Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells

The theme for The Exorcist is one of the most recognizable movie themes in American history. But it's not as well known that the theme was from an early album of prog rocker Mike Oldfield. Oldfield came out with Tubular Bells in 1973; it was used in The Exorcist in the same year. So the first few minutes of this album, at least, are already familiar. The rest of it, perhaps not so much. Tubular Bells is nearly ubiquitous at used record stores, so I decided to give it a try.

What a treat! At first, the unusual time signatures and general repetitiveness of the music reminded me of Steve Reich and other classical acts. With time, though, the way various instruments are introduced, the way things culminate, peak, decay, soar, and disappear reminds me more of prog rockers like Soft Machine. It's rock, it's kinda jazzy, it's well-composed. Tubular Bells is only two tracks; each spans the entire side of a record, much like Soft Machine's Third album. So it's not surprising to see that Oldfield has some connection to Kevin Ayers. (The surprising bit is that he was 16 [16!] when he went on the road as part of Ayers' touring band.)

There are about 50 different instruments that come into the mix here, and Oldfield is playing the vast majority of them. It seems in the early 70s there was this trend of a self-made album, like Paul McCartney's McCartney, Stevie Wonder's Music of My Mind, Roy Wood's Boulders, and Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star. There's a level of ambition and talent in those albums that seems absolutely inconceivable today.

Really, the more I dig into this album the more amazing it seems. For instance:

Tubular Bells, originally dubbed Opus 1, grew out of studio time gifted by Richard Branson, who at the time was running a mail-order record retail service. After its completion, Oldfield shopped the record to a series of labels, only to meet with rejection; frustrated, Branson decided to found his own label, and in 1973 Tubular Bells became the inaugural release of Virgin Records.

Yowza.

Edith Frost - Calling Over Time

I came to this one when trying to find other albums produced by Jim O'Rourke. I had never heard of Edith Frost before. Calling Over Time is her debut, released in 1997 on Drag City. It's pretty sparse, usually just a guitar and/or piano, sometimes with another instrument or two low in the mix. Chicago being an incestuous pit of musicians, some other members of Gastr del Sol were involved in the recording, but this doesn't really have the feel of something like Camoufleur.

This normally isn't something I would seek out, but I'm glad I found this one. It's a fantastic winter album, incidentally. Maybe I'll try some other Drag City stuff I haven't tried before, like Palace Brothers, and/or revisit some more Smog and Will Oldham / Bonnie Prince Billy / whatever albums. As for Edith Frost, she only has three other albums, I might as well check them out, too.

Yellow Magic Orchestra

Coming across something like Yellow Magic Orchestra vindicates this dumb effort to keep finding new music.

As much as I enjoy Krautrock, I never really want to listen to much Kraftwerk; I find it too uptight. YMO is like a Japanese Kraftwerk, but fun to listen to. This, their self-titled debut, is considered the first computer-themed album. This came out in 1978, the same year as Space Invader!

I came to YMO in a fairly roundabout way. Basically I got to this through Destroyer, via Japan. Destroyer came out with Kaputt either early this year or late last year. In an interview with Dan Bejar about the album, he mentioned something about David Sylvan records. So that got me to his solo career as well as the band Japan. On some of those records, Ryuchi Sakamoto was listed as a collaborator and YMO in general was considered an influence.

Pitchfork: Back in your twenties, would you ever imagine that you'd make an album like Kaputt?

DB: No, not at the time. When I got into the American scene, I put aside a lot of stuff that was dear to me. There was this 10-year period where the idea of putting on a David Sylvian record was ludicrous because it was just too lame. I banished Morrissey from my life in favor of Sun City Girls, so I only really discovered Your Arsenal in my thirties. It's embarrassing.

Pitchfork: Do you think your 25-year-old self would think Kaputt sounds lame?

DB: For me to bother with it at 25, someone would have had to sit me down and said, "No, you should actually listen to this." Maybe I'm selling myself short. At that time, I was almost exclusively listening to classic rock records from the 60s and 70s.

Yeah, that's where I am, or where I have been for the past five years, listening to classic rock records from the 60s and 70s, really in need of someone to sit me down and tell me to listen to stuff. You'd think the internet would make it relatively easy to find where to go next, but it's not that simple. If anything, it provides access to too much. It would be overwhelming to take that much in.

Anyway, this is definitely one of the better finds. Last weekend I was giddy when I saw the translucent yellow vinyl version for under 10 bucks at the local record store. I fully expect to check out some more YMO and related stuff like Sakamoto's solo work.

Nilsson Sings Newman's 12 Songs

Getting into Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman have been two of the better things I've done this year. I knew Randy Newman was writing songs for others in the late sixties; he penned the intro to Van Dyke Park's Song Cycle, "Vine Street" as well as some songs for Harpers Bizzare and similar bands. And even though he had his first solo album in 1968, it wasn't until Nilsson came out with Sings Newman that Randy was introduced to a wide audience.



It seems hard to imagine why Nilsson would've done such a thing at that point in his career. He had some success with his first three albums and his big single that he didn't write, "Everybody's Talkin'" but Nilsson Schmilsson was still to come. So maybe he hadn't reached the peak of his success but he was definitely on the way up when he drops an album of songs written by some no-name guy, Randy Newman. Just the idea of doing that seems unheard of in today's world of constant self-promotion.



Listening to Randy Newman is strange. He has a unique style and relies on similar melodies in some songs, most of which (for me and others around my age, I expect) well-associated with the Toy Story movies. I know that may be unfair, but it's hard to listen to songs like "Yellow Man" or "My Old Kentucky Home" or whatever without thinking of Woody and Buzz Lightyear. Still, I've severely enjoyed his early albums, which can usually be found for under five bucks at vinyl stores.

Boom Bip and Doseone - Circle

I came across this one from two directions. One, I'm slowly going through the cLOUDDEAD-related works beyond Why?'s solo work. So eventually I would've gotten to this Doseone / Boom Bip collaboration. Circle also came up on a list of song cycle albums, so that brought this to the top of the list of things to check out.

This one is super weird. It's so left-field it makes cLOUDDEAD sound like Will Smith. I think there's a part where Dose raps about laundry instructions. Even though it's just Dose One on vocals and Boom Bip supplying the backdrop, it seems that each of the 29 tracks has some different genre or bent. Occasionally it returns to a theme about a birdcatcher, but only briefly.

Boom Bip does some pretty amazing work here; the Allmusic review mentions DJ Shadow and Aphex Twin, that sounds about right. Overall it's undoubtedly the most unusual hip-hop album I've ever heard, and one I'll keep coming back to.

on deck

Ash Ra Tempel - s/t
Buzzcocks - Another Music in a Different Kitchen
Michael Rother - Flammende Herzen
New York Dolls - s/t
Why / Odd Nosdam - Split EP

Jens Lekman - An Argument with Myself

It's hard to believe it's been four years since Night Falls Over Kortedala. He was fairly prolific from 2003-2007: only two real albums but plenty of EPs to fill the gaps. But Jens does great stuff so I'll take what I can get. Here I like the title track but nothing else is particularly note-worthy. I just hope he's got another album on the way soon.

on deck

Edith Frost - Calling Over Time
Ellen Foley - The Spirit of St. Louis
Randy Newman - 12 Songs
Subtle - A New White
Yellow Magic Orchestra - Yellow Magic Orchestra

dead ends

Spiritualized - Lazer Guided Melodies

I think I tried to get into Spiritualized once in high school, then again in college, and even this third time around it's not really clicking. This dreamy-pop, soft psychedelic, spacey shoegaze is nice to have on in the background but I can't ever focus on it enough for active listening. Also, I'm constantly comparing it the Verve's self-titled EP (which also came out in 1991) and their first full album, A Storm in Heaven. I listened to those so much in high school that I basically can't hear anything but Verve when listening to Lazer Guided Melodies. Oh well.

Klaus Schulze - Irrlicht

Holy moley this is creepy. I was listening to it at home alone in broad daylight and I had to turn it off because I thought I was going to get murdered. It's perhaps unfair to call this a dead end; I'll still check out some of his other works. I reckon I checked this out due to his history with Ash Ra Tempel, but it turns out Schulze wasn't involved with my favorite album of theirs, Schwingungen. Since it's Schulze, I expected it to be synth-heavy, but instead there are no synths to be found here on his debut album. It's all organic, both in the sense that there's no electronic manipulation and that an organ drone is the dominant instrument. It's amazing how evocative this album is, but it's not something I'll return to often.

Duran Duran - Duran Duran

I gave it an honest try but this doesn't do much for me. I'm still going to check out Rio, so if that one clicks, I may return to their self-titled debut.

Prefab Sprout - Two Wheels Good

I've been listening to this almost non-stop for weeks now. Seems like an appropriate fall-weather album. I suppose the closest thing that comes to mind is the Smiths, with a bit of the Mekons thrown in for fun on songs like "Faron". Very clean and polished, though. Thomas Dolby produced!

Two Wheels Good was known as Steve McQueen in the UK; the name was changed stateside due to a legal conflict with the McQueen estate. (Steve had died five years earlier; I never knew how he died--that is a story definitely worth Wiki'ing.)

I don't remember how I came across this one. It was probably searching 'sophisti-pop' on AllMusic, trying to find anything similar to Scritti Politti's Cupid & Psyche 85. So I may end up checking out some other Prefab Sprout albums, as well as other sophisit-pop albums.

on deck

Colin Stetson - New History Warfare Vol 2: Judges
Duran Duran - Duran Duran
Klaus Schulze - Irrlicht
Prefab Sprout - Two Wheels Good
Robert Fripp and Brian Eno - No Pussyfooting

dead ends

Time to clear out a few things...

Harmonia - Musik von Harmonia, Tracks & Traces

These two albums chronologically sandwich my favorite Harmonia album, Deluxe. Deluxe is upbeat, melodic, elegant, and interesting. I expected something vaguely similar from Harmonia's other two albums but even after revisiting them multiple times I never form a better impression of them.

Dollar - The Dollar Album

I'll be talking more about the source for this one later but basically I've been looking for some more synth-pop and wow, this one is too much. If you were looking for a soundtrack to parody the '80s, this is a good choice.

Teardrop Explodes - Kilimanjaro

After reading a good bit of Julian Cope's music reviews, I wanted to check out some of the music he made. During the first few listens, I thought this sounds too much like U2; once I made that connection I couldn't get past it.

Psychic TV - Force the Hand of Chance

OK, so this is instructive. Psychic TV's Force the Hand of Chance was a blind download. I knew nothing about this other than it was suggested in a thread I made about 'song cycle' albums. This, by the way, explains how I come across about 5 percent of the albums I try.

Van Dyke Parks' album Song Cycle is undoubtedly a top-10 album for me. Going by the definition I found on Wikipedia:

A song cycle is a group of songs designed to be performed in a sequence as a single entity. As a rule, all of the songs are by the same composer and often use words from the same poet or lyricist. Unification can be achieved by a narrative or a persona common to the songs, or even, as in Schumann's second Liederkreis, by the atmospheric setting of the forest. The unity of the cycle is often underlined by musical means, famously in the return in the last song of the opening music in Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte.

The term originated to describe cycles of art songs (often known by the German term "Lieder") in classical music, and has been extended to apply to popular music.

In that case, some of my favorite albums would be considered song cycles: The Clash's Sandinista, Todd Rundgren's A Wizard, A True Star, and perhaps Allen Toussaint's Southern Nights. (VDP's album, ironically, doesn't really fit the definition.)

I listened to this on repeat today, perhaps four or five times all the way through. I rarely do that with a new album, so this is what qualifies as excitement for me. I've been intrigued to research this album that I've never heard of before, but before I do that, I wanted to try something.

This is my guess: I'm thinking this album is from the UK and released in the span of 1988-1993. Influences include Television Personalities, Public Image Ltd., This Heat, and Bill Holt's Dreamies. I'm betting this was the band's only album. The genre is avant-garde post-punk, although it's a bit later than most post-punk albums.

So now I'll actually research it and see how close I got.



Update: Oh bruddah. I was right about the UK post-punk bit, so I should've known it was even earlier than I guessed. This was released in 1982, after Genesis P-Orridge was out of Throbbing Gristle (a band whom, despite their appearance on several post-punk compilations, I've never been able to get into). This album is as old as I am.

I was way off the mark thinking this was a one-off album. Then again, it appears Psychic TV is more of an audio/visual house collaboration among dozens of artists. They described themselves as a video group who does music, rather than a music group which makes music videos. In the mid/late-80s, they set the Guinness record for most releases in one year. Perhaps the rest of their work doesn't sound much like this one. Without digging too deep, it appears the rest of their work is more industrial and exotic before transitioning to house and techno in the 90s.

Something I don't yet understand is that Wikipedia describes this as a single album with 8 tracks. That's certainly what I've been listening to today. Yet AllMusic refers to a double-album with 13 tracks. I guess I've got to find the other five tracks.

sources

One of the sources for exploring Krautrock music was Julian Cope's Krautrock Sampler, which can be yours for a few hundred bucks. Or you can try to find the PDF online. Or, if you just want some album recommendations with minimal text, there's a list of his Top 50 Krautrock albums.

My favorite Krautrock albums all appear here, with the exception of Cluster and Eno, which perhaps is more ambient than Krautrock, but that's a blurred line anyway. Off the top of my head, my own top ten would include:

Ash Ra Tempel - Schwingungen
Can - Ege Bamyasi
Can - Future Days
Cluster - Zuckerzeit
Cluster and Eno - Cluster and Eno
Faust - IV
Harmonia - Deluxe
La Dusseldorf - La Dusseldorf
Neu! - Neu! 75
Walter Wegmuller - Tarot

I've tried a few of the other albums on this list from Amon Duul, Popul Vuh, and Tangerine Dream without much success, but I may try revisiting some of those while I'm checking out un-heard albums from Cosmic Jokers, Witthuser & Westrupp, and Tony Conrad.

on deck

Finally got a new computer and worked through the backlog so that I only have five more to comment on. So it's time to work new stuff into the rotation:

Dollar - The Dollar Album
Harmonia - Tracks and Traces
Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells
Nilsson - Sings Newman
Psychic TV - Force the Hand of Chance