a listen again, and his spoken introduction makes me both sad and yet also introspective at the music revolution he launched as is apparent from this album. As a friend told me that this sounds like a long lost Jean-Michel Jarre album, and I'd have to agree. It's very deliberately old-school-save for the occasional not-too-ancient sounding drum machine
- and happily so. One could imagine futuristic (by late seventies reckoning) spaceships careening around the room, Carl Sagan in his dandelion-seed spaceship or recall a lysergic memory or two from the pre-Reagan era. Namlook and Schulze lay down big fat Moog lines in a giant, cosmic reverb-y void. All the song titles reference a Pink Floyd song, albeit in a cheeky, rearranged manner (Phantom Heart Brother, Careful With That AKS Peter, etc.) but it's not very Floydian. Folks who stopped listening to music after Tomita, Vangelis Tangerine Dream peaked can have a reason to rejoice and lament no more that the future ain't what it used to be. I've been listening to it for weeks and I'm still not sick of it.

Filmtracks 2000

2005-09-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

Bill Laswell
Tzadik

An odd, mixed bag from Laswell, from the ongoing Tzadic film series. It's not altogether clear if any of this songs have been used in any movies and most are only cinematic by virtue of their exotic, world-beat nature, the emphasis here being on Middle Eastern music styles. Oum El Bouaghi is a great integration of Arabic music styles with dub and O Haji Baig has an almost Turkish flavor to it. Some sound like extracts and/or out-takes from other Laswell projects and indeed Deadly Haven seems lifted out of the middle of 2000's Lo. Def. Pressure. Fans and completists of Laswell's recorded output would do well to snap this up (I did), even though, taken as a whole, it seems kind of redundant or unnecessary.

LSDC&W

2005-09-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

Eugene Chadbourne
Fundamental

For those intimidated by the formidable size of the good Doctor's discography, this is probably the best jumping in point. It focuses primarily on his pre-Shockabilly days and features not only that line-up (Mark Kramer, David Licht) but also some of his collaborations with John Zorn and Tom Cora. There's more of his mutant hybrid country/jazz/psychedelic/hoe-down stuff than in later bands/pairings, etc. The Beatles medley simply must be heard to be believed. There's also some early stabs at sound collage in the style that was soon to be a staple of his home recorded output. This has been released by Chadbourne and may vary from the earlier version put out by Fundamental Records in the eighties.

Faith Moves

2005-09-12T12:59:00.000-07:00

Nicky Skopelitis & Sonny Sharrock
CMP

I'd always wondered what this collaboration between these two guitar giants would sound like and now I know. Nicky Skopelitis is responsible for most of the string sounds on peak-era Material's albums, playing guitar, oud, baglama as well as Coral sitar, a cheesy, sixties novelty which Skopelitis has mastered and forged a distinctive sound all his own. Sonny Sharrock was undisputedly the John Coltrane of the six-string guitar. He could summon up a brain frying barrage of jazz notes one moment and the next beautiful, soulful passages worthy of Bird or Coleman, all with a fat, warm overdriven guitar tone that would've had Fripp or Santana green with envy.
This album features surprisingly upbeat, bright sounding compositions with Skopelitis providing exotic, multi-ethnic beds of music for Sharrock to solo over or at times play counterpoint to.
Beautiful.
Fans of the nineties incarnation of Material will undoubtedly love this album as most of that era's crew is on board.

Will Work for Beats

2005-09-12T12:55:00.000-07:00

Gonervill
Innerhythmic

If there's such a thing as instrumental hip-hop, here's a mega load. Lots of cool beats from Brain (Primus, Buckethead, Praxis), with turn-table-isms from Extrakd and Eddie Def. This is slick, urban driving soundtrack music at it's finest, with organic, funky beats and lots of vinyl-melting scratching and mixing. Deep bass by Laswell (credited here with Realization) and surprise guests Buckethead, M.I.R.V. and others. Get real Gone.

Another Day on Earth

2005-08-01T08:47:00.000-07:00

Brian Eno
Hannibal

Brian Eno's first 'song' album in over 20 years is understandably a highly anticipated event for fans and casual fans alike.
As one of the former, I agonized over buying this album for a number of reasons. I had no expectations of this being another quirky foray into his chatty, bizarre and frequently conversational lyrics, - he'd been heading away from that since Another Green World.
One of my fears was that perhaps Eno wouldn't have anything particularly interesting to say with lyrics, either artistically or intellectually, after all these years.
I'm very happy to report that I'm not disappointed in the least. One of the things I highly value in Eno's art is that you never really know what to expect, so suspending all preconceptions went a long way in my enjoyment in this process of (re)discovery.
Decades of creating beautiful - and sometimes unnerving - sound sculptures has honed his studio skills to razor sharpness. And that's evident from a casual, surface listening to most of the tracks; Eno is one of the few artists who can make sounds sound as if they are originating from inside the listener's head.
Lyrically, His songs deal with world events, global welfare and come from a perspective one would expect from someone involved with The Long Now Project, a think tank centered around very long-term (10,000 years!) global planning. Although some of the songs showcase his randomly generated- and in some cases, apparently computer generated - approach to lyric writing, many have beautiful, contemplative lyrics. How Many Worlds asks "How many people will we feed today/How many lips will we kiss today?/ If we wake up." over a piano and swelling mock string arrangement. Caught Between displays his always great sense of balancing words as a sound poem with a beautiful, engaging melody. The title track, Just Another Day on Earth is one of the most gorgeous- yet accessible things Brian Peter George St. Baptiste de la Salle Eno has ever produced- so much so that it'd be easy for me to forgive him if it made a dent on mainstream, MOR radio here in the states.
The album ends with a strange, seemingly computer constructed piece, called Bone Bomb, complete with apparently artificial fem-bot vocals, as if to remind us that he's every bit weird as he was the day he parted with Brian Ferry and company.
This is a marvelous addition to any Eno fan's shelf, nestled beside Warm Jets, Tiger Mountain, Green World and Before and After Science.

Break Through in Grey Room

2005-07-25T13:34:00.000-07:00

William S. Burroughs
Mute

Hear cool sound recordings and early tape experiments from WSB and Bryon Gysin from this seminal period of their careers. It's a perfect backdrop for reading Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded or maybe even the Word Virus anthology.

See comments for details.

The Power to Believe

2005-07-12T16:02:00.000-07:00

King Crimson
Sanctuary

A slab from this nearly 40 year old prog rock band that proves it can still take on all newcomers to the field. As Fripp has often stated, King Crimson comes together when they have relevant music to play and/or things to say. And this time around this thematically tied together album seems to be about our beliefs and perceptions, faith and the mass spectacle society. Level Five, the album's opener after a brief a capella of the thematic motif, is a Lark's Tongue-ish scorcher that proves that no one but Robert Fripp can coax cello-like nuances from his guitar at one moment and frenzied, terror shrieks the next.
In fact, this whole album hearkens back to an earlier period of KC's history. The device of stringing this outing together with the Power to Believe I,II and the Coda are reminiscent of the Peace chorus on In the Wake of Poseidon. Level Five somewhat resembles the title track from 1974's Red. And the inclusion of the beautiful artwork of P.J. Crook throughout brings to mind the Peter Sinfield era of this band's back catalog.
Not that this is a derivative or nostalgic album by any means; there is enough here that would give Tool, mars Volta, et al, a run for their money. The pastoral sounding Eyes Wide Open is one of Adrian Belew's most beautiful songs yet, and seems to be about where the individual finds himself today.The very aggro-sounding Facts of Life sounds like Ministry on a very good day, transcribing the rationale of the Project for the New American Century with the lyrics:

Six billion ants, crawling on a plate/ Six billion ants, crawling on a plate, /none of them give back as much as they take.

The very post-modern (for a prog-rock band) Happy with What You Have to Be Happy With, complete with amusing placeholder fill-in-the-blanks lyrics, has one of the catchiest, most life affirming choruses to date.

Brainfreeze

2005-07-09T11:27:00.000-07:00

DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist
Bootleg

Here's an album that I'd been looking for for years, after hearing it played over the sound system at the dearly departed Django's Records (RIP). The clerk at the counter told me the story of the album's creation and the legal difficulties with a certain convenience store chain and of the album's subsequent deletion – all the while refusing to sell me his personal copy- so I've been looking for it ever since. Bootlegs abound and I'm overjoyed to have found it at last.
Contained on it's two sides is one hellacious throwdown between DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist, recorded live in the studio, using some of the coolest, funkiest R & B and funk 45s from the seventies and eighties. The execution is seemless. Although it's sad to think of all of the classic sides that were demolished in this scratchy melt-down, the end results are well worth it.

The Isness

2005-07-09T11:15:00.000-07:00

The Future Sound of London
Hypnotic

I don't know which musical experience is more satisfying; buying an album and immediately falling in love with it and every song on it, to the point that you play it over and over non-stop – or, buying an album, taking an immediate dislike to it and having it grow on you over a period of time, till you find it one of your favorite albums.
The latter was certainly the case with FSOL's latest album, where I purchased it retail after being unable to find it used or at least hear samples of it.
The first track, The Lovers is pretty straight-foward mellow FSOL. But subsequent songs had my jaw dropping to the floor ( or floorboards of my car, as the case may be) as the arrangements of the tunes unfurled.
Sitar!? - acoustic guitar!? - FRENCH HORN!? - SINGING!?
This is nothing like Dead Cities!
This is a full blown psychedelic album, with heavy nods to Donovan (who wrote the liner notes – which shoulda served as a warning), Prog-Rock and other relatively unknown British psychedelic musicians. It's obvious that Garry Cobain and Brian Dougan and have been been listening to lots of long lost singles from that era, as is evident from some of the DJ sets they've done for the BBC and Resonance FM.
It's hard not to compare this to Pink Floyd – especially for us Yanks.
But I'll be damned if it didn't grow on me and continues to be an album I sit and intentionally listen to, from beginning to end. It's the perfect album to listen to on a lazy Saturday afternoon, with the curtains drawn and your jukebox's lightshow turned on.

When I Was Young

2005-07-08T07:55:00.000-07:00

Genesis P. Orridge and Astrid Monroe
Important

A spoken word trip-hoppish outing of sorts for GPO and DJ Astrid Monroe, whoever that is.
You know someone's been around for awhile when their distinctive voice has the same resonance as William S. Burroughs did in the last couple of decades. Genesis' voice is one of those I'll always associate with high evolutionary change, even if I don't follow where he's currently headed.
There's loads of Theremin to spare in this album, and the beats are smooth and mellow. Comparisons to Portishead are inevitable. GPO doesn't really reveal anything too revelatory here and his voice is oddly distorted, time stretched or cut up.
But it is interesting to hear from this still vital, creative force.

20 Jazz Funk Greats

2005-07-04T18:21:00.000-07:00

Throbbing Gristle
Mute/Grey Area

What a stoop I was to have never bought this album until now!
I even enjoyed the few cuts from it that I heard on compilations, but never got around to buying it. I was more or less put off from it by reviews calling this TG's most accessible record, rather than nearly every other critic's misapprehension over the title; I may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer in the early eighties, but even I knew the name of that album, coupled with the faux-easy listening cover photo was a clever gag from GPO and crew.
No, I had no real valid excuse for not adding this wonderful album to my collection, none at all. I
'm glad I did though, and find it's a perfect middle ground between the gritty minimalism found on earlier releases and the pop sounds of their later singles and Chris N' Cosey's post TG albums. The instrumental pieces really paint a frightening, post industrial landscape that hearken back to the days when Burroughs and Phil K, Dick were what we thought the future would look like.
It does and it doesn't, but this is a fine record. Don't wait 20+ years to buy it like I did.

The Wall of Sacrifice

2005-07-04T18:18:00.000-07:00

Death in June
Tesco

I've avoided DiJ all these years, but have been intrigued by singer/guitarist Douglas P.'s contributions to other people's work and his taste in music via a podcast he did for Brainwashed. I'd always written them off as another dark industrial band that flirted with fascistic imagery and had a misanthropic lyrical bent. Whereas bands like Test Dept. and Laibach openly displayed aesthetics of fascism or nationalistic motifs, they, for the most part are doing it in a sort of political and artistic detournment, and have aspects to their art and music (Futurism, Deconstructivism, Surrealism, etc.) that would never have been tolerated by a genuine fascist government such as Nazi Germany. Death in June, complete with creepy WWII Fallschirmjager jumpsuits and scary looking gargoyle masks, have a tougher go of shaking Nazi allegations. It doesn't help that frequent collaborator (and often similarly attired) Boyd Rice makes an appearance, a spoken word piece where he intones about destruction being an essential part of the wheel of life (Bring on the Night). That little ray of sunshine aside, the rest runs the gamut from smooth death folk (Fall Apart, Giddy Giddy Carousel), industrial loop melt downs (Wall of Sacrifice, Death is a Drummer) and death drones (Heilige Leben) for an alternately beautiful and desolate listening experience.

Underground

2005-07-04T18:08:00.000-07:00

Goran Bregovic
Mercury, France

An excellent soundtrack to one of the greatest movies of all time, Emir Kuristika's Underground, aka Once Upon a Time There Was a Country.
If you've ever had the pleasure of seeing this film from the former Yugoslavia, the sound of the Gypsy brass band that is in virtually every other scene will be stuck in your head for months. The raucous sounding Kalasnjikov, which is heard throughout the film, is here, as is the haunting War, complete with a tragic children's choir.
Here, rather than simply lift the songs from the soundtrack, many have been recreated and in some cases rearranged completely by Bregovic and his band.
Some songs are a beautiful fusion of Balkan folk with electronica, such as The Belly Button Of The World with great sounding Middle Eastern percussion as well as a pulsing electronic beat, which sounds oddly appropriate for a film that covers fifty years of the history of Yugoslavia.
Missing in action is the German hit song Lili Marleen that crops up throughout the film. First heard when the protagonist's city falls to the Nazis and later when the Allies defeat them, it's used throughout the movie to a humorous effect. Part of the joke is that that song was an enormously popular song in Nazi Germany. So much so that the Allies, including Yugoslav partisans, began playing it. Eventually it was banned by the Nazi government and was played every night at 10 o' clock by the Yugoslav resistance. It's just one of hundreds of symbols and allegories to be found in this wonderful film.
Lovers of traditional Balkan music, Euro-Folk, Klezmer or any exotic music will find this soundtrack enjoyable whether they've seen this film or not.

Sacrifice

2005-07-04T11:13:00.000-07:00

Divination
Subharmonic

This is more like it. A purely ambient album from Laswell project Divination.
Divination seems to be his electronica/ambient/dub vehicle. I say his lightly, as Laswell tends to underplay himself instrumentally, his role chiefly is to bring together disparate musicians and elements. Like his outfit Material, the personnel and music style here varies from album to album.
On this album, electric zither player Laraaji peels off shimmery chords and lets them sail around in the aether. The effect is a lot like the wind playing on the water. Laswell's understated bass makes an occasional appearance on the horizon, in a call and response to Laraaji's zither.
Beautiful.

Cymatic Scan

2005-07-04T10:33:00.000-07:00

Bill Laswell & Tetsu Inoue
Subharmonic

After really enjoying most of Laswell's ambient stuff, especially his collaborations with M.J. Harris (Somnific Flux, Divination) I was exited to hear about this hour long piece featuring Tetsu Inoue.
Although it does create quite the sonic landscape, it's not very well defined and fuzzy. I don't know if it's the mix, or if Laswell intended the sound to be just out of reach. It's often said that good ambient music should be like wallpaper and enjoyed in the background. For some of us relaxation junkies, especially those raised on Phil K. Dick, Ballard and Burroughs, we tend to like music that wallpapers us into a sci-fi like setting.
Although my initial feelings on this disc will probably improve with subsequent spins,
It seems that the promising soundscape hidden in the mix seems to be buried under the wallpaper.

Bush Doctrine

2005-06-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

Biochemical Dread
Cocosoli1dc1t1

Another Richard H. Kirk project, this one sounding more like Cabaret Voltaire than, well - the last few Cabaret Voltaire albums. Bush Doctrine has a live, jamming quality to it, as if he was tinkering with the samples in real time with the master tape rolling. Which indeed he may have. He album is raw and anarchic, as it should be, given the subject matter. And, as with other Kirk projects and Cab Volt, he uses samples for texture, rather than context. So the piece as a whole is intended to document our showdown in the Gulf, there is not a single recognizable voice or sound bite. Instead we hear eerie, disembodied shortwave radio voices, blips and beeps and distorted, dissonant ambiances. It provides the perfect soundtrack for channel surfing the apocalypse. The closing track, We Got Weapons is a meltdown of distortion and heavy drum beats that brings to mind a cybernetically rebuilt Nag Nag Nag, coming in to finish us off.
Highly recommended.

Easy Listening for Difficult Fuckheads

2005-06-30T07:56:00.000-07:00

Pigface
Underground Inc.

A mixed bag from the multi-star-spangled juggernaut that Martin Atkins calls Pigface.
I don't know what to make of an album that tells me to “fuck conformity, fuck the mainstream” but then contains some of the most ready for Clearchannel Nu-Rock spuzz (Blow You Away, Bitch, King of Negativity) and formulaic quirky Goth-girl pop (Sweetmeat) imaginable. It does feature a cool version of Delta 5's Mind Your Own Business, a weird turn by KMFDM's En Esch and a dreamy track from My Life's Groovie Mann (Closer to Heaven), which is heads above anything Thrill Kill's done in a long time. Chris Connely makes an appearance on Miss Sway Action, a floating, Berlin period-Bowie-esque tune. Add to that a calculated faux rant piece by Penn Jillette as the closer, that is sure to only shock/annoy/entertain those who didn't hear it coming.

Houses of the Molé

2005-06-29T20:57:00.000-07:00

Ministry
Sanctuary

'Tis a sad thing to hear Ministry flailing about these days. Even straight up formula can't keep the machine going for very long. After the opening cut, No W, which uses samples of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana juxtaposed with George W. Bush to great effect, it all sort of putters out and sinks into self parody. There are conscious efforts to make this album bookend with 1992's Psalm 69, which came out during the first Gulf War and Bush 41's reign, complete with a reprise of TV, here called WTV. What's really missing is the contribution of longtime bassist and collaborator Paul Barker. After much trial and tribulation he left the band and, it seems took away some of Ministry's twisted edginess.
Jourgenson and (temp) crew now sound like the many countless bands that they've inspired these many moons ago. Some would say they've been heading that way for years and they may be right. The new Barkerless Ministry has little bite left to them.

Colosseum

2005-06-29T20:26:00.000-07:00

Shockabilly
Shimmy Disc

Shockabilly Ghost, the reissue of Earth vs and Colosseum

Contemporaneous detractors aside, Shockabilly were one of the great unsung heroes of the ugly, atonal eighties. They beat the Butthole Surfers to the windowpane acid spiked punch bowl and could out-goon the Cramps on any day.
And actually, most critics of the band seemed to center on guitar molester Eugene Chadbourne's Muppet-on-DMT vocal stylizations, which is understandable and difficult to defend.
But in today's musical pantheon, he doesn't sound all that out of place, say next to Les Claypool, nor do they sound as hickoid-on-bathtub crank as, say a Bob Log III.

My favorite Shockabilly record, hands down, is Colosseum, their second full length album.
Here they've edged away from country and rockabilly (save a hilarious take on Roger Miller's Dang Me) and move straight into psychedelic rock and retardo sludge.
The semi-autobiographical The Secret of the Cooler is one of the most beautiful ugly songs I've ever heard. The album also features more original songs by both Chadbourne and Kramer than on their debut EP and subsequent album. A Chadbourne original, Hattisburg Miss. is one of the straightest things this trio has ever committed to vinyl. Eugene really cuts loose on a version of the Byrd's Eight Miles High with a fat, overdriven solo that at times sounds like Robert Fripp channeling the late, great Sonny Sharrock.
Sadly, Eugene Chadbourne claims Shockabilly was one of his least favorite projects and Kramer has apparently desecrated the mixes on subsequent reissues of the Shockabilly catalog.
Find the original vinyl (on Rough Trade) if you can.

Ljubljana-Zagreb-Beograd

2005-06-29T15:56:00.000-07:00

Laibach
Mute

This album serves to document Laibach's early, pure industrial period. Recorded live, it's one of the few albums to feature original frontman, Tomaz Hostnik, who left the band and later committed suicide.
Tinny and - true to the genre- discordant and mechanical, it does contain some hints of the madness to come, albiet in a sketchy manner. At times they sound not too unlike Cabaret Voltaire or Throbbing Gristle circa '79.
The album also includes an early studio version of Drzava that threatens to resolve itself into a straight ahead rock song, but doesn't.
For completists and the curious only.

We've Landed

2005-06-29T15:41:00.000-07:00

Hi kids.
This is going to serve as a place for nothing but music reviews.
I run into a lot of music.
Not necessarily new stuff, per se, but I must download at least one album a week, or buy one used. Or rip one from a friend.
Sometimes I even resort to buying one new.
And I'm an opinionated bastard.

Not that I don't have enough irons in the fire.