sixseveneightnineten ELEVEN TWELVE

In my record digging I came across something astounding. I saw on a list that Larry Levan had remixed something from a certain Cookie Monster. I wondered what 70's group that could be, maybe some sort of forgotten Latin flute jazz soul group? Maybe a second rate MFSB? Then I started to get the shivers when I realized he had remixed the very one and only Cookie Monster from Sesame Street! At that point I knew I had to get my hands on it, and though I ordered it I knew I couldn't wait a week and a half, so I fired up every MP3blogger's dirty little secret. The "C is for Cookie" remix is a fine one, falling somewhere below his better remixes but interesting enough to keep in the back of your head. The cut before it though, truly jaw-dropping and utterly unexpected. "Pinball Number Count" will have pretty much give every adult raised in the Western world during the the '70s or '80s wracked with an immediate Pavlovian response. This recording has been a Holy Grail of beat fiends -- except, it didn't exist in any commercial release of any kind. The wonderful folks at Ninja Tune worked with the Children's Television Workshop to stitch together the various counting segments into a proper song. I find it hilarious people having been trying to find this for so long, it's a jingle I too have been seeking without even knowing it. I'm pretty sure in the past couple years, if it's late enough and I am sufficiently fucked up, I've had that One Two Three FOUR FIVE sixseveneightnineten ELEVEN TWELVE thing richochet around my head for no good reason.

The Pointer Sisters - Pinball Number Count
**Buy it from Ninja Tune**



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Pitchfork Stalking Roundtable

Embarrasing and/or regrettable pictures of the Pitchfork staff abound on Friendster. Remember Friendster? Remember how it was fun for a minute and then everyone got tired of it and left their profiles in a state of update purgatory? Well, our crack reporters logged back in, so let's put a face to a favorite writer's name in this inaugural Banana Nutrament roundtable.

Rob Mitchum


Deirdre: He's posting on his Wittgenstein Lovers LiveJournal page.

Darnell: No, he's raising the Buy It Now! price on his exhaustive collection of Factory Records ephemera. Now he's taking the auction down entirely!

Miguel: Wrong, he's on the Genesis P-Orridge Meetup.com page organizing a flash mob.

Rating: 2.7

Rob Kleckner

Indeie: I really grok this seminal haircut reissue.

Miguel: This isn't such a great photo, but it does give us a rare glimpse into Pitchfork headquarters. Note the story assignments on the dry erase board.

Darnell: I didn't know they still made Tab.

Rating: 6.2

Julianne Shepherd


Gordo: There's a certain vibe here. I was thinking shy but spunky. Then it hit me. It's "Naughty Schoolgirl".

Miguel: Whoa.

Darnell: Yeah, definitely.

Deirdre: You lot are disgusting.

Indeie: Can you imagine the post-coital cigarette, running idle fingers through her hair as she expounds on the subtle intricacies of Sufjan Stevens' latest release?

Darnell: Or stencils "Aesop Rock" onto your limited edition titanium Trapper Keeper?

Deirdre: I'm going to give her a 0.0 just to round down your piggish scores.

Rating: 8.0

Nick Sylvester


Miguel: It looks like he just got back from some sweet ass rave with all the cool kids from ILM. The jocks couldn't even get in the door.

Gordo: He must have eaten some bum E pills.

Deirdre: Don't pull a Leah Betts, Nick!

Darnell: If I ever became a British trance DJ, that would be my name, DJ Leah Betts

Rating: 4.1

Ryan Schreiber

Indeie: This is an atrocity to mankind.

Miguel: Do you think he lost the foam sombrero that goes with that?

Indeie: It says he lives in McLean, VA. Something is amiss here.

Miguel: Maybe he telecommutes.

Rating: 0.0

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Parochial Nimrods

My right ear is still a little off-kilter, so, as promised, here's some spoken tracks to enjoy. It takes a special sort of deviant mind to have mastered the art of prank calling to such an extent that you have a dedicated incoming phone number for fucking with people who call you. Longmont Potion Castle has been harassing the kindly folk of Colorado for years with wooly non-sequiturs and confused threats. In this recording he is called by a vitamin salesman who tries to work his "Always Be Closing" magic on a hot lead, only to be psychologically tortured for ten minutes. This is the perfect revenge scenario for getting back at stupid telemarketers and is reverse crank calling at its best. Longmont Potion Castle also recently appeared on a split 7" with parrot fronted death metal band Hatebeak.

Longmont Potion Castle - Vitamin Salesman
**Buy it at the Longmont Potion Castle site**


Matt Besser was served a grim fate, his New York City telephone number began receiving calls destined for a Houston AOL service center. Rather than change his home phone number, he began impersonating an AOL technician and started befuddling the minds of countless callers trying to fix their internet connection. Besser, a founding member of the UCB, began playing these reverse crank calls in his standup routine and eventually fleshed the whole thing out into a successful one man show. In this recording he pretends to be working for a cultish Christian answering service and is met by an incredulous caller.


Matt Besser - Hook It Up With Jesus
**Buy the CD from Matt Besser's site**

Grazing in Prospect Park Bandshell

Hugh Masekela is coming to Brooklyn on Thursday, June 23rd. I find it quite baffling that both BV left him out of his Gothamist Weekly Shows update and the good folks at Oh My Rockness tout Saturday's New Pornogrophers/Stars free concert in the bandshell without so much as adding Masekela's gracing of our fine borough to the listings. Methinks radio silence on this important gig has something to do with indie rock's general disdain for jazz, unless it concerns an out of print LP of Sun Ra playing nose flute with Malcolm X's son-in-law. At least the grouches at New York Press caught notice.

Hugh Masekela is best known for his chart topping hit "Grazing in the Grass", but the South African trumpet player has also collaborated with Afrobeat superstars and worked tirelessly for the end of apartheid in his homeland. The other half of the bill is a screening of noted artist William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection. I don't know much about it, but I would imagine this animation with original score will be in the style of his portentous charcoal drawings.

Hugh Masekela - Grazing in the Grass
**Buy it from Tower Records**

Hugh Masekela - Mama (Metro Area Birthday Dub)
**Buy it from BestPrices**


Hugh Masekela and William Kentridge (screening) at Prospect Park Bandshell 7:30pm, Thursday June 24th
Map for the Prospect Park Bandshell
More information on Hugh Masekela

Deaf Fresh Crew

As fate would have it, just as I'm looking to meet all the new visitors with some posts worth bookmarking, calamity strikes. The "LCD Soundboard for Losing My Edge" post has created a deluge of traffic, seeing as every hipster worth his LiveJournal is linking to it. So what happens? Right as I'm looking to embark upon a strict post a day regimen, I blow out an eardrum. I'm not sure if it was due to diving too deeply too quickly, getting a bad cold on vacation, or blowing my nose loud enough to be mistaken for a Dizzy Gillespie impersonator, but something ruptured and I'm at 50% hearing. We've posted some kooky shit on here before, but I assure you this is all true.

Writing an MP3 blog with hearing in only one ear is a bit like asking One-Eyed Pirate Pete to review a 3D movie. If the damage is permanent I might hang up my shingle for good purely out of spite. In the meantime, maybe I'll switch over to a guest blogger format, review some spoken word (!), or just hope everyone else carries the weight (hint, hint). Just so you know in case you're wondering why we're dark for a while.

The good news is that Flavor Flav was on my return flight home. Saw him on the plane pissing off everyone in first class by pretty much refusing to sit down for the entirety of the flight. Caught him at baggage check and shook his hand. It was very cool of him to pal around with and take pictures with all the uniformed enlisted men and women on leave from Iraq; and yes, he does wear a clock even in his personal life. Dude is never off. The only problem with having him on the flight was my realization that if the plane went down, the headline would read "Flavor Flav Dies in Airline Disaster". I'm guessing a lot of my friends would have heard about it on TV or the Internet and would go, "Damn, Flavor Flav died?". Then a little later phone calls would go out and word would get round that I too would have perished, and everyone would be all, "Wow, Miggy died too? I can't believe he's dead". Then later in the day my friends would be all somber and reflective and go, "I can't believe Flavor Flav is really gone".

Haunted Beats

The recent resurgence of interest in Arthur Russell has been met with enough comps and reissues to sate the public's newfound appetite for his unique avant sounds. Still, when I stumbled across this track by Russell's frequent collaborator and co-producer Nicky Siano, I felt something like an archaeologist tripping over a relic left behind after the excavation. While Siano's work is wholly his own, it's still firmly within the framework of the Sleeping Bag sound he helped create.

Nicky Siano - Move
Visit his website here
**Buy Nicky Siano's The Gallery here**

Siano initiates the proceedings with flashing strobes of tambourine, as if calling down an invocation to a shamanic rite. Breathy exhortations to move coupled with jungle animal vocalizations lay down the sultry but propulsive atmospherics. I can remember looking at the distant New York City skyline as a kid in the mid-80s, at that time it was a mean, bad place with lots of interesting people, and had you told me this was playing at some steamy East Village party, I would have believed it. It's somewhat sad listening to this, as it is not only comes from another era, but from a period that will not likely return. Much has been said about the corporatization of New York City and many have waxed sentimental on how things were "back in the day", I won't get into that, but it is troublesome how all the major artists New Yorkers swoon over are transplants from other parts of the country or other corners of the world. Washington might be the seat of government, but New York is the seat of culture, or at least a major one, and there is very little homegrown talent bubbling up from the sidewalk these days. I'm certainly not counting NYU dorm room bands emulating the StrokesInterpolKillers axis, and I guess there are people in the Brooklyn fringes making interesting sounds, but how many are in it for the long term? I won't be a total pedant and work in the analogy of late period Rome's fall being hastened by it's unwillingness to produce anything original from within itself, but it goes without saying that New York would be a more exciting place to live if it produced a few more truly native artists like Siano rather than being a stage for those imported from elsewhere. Or I could be completely wrong, and in 2025 DJ's will be unearthing NYC's finest current day musicians.


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Theo Parrish - Blue Out

"Blue Out" isn't my most cherished Theo Parrish cut, but it is his most accessible work and a good introduction to his sound. In his songs he builds a natural bridge between early house music and modern soul, sort of a Farley Jackmaster Funk by way of the new millenium. I particularly love the interplay between the somber synth background and the hyperkinetic keys catching their own tail, almost like a conversation between an old man and his rambunctious grandson.

**Buy from Sound Signature's online store**
**Buy Theo Parrish records at MusicStack**
Here's a link for the APT DJ lineup, he had a monthly party there, but I don't see anything for June

LCD Soundboard
"Losing My Edge" lyrics now with sound for the age of HTML. This took too long to complete and could quite possibly be one of the nerdiest things I've ever done. At least some other poor sap out there in the ether transcribed the lyrics, I don't think I would have ever gotten that far. Still, this is a better ass-kissing than six weeks of consecutive Tricia Romano writeups. I hope this doesn't make me a fanboy.. shout to Gripper

Losing My Edge

Yeah, I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge.
The kids are coming up from behind.
I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge to the kids from France and from London.
But I was there.

I was there in 1968.
I was there at the first Can show in Cologne.
I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge to the kids whose footsteps I hear when they get on the decks.
I'm losing my edge to the Internet seekers who can tell me every member of every good group from 1962 to 1978.
I'm losing my edge.

To all the kids in Tokyo and Berlin.
I'm losing my edge to the art-school Brooklynites in little jackets and borrowed nostalgia for the unremembered eighties.

But I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge, but I was there.
I was there.
But I was there.

I'm losing my edge.
I'm losing my edge.
I can hear the footsteps every night on the decks.
But I was there.
I was there in 1974 at the first Suicide practices in a loft in New York City. I was working on the organ sounds with much patience.
I was there when Captain Beefheart started up his first band. I told him, "Don't do it that way. You'll never make a dime."
I was there.
I was the first guy playing Daft Punk to the rock kids. I played it at CBGB's. Everybody thought I was crazy.
We all know.
I was there.
I was there.

I've never been wrong.
I used to work in the record store.
I had everything before anyone.
I was there in the Paradise Garage DJ booth with Larry Levan.
I was there in Jamaica during the great sound clashes.
I woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988.
But I'm losing my edge to better-looking people with better ideas and more talent.
And they're actually really, really nice.

I'm losing my edge.

I heard you have a compilation of every good song ever done by anybody. Every great song by the Beach Boys. All the underground hits. All the Modern Lovers tracks. I heard you have a vinyl of every Niagra record on German import. I heard that you have a white label of every seminal Detroit techno hit - 1985, '86, '87. I heard that you have a CD compilation of every good '60s cut and another box set from the '70s.

I hear you're buying a synthesizer and an arpeggiator and are throwing your computer out the window because you want to make something real. You want to make a Yaz record.

I hear that you and your band have sold your guitars and bought turntables.
I hear that you and your band have sold your turntables and bought guitars.

I hear everybody that you know is more relevant than everybody that I know.

But have you seen my records?

This Heat, Pere Ubu, Outsiders, Nation of Ulysses, Mars, The Trojans, The Black Dice, Todd Terry, the Germs, Section 25, Althea and Donna, Sexual Harrassment, a-ha, Pere Ubu, Dorothy Ashby, PIL, the Fania All-Stars, the Bar-Kays, the Human League, the Normal, Lou Reed, Scott Walker, Monks, Niagra, Joy Division, Lower 48, the Association, Sun Ra, Scientists, Royal Trux, 10cc, Eric B. and Rakim, Index, Basic Channel, Soulsonic Force ("just hit me"!), Juan Atkins, David Axelrod, Electric Prunes, Gil! Scott! Heron!, the Slits, Faust, Mantronix, Pharaoh Sanders and the Fire Engines, the Swans, the Soft Cell, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics, the Sonics.

You all know what you really want. (x15)


LCD Soundsystem is appearing at Webster Hall in NYC with The Juan MacLean this Friday, June 10th. They also will be performing along with Interpol as opening acts for The Pixies at Jones Beach on Tuesday, June 14th.

Brooklyn Keeps On Taking It

Prospect Park was besieged by the Brooklyn Best festival this past weekend. It was sort of a crazy quilt of readings, outdoor screenings, bands, and excuses to see your neighbors.

Saturday night met us with the Brooklyn Museum First Night, and having not seen the Basquiat exhibit, I thought I'd poke my head in late to get a quick, free look. Turns out they closed a number of exhibits way early and incited a near-riot of people getting shut out of certain galleries. On the way over I caught a quick look at the Star Wars screening in the park. Caught a little cantina band and the revisionist, kid-friendly take on Greedo's demise.

Now did I learn from going to Saatchi's Sensation! at the Brooklyn Museum on the last day of the show? Did I learn from being shunted through a line that nearly stretched through Washington Avenue? No, so Sunday the wee one and I headed out early to check out Basquiat. Guess what? Half of the museum is inaccessible to strollers, though the website says otherwise. Owned by the BMA twice in two days.

Big boss man was a little bored with Baquiat's early work

A few of the better post-1982 pieces caught his attention though

Gray - Drum Mode
*Buy it from Amazon*

Here's one of the few extent recordings from Gray, a band Basquiat played in and posthumously made famous by association. Warning: Vincent Gallo is involved in this.



Rammelzee vs K-Rob - Beat Bop
*Buy it from Amazon*

Original vinyl copies of the Basquiat produced "Beat Bop" go for over $1,000 on the open market. Sure, art world completists might be driving the price up, but this is a "mandatory listening" hip hop classic.


Before leaving for the museum we saw resident slimeball cheerleader Marty Markowitz on NY1 hawking a bike race to Coney Island and an "indie competition" at Grand Army Plaza. He answered the confused reporter's look with a clarification of "you know, one of those indie rock band competitions". I had Markowitz's number a few years ago when I saw him on the news wearing a polo shirt and slacks to a cop funeral. Classy.

Listen to 33HZ here
Courtesy of Stereogum


After the museum the Wonderbun and I passed through a Krush Groove from headliners 33HZ, a band that will surely be loved by the fauxhawk set. Dude really know how to jam out on the Casio keytar. All joking aside, these guys ignited the crowd with their pastiche Prince-isms and synthetic white boy funk. Kiddo Badiddo liked what he saw but offered they rocked out harder at Piano's last month.

Thus Spake Banana Nutrament

Big up to Brooklyn Vegan for punting over more traffic in five minutes than comes our way in five weeks. Either that or it's a slow news day. I'll lay off the meat tonight, hell, it's Friday and I am Catholic.

Silver Apples - Oscillations
*Buy it from Aquarius Records*
*More information on Silver Apples*

A classic record fetishized by lovers of analog synthesizers and weirdness in general, Silver Apples self-titled debut is a mind melting fusion of pop hooks and off-kilter dissonance. The ghostly vocals and evocatively primitive technology make this 1968 work a not-to-be-missed artifact from the psychedelic era. This is a prime example of experimental music that actually goes somewhere, rather than being the product of sticking one's own thumb up one's ass and waiting for the government art grant money to roll in. Apparently 20 Jazz Funk Greats has been rocking Silver Apples in his DJ sets, good for him.

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Exkurs - Fakten Sind Terror
*Buy it from Other Music*

It's not a Two-for-Tuesday but we'll do a double Kraut dip and follow up yesterday's Kraftwerk with the angular stomp of "Fakten Sind Terror" by the Exkurs. I didn't glean this one from the dust and cobwebs, the work has been done for us by the fine people behind the essential Teutonik Disaster compilations. These lovely documents bring together all kinds of schizoid sounds from Deutschland in the early 80's, revealing eerie parallels with NYC's post-punk, no wave, and dance community undergrounds. "Fakten Sind Terror" has a groove funkier than James Chance pounded flat into a schnitzel.

I Must Get Back to Hammerstein Ballroom in Stuttgart in Time to See Kraftwerk


Fourth time they played New York City? Well, I wouldn't have gone had a friend not raved about their performace at Coachella last Summer. He proved himself right, here's the breakdown of Wednesday night's show:



You can just about make it out, check the four sleek PowerBooks crisply laid out on daises, tantalizing us before they come out.



I'm not sure what his name was, but of all of them he got the most applause when they came out. Kind of looks like that guy from Sprockets. So far, this has been twice as exciting as Blue Man Group.



Right around here they took a break from the chilly Krautfunk and launched into a cover of "Planet Rock"! I was really hoping Afrika Bambaataa would jump out from behind the stage or maybe some of the Kraftwerk dudes would start rapping. No dice.



When this went up on the video screen people went apeshit cheering and screaming. It was like being pushed through a wind tunnel made up of bullhorns.



After I got home I realized I had a little bit left on my camera's memory stick, so I snapped a picture of the blog for posterity's sake. Ideally I'd be taking a picture of this post, thereby setting up a sweet infinite recursion. But I don't have time for those kinds of shenanigans.

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Kraftwerk - Aerodynamik (Francois K Aero Mix)
*Buy it from Nuloop*
This was recorded in 2003 and remixed by Francois K a year later. Damn, these guys never fell off.


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Kraftwerk - Numbers
*Buy it from Amazon*

Though its appeal is undeniable, "Numbers" was sold through to me by a coworker a few years back. He was a great guy to work with, my only gripe was that with him being an African-American, everyone at work accepted anything he said without question. My refutation of his claim that The Crips were named after Tales From the Crypt fell on deaf ears, rankling me quite a bit. He was dead on right though when he brought us the Computer World CD and announced that "Numbers" was the greatest rollerskating jam ever. You've got to be doing something right when you can convince a team of paralegals to pause from working, lean down low, and waggle their arms everytime the synth breakdown comes on at the end.

Darkness and the Light

A certain Nintendo hockey cartridge once famously devoted 75% of its paltry ROM to the opening refrain of "Blades of Steel" uttered by a distended electronic sportscaster. Much of Jesse Rose's Let's Start Again EP purrs and bloops with the electrohustle of distorted, twitchy samples, as if Rygar, Mega Man, that dude from Castlevania, and all the cool NES characters were partying it up in the production suite. Not so with his final track, the woozily infectious "Black Coffee".

Jesse Rose - Black Coffee
*Buy it from Juno*
*More about Jesse Rose here*

This dark gem juxtaposes crisp beat programming with a sultry female wail and background strings firing like frayed synapses. Perfect 5 AM music for a pre-dawn stumble.

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Brennan Green cobbled together a track that is almost the diametrical oppostite to Rose's "Black Coffee". Here he remixes EPOD's "The Pursuit" with soulful aplomb, meshing wistful Rhodes lines with the original's spirited choruses. Why is it that naive happy house sounds like so much dreck, while the best stuff is made up of party sounds sustained by a certain longing (a la Larry Heard) or sadness? Is it a fairer take on the ups and downs of our lives? Brennan Green DJs every second Thursday at his Pop Your Funk affair at NYC's APT.

EPOD - The Pursuit (Brennan Green's Trackdown)
*Buy it from Coco Machete*