Yellow Magic Orchestra - Solid State Survivor

I enjoyed YMO's self-titled debut, but Allmusic recommended their second album more.  These guys are often compared to Kraftwerk, but where Kraftwerk is steely and grey, YMO is popped colors, fun.  Here they ditched some of the traditional Asian tunes they had on their debut and save their cover song for "Day Tripper". 

I don't know as I'll keep looking for more YMO albums, though.  I do have a Ryuichi Sakamoto solo album that I've hardly listened to; maybe that's where I'll go next.

Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Volume 2: Judges

Admittedly I didn't really get this the first few times around. I had it on in the background and thought it was just another dude making some abstract noises electronically. There were some spoken word bits that sounded an awful lot like Laurie Anderson. It sounded interesting, kinda Aphex Twin-y, but with all the tools available to musicians today, it didn't sound like anything mind-blowing.

Which is why it's a good idea to read a bit about stuff sometimes. What's going on here is mind-blowing on both the inhale and exhale. It turns out these songs are done by Colin alone with no overdubs or loops. It's just him, his saxophone, and about 20 well-placed mics. So in a sense the only manipulation here is in the mixing.

So now knowing that, I wish I could go back to ignorance and try to listen to the music just for what it is. Now when I hear it I have difficulty getting past the question, "how in the hell..."

I'm not too familiar with the sax but what he's doing must destroy the reeds. So witness the music of destruction:

The Art of Noise - Who's Afraid of the Art of Noise?

This is a bit frustrating, but I'm trying to remember how I came across this band. I know I had seen a few of their albums when flipping through the 'punk / new wave' sections of record stores, but unless an album has a very distinct cover and I made a note of it, that's typically not the way I find things that might be worth exploring.

Every now and then you come across something that sounds as if someone made a mistake somewhere and perhaps time and space are not one-way vectors, as surely for an album like this to have existed in 1984 is evidence of a rift in the space-time continuum. It's not that it sounds way ahead of its time; it's just that assigning this to any specific point in time seems arbitrary.

Who's Afraid is best described as a sound collage, two words that normally translate to 'stay away'. But what a mistake that would've been--I wouldn't have heard the full 10-plus minute version of "Moments in Love," a beautiful, chilling opuses of avant-garde synthesized goodness. Of course it has been sampled numerous times since then; even the band made dozens of different versions of the song.

(Ignore the video; it's the only full-length version of the song I could find on YouTube)



But really, most of the album isn't really like that. The remainder is closer to the other big hit from this album, "Close (to the Edit)." By no means is that a bad thing; it's just been copied so much that it's hard to separate the original from the cliche imitations. Witness the fables of the deconstruction:

The Residents - Meet the Residents

The Residents are true avant-garde crazies. Their earliest albums (of which this is the first) have precedents in Captain Beefheart's experimental albums, Frank Zappa's conceptual numbers from Freak Out!, the work of Steve Reich, and the compositions of chance music tonemeister John Cage -- yet the Residents' work of this time really sounds like nothing else that exists. All of the music on this release consists of deconstructions of countless rock and non-rock styles, which are then grafted together to create chaotic, formless, seemingly haphazard numbers; the first six "songs" (including a fragment from the Nancy Sinatra hit "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'") are strung together to form a larger entity similar in concept to the following lengthier selections. The result is a series of unique, odd, challenging numbers that are nevertheless not entirely successful. The album cover is a fierce burlesque of the Beatles' first U.S. Capitol label release, sporting puerilely doctored photographs of the Fab Four on the front and pictures of collarless-suited sea denizens on the back (identified as Paul McCrawfish, Ringo Starfish, and the like). This is an utterly bizarre platter that may appeal to very adventurous listeners.

(The Residents - Meet the Residents)