Things I like...

Bob Hund
A few years back a girlfriend emailed me a couple songs from this Swedish band which she had accidentally discovered on Napster when searching for something quite different. The song files completely bogged down my 56k connection making it impossible to get email the whole day. But it was worth the bog. (Thanks Jasmine.) Bob Hund ("hund" means "dog") immediately reminded me of Magazine but a bit more on the melodic side - some Pere Ubu in there too. Eventually a Swedish friend located all of their records for me and had them hauled over here from across the ocean (thanks Anna) - some commercial, some CDRs, including a killer live record. After sifting through many many songs I found maybe twelve I could not do without. Check them out. http://www.bobhund.com/ Bob Hund - Reinkarnerad exakt som förut (Omslag Martin Kann) - mp3

Brian Eno I got to have dinner with Daniel Lanois the other night during the course of which I picked his brain about his dealings with Brian Eno. (I even learned the nickname Eno had for his penis.) Great stuff. But most of all I wanted to know about the 1990 Eno/Lanois recording Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtrcks - truly the best ambient record ever. I got the skinny on some of what went on in the studio - and why it's so dang hard for amateurs (like me and my friends) to emulate this seemingly random form of music. Buy this record. Eno's cult of sycophants makes me apprehensive to recommend him lest I be identified as one. But I guess being mistaken for one is a small price to pay for there being a Brian Eno to listen to. Though he's probably most popularly known as "the guy who produced U2" he had already won his way into the heads of alt-musicians (including U2 of course) many many years prior. He had been with Roxy Music in the early days as a flambouyant cross-dressing keyboard player. After that he recorded two solo records -- Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. These records are fantastic. Many folk would lump them together with his next two records, Another Green World and Before and After Science, but pay no mind to them. He's a bottomless pit of inspiration.

Cliff Edwards Cliff "Ukelele Ike", Edwards' (1895-1971) began as a teenager performing in saloons and carnivals eventually becoming a superstar selling over 74 million records and acting in over 100 Hollywood motion pictures before he died broke in 1971. Edwards' beautiful three-octave vocal range eventually landed him the role of Jimminy Cricket in Walt Disney's animated feature Pinocchio. His best-known vocal performance is his rendition of "When You Wish Upon a Star" - which some have rightly called one of the great popular vocal performances of the twentieth century (redhotjazz.com/cliffedwards.html). This recording won the Oscar for Best Song in 1940 and became the theme song for the Walt Disney Corporation. Despite its place as a piece of 20th century sound iconography, Edwards' performance on this recording still never fails to move me deeply. I urge you to listen to it with fresh ears - trying to exorcise images of cricket in waistcoat and top hat. When You Wish Upon A Star - 1940 - mp3 Singing a Song to The Stars - 1930 - mp3 Debussy plays Debussy This is a fantastic recording of a 1913 piano performance by Debussy himself - playing his own compositions. In 1913 Debussy played these pieces on a piano outfitted with a Welte-Mignon piano roll machine. The machine "recorded" Debussy's performance onto piano rolls. Eighty-seven years later the Welte-Mignon was restored and the rolls replayed and electronically recorded for this collection. Unlike standard player-piano machines, the Welte-Mignon machine is sensitive to dynamics and pedaling - two aspects which are essential to Debussy's piano music. We get to hear how Debussy heard his own pieces. If you're familiar with benchmark performances of the Preludes I guarantee you will be floored by Debussy's own understanding of them and the profound (but "perfectly" appropriate) subjectivity he exhibits. Link Isao Tomita plays Debussy   One of my main music crushes has been Tomita's electronic interpretations of Claude Debussy's music. Snowflakes Are Dancing is the name of my favorite release of his - (1977, now on CD of course). Tomita is the second-gen of those 60s-70s analog/moog composers who, like Wendy Carlos before him, recognized the potential for non-extant sounds in interpreting orchestrated music. Whereas Wendy Carlos (and Perry & Kingsley) wrote and interpreted Bach-ish syncopated music, Tomita focused on Debussy and Stravinsky and Holst, exploring a more fluid, impressionist texture with less emphasis on metronomic rhythm. The pieces seem much more "performed" than "sequenced." Tomita has really influenced my own flirtatations with midi and sequencing. There is an element of irony in much of his arrangenment and voicing - like good Japanese pop-art. The Girl With The Flaxen Hair - mp3 Rollerskate Skinny My friend Matthew turned me on to this band's record Horsedrawn Wishes (1996). Four of the songs immediately stuck and then the rest grew on me. I've included one of the sticky ones here as a download. This band broke up years ago. Despite what reviewers typically say, I prefer this record over their earlier Shoulder Voices - which featured Jimmy Shields, brother of My Bloody Valentine's Kevin Shields (a music journalist factoid which is sadly never ommited from reviews of this band.) http://www.irishmusiccentral.com/rollerskateskinny/ Rollerskate Skinny - Cradle Burns - mp3