Las Malas Amistades Redux

Good mp3blogging entails hipping people to obscure bands you love and want to share.

Bad mp3blogging is commenting on the recent hurricane tragedy in New Orleans by putting up a certain Led Zeppelin track or a particular Johnny Cash tune.

Unfortunately for me, bad mp3blogging also includes relying on Google as a primary research tool. When I posted a while ago about Las Malas Amistades, I got the facts hopelessly wrong. Fortunately, bandmember Manuel got in touch with me and set me straight. As it turns out, the band hails from Columbia, not Brazil. And one of the members now lives in Queens, not Brooklyn.

That's one of the great things about search engines, as my post gets indexed it lays down a sort of honeypot trap to pull in the subject of the piece. Everyone has had a boring day and Googled themselves at one time or another.

It's great that Manuel got in touch, because now we have more info to share about Las Malas Amistades. The band's site, malasamistades.com has samples from their first album. They also have created a group blog at malasamistades.com/blog containing their writings and art. I was also informed that a second album is set to drop sometime in September. It will likely be available at Kim's, Other Music, and online at Forced Exposure.

Here are a few favorite tracks from the site:

Las Malas Amistades - General Electric
Las Malas Amistades - Autoboy
Las Malas Amistades - Bolitas Canicas

Las Malas Amistades Site
Las Malas Amistades Blog

Martin Luther King Meets Chicago House

Can't be bothered blogging on the weekend, so we missed posting commentary on yesterday's (Sunday, August 28th) 42nd anniversary of Martin Luther King's historic "I Have a Dream" speech during the March-on-Washington of 1963.

Sure, every American schoolboy has had its stirring close drilled into his head, but here is another way of hearing it:


Mr. Fingers - Can You Feel It (Martin Luther King Mix)
**Buy it from Trax**
Text of the I Have a Dream Speech


Let freedom ring.

Animal Collective's Feels

On Wednesday I started writing about Broken Social Scene's and Animal Collective's leaked albums. Got a little verbose so I thought I'd stick to BSS and follow up today on these shamans of the digital age.

Though Animal Collective is a Banana Nutrament favorite, I had no idea Feels was coming out October 18th, nor did I know a new album was pending. Fluxblog broke the news to me with a write up on "Grass", while a few other blogs took a sneak peak at the upcoming album. From what I've streamed so far, it sounds on par with the astonishing Sung Tongs.

Having been beaten to the punch, here's a few things Animal Collective has been doing in the interim between Sung Tongs and Feels:

Animal Collective - Wastered 12" Side B
Such a lovely, hypnotic piece on their tour only 12" split with Black Dice
**You can find it.. uh.. maybe only for completists with deep pockets**


Animal Collective - The Kite
Gauzy, reverbed textures from a reworking of what sounds like summertime field recordings
**Get it on the They Keep Me Smiling compilation at Forced Exposure**

Cryptical Developments

I've really fallen asleep at the wheel here. Two of my favorite artists are about to release new albums and I had no idea.

Animal Collective's Feels is set to come out Oct 18th. Pre-order and stream samples here. More on that later this week.

Broken Social Scene has a new self-titled album coming out October 4th. How was I not aware of this?

Broken Social Scene is especially dear to our hearts, though we missed the SummerStage show, my honey and I went to see them at Bowery Ballroom back in December when she was EIGHT MONTHS PREGNANT. We stood way at the back where the stairs are, to avoid any basslines that might disrupt the final touches on our baby's cranial development. How indie rock is that kid gonna be? Twenty years from now he'll be telling off the clerks at Other Music that he prefers Broken Social Scene's earlier work and that they are hardly as essential as when he caught them in utero.

I thought you were only allowed to self-title your album on freshman efforts. What is even more curious though is the poem that has been posted by Kevin Drew on the BSS website. It seems to be directed to people searching for a leak of their album. I'm going to attempt to parse a few choice lines for your edification:

Lines 1-2
So there you have it.............
Two weeks later and you all get to hear it.
Sounds like he is pissed that they just wrapped the mix and it has already leaked.

Lines 6-7
Did you think if you didn't seek our souls that you wouldn't find it??
please...............
Seems like tortured symbolism until you realize that "seek your souls" represents SoulSeek.

Line 8
I couldn't fucking tell you if your computer misrepresents the sound.
True, them computer speaker shits are tinny.

Line 12
wWhat you hear is our sound.
Masterful attempt at sneaking a Beastie Boys reference by us.

Lines 23-24
I couldn't be happier with the dirt, the piss, and the idea of fear within this sound.
Treble and bass have as many rules as your fingers want.
Abrupt shift into iambic pentameter.

Line 30
We were hoping all the dungeons and dragons people will roll the dice...........
Is this a veiled swipe at Indeietrus' band? Does this mean BSS reads our blog? I had no idea we were that influential.

Lines 38-40
We're grateful you are tracking us down.
Go and argue and go and fall in love.
Or go towards the ditch.
Is he a closeted Deadhead? He may have written this under the influence of that Mexican brown from Washington Square Park.

So the whole poem is pretty ambiguous about whether he is angry about the leak. He seems to want to scold and thank the fans all at once. I guess there is no harm as long as their fans do go out and buy their work in October. I may have become aware of BSS from a download, but then You Forgot It in People did become my de facto Christmas present of 2004. I must have bought it for at least four people.

Preview 7/4 (shoreline) from the Arts & Crafts site

Records in Park Slope

You don't have to blow your salary at Academy or comb through the nether regions of Williamsburg to find good rekkids. Between Park Slope's Somethin' Else Records, the weekend flea market at P.S. 321, that seemingly always closed store at the corner of 5th and 9th, and the neverending stoop sales, the discrimnating buyer can find plenty.

Here are a couple I picked up this weekend:

$0.75
Milton Nascimento - Talento Brasileiro
I guess discounted because of the two places where it skips. Very pretty Brazilian stuff though, I've been meaning to check him out.

$2.00
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
I'm a sucker for a good charismatic yogi. I think this guy turned on The Beatles.

$3.00
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Don't make fun of me, it's even better than the new Black Dice.

$1.00
Loud Reed - Berlin
Very raw and dark.

$1.00
A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray 12"
Has a whole bunch of piano breakdowns and acid squelchy remixes on it that I never knew existed. As always, favorite part is when the guy goes "m-m-m-major!". I need to get that as my cellphone ringtone.

$1.50
Nitro Deluxe - Let's Get Brutal/This Acid House
I was surprised to find this so cheap. Lots of artists decamping from the electroclash fad for a second look at Aciiieed. Also, that Soul Jazz comp doesn't hurt matters.


Tune in next week to see what I come back with. Just kidding, Honey. Seriously, I'm only kidding.

Give Me Every Little Remix

Imagine you had a boutique label and one grillion dollars to spend as you wished, hiring the best remixers on a whim -- Francois Kevorkian, Luomo, Yamatsuka Eye, Lindstrom; hell, I got a field recording of the Meatpacking District at 1 AM, let's get Larry Heard on the phone.

Came across quite a bit of shit talk about Mr. Maclean's opener role at the Webster Hall this past June, I don't know, I didn't go. He did kill it though a while back at the now defunct Volume with his drummer from Turing Machine laying down the house beats and Tim Goldsworthy working the theremin like a drunk Helen Keller. Actually, before the set even began he won me over screaming at the nonplussed crowd, "Get in here, you hipster artfags!".

The Juan Maclean - Give Me Every Little Thing (Cajmere Remix)
**Get it at Phonica**

Now see, "Give Me Every Little Thing" is a stomper. Always has been, and to make sure you don't forget they got Cajmere to rework GMELT. A while ago I wrote about a boring ass job I had to endure where our only light moments came while pretending to roller skate dive to the breakdown on Kraftwerk's "Numbers". Another group favorite on my coworker's mixtape was Cajmere's "Percolator". Nice to see that almost ten years later Caj has lost nothing and keeps his source material a stomper, just in a completely different direction.

Cajmere - Percolator
**Get it from Nuloop**

As far as Delia Gonzalez & Gavin Russom go, well, I don't buy the whole Moroder meets Krautrock publicity copy. It's more like Tony Conrad via a dogeared Casio instruction manual missing a few pages. And that is something to behold.

Delia R. Gonzalez and Gavin R. Russom - Field Effect 4
**This comes from a compilation regarding a show at Andrew Kreps quite a while back**

Knowing that both The Juan Maclean and Delia & Gavin are playing the CMJ fest together, I take a break from writing this and check the Northsix website. Just found out tickets for the DFA showcase are going on sale in 45 minutes. Test your luck here.

Baby Got Backpack

There is one particular Miami Base song I have never been able to abide. You know the one. The one that all the thirteen year old girls at the mall chant like Hare Krishnas. I am speaking about "Baby Got Back", a delightful rump shaker of a ditty that caught my ear ten years ago. That is, until I heard the repugnant and racially insensitive line "even white boys got to shout".

What does that mean? I am a second class citizen due to being melaninally impaired? Like I can't Cabbage Patch with the best of them? We need to live in a world where the rich, the poor, the white, the black, the Luxembourgians, the Lichensteinians, the obese, and the slender can do the Running Man in unison.

So, I can proudly report that Sir Mix-A-Lot has seen the error of his youth and repented with this delightful revisitation to his demographic target. Rrrrrrrrrreewind!

Sir Mix-A-Lot - Baby Got Backpack
You can watch it here, it's the second video to the right on the top row

Hey, beats going on Celebrity Fit Club.

Interview With Reporter Who Interviewed Yoko Ono

I'm at a birthday in the Lower East Side and my friend Lisa casually mentions she's late because she was at the Dakota interviewing Yoko Ono. Everyone nods and exhales a "Greeeaat", while I sit there barely able to contain a "whothewhatnow"?

I should add that Lisa is a big muckety muck at the Associated Press. It would never even occur to me to reach out to Ono's PR folks -- not that I have anything relevant to ask. So the next best thing is to shake Lisa down for details, like some schoolgirl upbraiding her more popular friend.

BN: I'm not a writer, but do you have any idea how jealous your getting to do this made me?

Lisa: It started to sink in after about the fifth time you said that.

BN: I got to confess I find Yoko Ono more interesting than John Lennon. Not that John isn't great -- they both did so many incredible things with their lives. How did you score this plum assignment?

Lisa: She's such an enigma. I got the assignment because she authorized the musical "Lennon," which just opened. I do a lot of theater interviews that wouldn't make you jealous.

BN: Were you intimidated entering her home?

Lisa: I think I would have been intimidated entering the Dakota even if John had never lived there. They've got all these gates and doormen in uniforms. But it definitely freaked me out to be in a place where he lived.

BN: You mention in the piece the Imagine piano, and lots of family photos everywhere. Did she have lots of images of John up? Any Beatles memorabilia? Gumball machines filled with cocaine? Any contemporary art lying around? Give us the goods.

Lisa: I couldn't snoop around too much. It wouldn't be very professional to wander off and root through drawers. But in the white room she has a picture of John in a New York shirt on the piano and a Magritte painting above it. She collects Magritte.

BN: So she has refined taste in home design?

Lisa: Yes, and the apartment is huge. She has a sofa in the kitchen.

BN: Did she cut off any of her clothes during the interview?

Lisa: No, but she wore a low-cut shirt. At 72, showing cleavage is pretty bold.

BN: Did you really know all that stuff about Fluxus or did you look it up before you met?

Lisa: I knew about her art, but the Fluxus movement in general is a bit hard to describe. I researched it.

BN: Does she still hang out with LaMonte Young?

Lisa: I have no idea. I guess I should have asked.

BN: Why couldn't I have gone too, posing as your strapping young assistant, manning the tape recorder and all things mechanical?

Lisa: I think you might have drooled on her.

BN: You pretty much own the name Lisa Tolin on Google. I mean, no one comes close. Any other Lisa Tolins out there frustrated by your total name domination? Do you think a challenger to the throne will ever emerge?

Lisa: There is a middle school soccer player named Lisa Tolin, I think. If she goes pro, I'm screwed.

BN: On a scale of 1 to 10, how retarded is the phrase 'bloggerati'?

Lisa: I'd give that a 9. I also hate 'blogosphere,' though I'm apparently in the minority.

BN: So pretty much now that I've outed that I know an AP editor, I'm guessing you'll never do a piece on mp3 blogs and interview me extensively, making sure to correctly spell our URL at the end of the widely syndicated article?

Lisa: I was thinking about it, but spelling the URL correctly would kind of take the fun out of it, wouldn't it?

BN: When I'm famous in ten years, are you going to call in a favor and demand that you be allowed to interview me?

Lisa: Yes, and I will want to bring in an assistant to man the tape recorder.


More about Lennon on Broadway

John Lennon - Oh Yoko!
**Buy it from Amazon**

Yoko Ono - Walking on Thin Ice
**Buy it from Tigersushi**

Deep Slumber

If I ever fall into a coma for thirty years and wake up in a hospital bed without long gnarly fingernails and a giant white beard, I would be really angry. I mean, thanks family, for grooming me in my somnolescence, but c'mon, you just blew my only chance to work the Rip Van Winkle look.

Durutti Column - Sleep Will Come
**Buy it from Forced Exposure**

Erase Errata - Go to Sleep
**Buy it on Audio Lunchbox**

My Bloody Valentine - When You Sleep
**Buy it from Insound for cheap**

Daft Punks

Got my Pixies/Gang of Four tickets for Coney Island today. It sounds like a great time, right in the Cyclones baseball stadium on October 1st. It will be a bit chilly but there should be some leftover sunrays, hopefully enough left for beers on the boardwalk at Rudy's or the possibly defunct Puzzles.

Actually, we might not go if Ticketbastard rejects my order. I grabbed four in case two friends not clued in to this want to join. After the transaction completed I started to get a nagging suspicion there might have been a two ticket limit, so we'll see what happens.. stay tuned..

This was sent to me the other day, a stop action music video made by some nerds dancing to Daft Punk. I thought, great, I've been planning to make a homemade music video of my baby dancing to "Teachers". That is, in a few months when he's big enough to fit in the red baby Adidas tracksuit we got him.

Guess what? These guys used "Teachers" too. I'm still going to make my video though, just you see. This is pretty good for a chuckle, nothing extraordinary, but cute:

Nerdy Homemade Stop Action Daft Punk Video

20 Jazz Funk Greats Dissects "Teachers"

Aziz Ansari at the UCB

Me and the Missus don't get out much, for some reason our six month old baby bun soaks up all our attention. That, and I think it's illegal to leave them unattended. But last Saturday the grandparents were in town, and we had a 30th birthday to get to later that night, so we checked out Aziz Ansari's show at the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theatre*.

*My old friend Dan used to perform there all the time before moving to Antarctica (no really, he did this one year base camp adventure job).

For the longest time I've been meaning to introduce my Dearest to the wonderful charms of the UCB, and Aziz Ansari Punched a Wall was a pretty great way to do it. I was reluctant to go at first, suspicious of the drumbeat from our NYC indie blogga aristocracy. I suspected they got bored annointing the next 'it' bands and had now moved on to comedians; in fact, Aziz is part of the local blogging ranks. It was a no brainer to check him out though after seeing the Shutterbugs videos, which are downright pee pee in the pant pant funny.

Shutterbugs Episode 1
Shutterbugs Episode 2

With all the writeups he gets I was expecting an ambitious "Premium Blend" echelon slick entertainer. Instead, he has an incredibly disarming stage presence, winning over the audience with his indirect, awkward delivery. I now see why the indie blogs got hip to him, onstage he has the bemused detachment of a character in a Wes Anderson film. The show has an an economical pacing, and the material ranges from kind of amusing to deep belly laugh -- but I'm not going to reveal why he punched that wall.

Quick shout to the act following him, the Wicked Wicked HammerKatz. First, because they asked if any bloggers were in the audience, that they get some hype. That earned me an elbow in the ribs from the Missus. Second, they are a hypertalented bunch of NYU kids who love a good suicide joke. So wrong, and yet so right.

Click here to reserve tickets to Aziz Ansari Punched a Wall and Wicked Wicked HammerKatz

My Name is Lobot and I am a White Slave


Some accuse George Lucas of being a closet fascist. Untrue. Many an African-American comedian has commented that Chewbacca is Han Solo's manservant. This is simply not so, Chewbacca is bound not by the manacles of oppression, but by a life debt owed to Mr. Solo. There is however, a seamier, more disturbing undercurrent running through the Star Wars trilogy.

Mr. Lucas tacitly endorses white slavery in his filmwork.

Although he skirts the issue in Empire Strikes Back, it is true, I am a white slave, grateful only to know that Lucas has spared you from seeing the harsher punishments meted out to me. For Lando Calrissian is my cruel master, having fitted me with a Compuslave TK-421 Obedience Helmet, he controls my every move by releasing or witholding sex drukqs into my orbital hemisphere. Listed below are some of the cruelties I have endured at Calrissian's hands:

His pouring of bitter, burning cold carbonite onto my genitals.

His making me dress in billowing puffy sleeved shirts, which he refers to as "Lobot's silkies and dainties".

His hiring of IG-88 to work me over a desk, which he watched via closed circuit holoprojector.

My constant endurance of Ugnaughts whose hands are a little too friendly with my tush.

His making me groom his moustache daily, and the plucking of the nostril hair.

My inability to make it out of bed in the morning without Calrissian's release of sex drukqs via remote control. Sometimes he forgets.

The time he made me retrieve Luke Skywalker's severed hand, only to force me to pleasure myself with it.

If my experiences are not enough proof for you, look at the rest of the trilogy. When Leia is forced to become Jabba the Hutt's concubine, what is she made to wear? Yes, a hot slave ho costume. And when Solo was abducted by Boba Fett, what vehicle did they depart in? Yes, the (white) Slave I.

Or look the rest of Lucas' filmography. That guy in THX-1192 is a white slave, and Ron Howard in American Graffiti was a total slave to the fashion of the 1950's.


Please Save Me

Jude Law and M.I.A Get They Knob On

Item! We have it on great authority from our comments box that Jude Law and M.I.A. are making the beast with two backs. When she dumped Diplo we figured she was due for an upgrade. F U Stereogum, F U Drudge, this is a Banana Nutrament nnnneXCLUSIVE, y'all got scooped.

true, it's a Maxim publication, but it has teh hawtness

The wonderful thing about the Internerd is that if this a malicious rumor, no one will remember and I lose no face. If it's true then I'm the Liz Smith of indie rock.

Good luck you two, you make a great couple.

Throbbing Gristle - Hot on the Heels of Love (Ratcliffe Remix)
**Buy it from Mute**