Playlists, upcoming albums, radio changes, and housekeeping

Playlists: I want to cover a few things with this post, but let's start with Other Music show playlists for the last 2 weeks. Instead of posting the song title info this time, here are some links to experience parts of these shows yourself. Let's start with the Paul/Killed In Cars guest spot: Paul put a mix on 8-tracks that covers most of the material he played on the show two weeks ago, which you can listen to here. For last week's show, I made a special mix of music related to chickens/eggs/birds (which I'll explain below). Unfortunately, streaming audio was unavailable at the station this weekend. Sorry if you tried to tune in over the internet. Download the Chicken Mix here and enjoy it yourself.

More upcoming records: I wanted to mention three more 2012 release announcements that I'm excited about. Dirty Projectors will release a new LP in July, Maps and Atlases release a new LP on April 17, and Igorrr expects to release a new album in December. Those are three of my favorite bands, and added to the other amazing releases slated for this year, it's clear that 2012 is going to be an exceptional year for recordings.

Other Music news: KZUM will be moving to new studios very soon. We don't have an exact date, but it's possible that we already broadcast our last show from the terminal building. I'll miss the old studios, and being downtown in general, but there will be great opportunities at the new location, including enough space to occasionally host live-in-the-studio performances on the show. Also, we've added a new DJ to the show! Please welcome Joseph, who also hosts a jazz/improvised music program called Out To Lunch every Thursday night from 10-midnight on KZUM. Joseph has incredible taste and he's going to be a great addition to the show. In related news, Malcom is entering a phase of semi-retirement from the program (but he'll still be on occasionally). We'll miss his presence and decade of experience on the program even more than the funky old studios we'll soon be leaving behind.

Reviews: I've received even more submissions, including another batch of material from Killed in Cars. I'm amazed and humbled at how great the majority of these albums are. It's going to take a long time to get caught up, but at least I'll have a good time getting there. It's been a couple of weeks since I got a chance to finish any reviews, but I have been listening and taking notes. Expect reviews soon...

Here's where I explain the "chicken mix," and how that relates to reviews: for the last few weeks, I've been busy preparing, prepping, modifying, and building materials for a little "urban flock" of 3 chickens. I'm not a very mechanically inclined fellow, and it took quite a while to everything together, but "the ladies" have arrived, and all seems to be well. Now that these girls are doing well, I'll be able to focus my attention elsewhere.

One final note before I dive into review-writing for the night: we knew this was going to happen soon, but today the increasingly sick elm tree in front of my house was removed by the city. It was time, but I'm still very sad about it. The tree was probably almost as old as my house, and one of maybe two of the original elm trees planted along my street in the early 20th century (the rest were killed by Dutch Elm disease in the 1980s). Cheers for all of the good years, noble tree.

Dominique Leone - Les Noces and more!

Dominique Leone's self-titled LP is one of my favorite records, an absolute desert island pick if I were inclined to prepare for desert island abandonment.  For me, it's a perfect combination of pop songwriting, great lyrics, and all kinds of compositional touches outside of the pop world.  There are passages where ostinatos evoke minimalist soundscapes, sheets of noise flow like early Boredoms tracks, angular melodies evoke the best of 70s Europrog with classical and folk influences (even mixed with electroacoustic and musique concrete textures in the middle section of "The Return"), and those vocals!  Layers of confident vocal harmonies, melodies, and contrapuntal countermelodies evoke everything from the Beach Boys to Magma at times.  And there are some simply touching, beautiful songs like the closing track, "Conversational."

When you consider that Dominique composed, performed, and recorded the whole record alone (on a digital 4-track, no less!), it's even more impressive.  Most of my favorite recordings tend to be singular visions like this, the work of one person following their ideas to detailed, perfected extremes.  The DL s/t LP is nothing if not uncompromising as an artistic statement, but its idiosyncratic nature remains very approachable.  It's a record that deserves both popular and "weirdo music" admiration.

There was supposed to be a vinyl edition of the s/t LP--it was mentioned as upcoming in Important Records emails several years ago.  But it never appeared.  Dominique, if you're ever reading this, is it gonna happen?  This, and the Dirty Projectors "Getty Address," are the 2 recordings I most want to see available on vinyl.  If Important isn't going to do it, do a lathe-cut short run or something.  It really needs to happen.

A few weeks ago, Leone made an amazing piano/overdubbed vocal arrangement of Stravinsky's Les Noces available for free on his BandCamp page.  This is some wild stuff--Leone manages to capture an entire mixed chorus arrangement by himself, with the addition of some electronic manipulation to capture the bass-range parts.  His many voices are accompanied by the very capable piano skills of Kanoko Nishi and Regina Schaffer. If you want a great (and free) introduction to Leone's mad skills, head over and grab these tracks.  While you're at it, you can also pick up the free Summer EP from July 2010, which isn't my favorite of his recordings, but it'll give you a sampling of his approach to pop.  The Works in Progress demo has even more cool-and-free stuff to check out, too.

If you end up liking the Les Noces recording, do consider donating to the new Kickstarter Campaign to help fund a chamber ensemble performance of this arrangement later this month in Berkeley at the Maybeck House.

Here's a live clip of a Dominique Leone gig at SXSW 2010:

The Show is the Rainbow - First Recordings

No radio show tonight--KZUM does a "blues weekend" every Labor Day weekend, so...

here's something even better: with Darren's blessing, some music to check out on your own.

The Show is the Rainbow's first two EPs are out of print and the label is no more, though you can still take a gander at the old Suckapunch Records website for reverie's sake.  Back in late 2002/early 2003, which feels like it was several lifetimes ago, Darren Keen was the insane guitarist/showman in a really fun rock-trio called Musico.  At Darren's request, my band, Shinyville, played our first show with them at the 49r in Omaha way back then.  Then Musico broke up, and Darren started working on a new solo project that ultimately became The Show is the Rainbow.  He played some early shows with the project at strange little places around Lincoln and Omaha like The Point After, and really started to develop his stage persona.  At the time, he didn't have a recording setup, but he was producing synth-based tracks in Reason and burning them to CD to sing/freak out over them for shows.  Though the gear I had was quite modest and lo-fi, too, I absolutely adored the new music and offered to help with tracking vocals and any extra "real instrument" parts at my little shoebox studio setup in the tiny bedroom of an apartment near the capitol building.

Darren took me up on the offer, and we spent the occasional evening over a month or so tracking vocals, eating salmon, and playing Smash TV on NES.  Party hard, right?  The recordings weren't multitracked in the "usual" way: Darren brought over stereo mixes of his instrumental material produced in Reason, then I loaded those onto ZIP discs (remember those?) for my old VS840 recorder, and we added vocals to the pre-existing mixes.  It makes for tricky mixing at the end, since there's no way to go back and adjust levels on any of the instrumental stuff.  Fortunately, Darren already had a really good ear for that sort of thing, and did a great job of anticipating the needed levels, so you can hear a lot of the very detailed instrumental stuff going on in the backing tracks.

Almost everything is Darren, though I do some falsetto background vocals on "401k" and a bit of banjo on "barry, barry, barry, save us!" and my wife plays some trombone on "401k."  I think the three of us made some fake restaurant foley sounds on "down the drain," too.

From those recording sessions, five tracks were selected and mastered to become 2003's "Barry Sure Wrote a Lot of Songs About the Girls He's Loved."  A few other tracks were later re-recorded in CA and released on the follow-up EP "Correcting Dog Behavior Problems Using Dog Radartron."  Finally, a few tracks exist that were created for a potential split EP, where Darren would play a couple of Shinyville songs, and Shinyville would play a couple of Show is the Rainbow songs.

Anyway, here are the original tracks from those early 2003 sessions. These are unmastered, but they sound pretty good considering the various circumstances mentioned above.  And sorry that these are .m4a instead of .mp3 files, but I archived a bunch of stuff as .aac "back in the day."  They'll play just fine in iTunes.

The Show is the Rainbow - First Recordings

Darren has continued to do some amazing work with The Show is the Rainbow, has toured around the world multiple times, and continues to grow exponentially as a musician.  I would highly recommend checking out his latest two full-lengths Wet Fist and Gymnasia.