Went record shopping with a mate this Saturday. Picked up some old Yello secondhand in Abbey Disks - there's a bunch of old stuff there if you're interested- but nothing new there grabbed our attention (apart from an I monster 7"). Moved on to Carbon in Temple Bar where the range of new stuff is always going to be cool, but pricy. Bought a couple of the five or six GAMM 12"s they had there. GAMM are a bootleg label so if you like something you buy it there and then. One was old breaks, something like Tim Love Lee's 12" mix of 'Again son..', you could put it on, pop out for a whiz and still sound like you had mad skills on the breaks. Another was the SWAT cop show funk with a full on samba/batucada beat track. What's not to like? I also bought the Kill the DJ compilation, which I haven't listened to all of but it's fairly safe to say if you liked 2 many DJs (which one? I had about six at one point and I know they did several sets after that, I don't know where they are now and...) you should give this a blast. The set list is a bit more now (Gang of Four) but also more daring (they mix into the Langley School Project doing Good Vibrations into that) but the game has been raised. We then popped into CIty Discs and browsed mainly the second hand vinyl and CDs. What a great shop, best prices in Dublin for new records, great selection of new electronic vinyl, and a huge range of second hand CDs. My mate bought an old Afghan Whigs 12", a Black Strobe 12" and something else, all winners he says. We both bought the LCD Soundsystem's new single for 2.99, just as we were moaning about the price of the album on vinyl which doesn't even come with the singles which were vinyl only in the first place, yes we have them but we wanted to keep on being treated specially. I suppose going on to a big record label means you can't indulge in that kind of behaviour. And I bought a Boyd Rice/NON compilation of ambient work from '75 to 2004 for a fiver. Not bad going.
I've been hearing about Boyd Rice for so many years it's amazing I haven't heard his stuff before. I suppose I listen to very little power electronics or industrial or whatever. This one passes the girlfriend test, some of them must you know, we listened to most of it last night whithout her going 'what is this shite?' I like the way that he takes the John Cage attitude to his noise art - he gets around people saying 'that's not music' by saying that it isn't. Cage said 'don't call it music if the term offends you'. You might have noticed a Cage connection in my name and the blog name BTW. So why would you listen to this if previously you listened to music? We were round visiting some friends with a nine-month old child. She had all these annoying toys that produced facile melodies (including one that kept on going do-re-mi to fa-do-re!) and my mate was saying it drove you mad and they got into your head. I was saying that there was nothing better for earworms like that than music that cannot be parsed by rhythm, melody, or harmony but simply by timbre and structure alone. I said I'd burn him a nice drone CD I have, but this Boyd Rice one will do too.
But it was getting late and we had Bad Santa to watch. I'm sure I'll mention that here again.
And I meant to write a review of Daft Punk's Human After All. I've had it for some time and not listened much to it. Next time.
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