GLISSANDAFRICA 70

Last week, I made a passing reference to a concert I would hypothetically love to see, featuring Glissandro 70 and Konono No.1. As it turns out, Konono will be in town for the Beats Breaks and Culture Fest this July, and it's FREE!

I urge all of you to send emails to Harbourfront and get Glissandro 70 on the bill. In the meantime, you can check them out at the release party tonight.

*****Remember, next week is our Fundraising show, which, means we'd like for you to call in and support CIUT and The Eclectic Sound Basement. You might ask why you'd want to support the station's Fundraising Drive, and more specifically The Eclectic Sound Basement. There are many to list, but you should pledge your support if you feel that any of the following things are true:

...that CIUT consistently delivers new, unique and innovative programming to a wide audience from Buffalo to Barrie, Kitchener to Coburg, and worldwide over the web.

...you're bored with the bloated Canadian Broadcasting Corpse, and you want to punch a wall every time you hear "talk radio". "the latest hits" or "new rock music" through your stereo system.

...you enjoy CIUT's involvement in bringing festivals, concerts and prominent lectures to radio audiences at a rate unparalleled in campus / community radio across the country.

...you find that few radio shows in the GTA have the kind of musical selection and quality of presentation offered weekly by The Eclectic Sound Basement.

...you 're an avid supporter of campus / community radio, no matter who's on the air at any particular time or day.

...you like to win prizes.

If any of these reasons appeals to you, tune in next Friday at Noon Hour and figure out how to keep CIUT and The Eclectic Sound Basement on the air.

ESB PLAYLIST

GNARLS BARKLEY - Smiling Faces
THE CHRISTA MIN - Stockholm
CHANNELS 3 + 4 - The Queen Demo
MYNX - I'm So L.A.
ELLEN ALLIEN - Magma
LIDSTROM + PRINS TOMAS - Horseback
GLISSANDRO 70 - Analogue Shantytown (Final Master)
GLISSANDRO 70 - End West
SHOUT OUT OUT OUT OUT - Tiiired
SHOUT OUT OUT OUT OUT - Nobody Calls Me Unless They Want Something

ANALOG SKIES

*Photo courtesy of Pop Sheep.

The world is made right again. Craig Dunmuir and Sandro Perri, two of Toronto's most fascinating experimentalish arttists, have joined forces and produced Glissandro 70 for us to enjoy forever. I urge all of you in the Toronto area to attend their CD release at The Tranzac on March 31st. Provided you're interested in sunny loops, odd chants and deep acoustic-sounding bass, this may be one of the coolest releases you'll pick up this year. "Analog Shantytown" is the new funk. If Konono No.1 come to town, these guys should open for them.



ESB PLAYLIST 3/24/06

A.R.E. WEAPONS - Keys Money Cigarettes
THE FIERY FURNACES - I'm in No Mood
WHITEY - Wrap it Up
PONI HOAX - She's On the Radio
JOAKIM - I Wish You Were Not Here
CERTAINLY, SIR - How You Been?
VITAMINSFORYOU - Churchill
FROG EYES - The Horse Used to Wear A Crown
MELIGROVE BAND - Planets Conspire
FEIST - Inside + Out (Ewan Pearson + Al Usher Extended Dub)
FEIST - Mushaboom (Postal Service Remix)
BLOOD MERIDIAN - I Was Wrong

About five or six years ago I had the privilege of taking guitar lessons with the son of Lenny Breau, a guitar great who might have been the best player in his day a la the fictional Emmett Ray in Woody Allen's Sweet and Lowdown...but real, very real.

LENNY BREAU - Lenny's Mode
*Recorded in a cabin in the early 70s.

LENNY BREAU - Indian Love Call
*A sample of his guitar work at the age of 15, shortly before he moved to Winnipeg circa 1960.

Anyway his son Chet (named after Lenny's close friend Chet Atkins) lived a humble life in a basement in Winnipeg. He used to have a show on public access where he taught scales, runs, progressions and ditties.

Anyway, when I took lessons, Chet had his own system, but I brought in a book by Mickey Baker, a must-have guide written in 1955 by a very "psychadelic looking guy", as Chet once said. Right off the bat, the book covers a wide array of modal exercises, bop and blues runs and odd chord progressions. What was really excellent is that it taught how to integrate bop jazz into rock n' roll. This book changed my life and without it, I doubt I'd have the same appreciation for people like The Contortions or Uz Jsme Doma or any of those jazzy punkish bands.

In any case, I neglected to put two and two together...Mickey Baker was one half of the duo Mickey and Sylvia, who wrote and released "Love is Strange" in 1957.

MICKEY AND SYLVIA - Love is Strange

ESB PLAYLIST 3/17/06

WOLFMOTHER - Woman (MSTRKRFT Remix)
CADENCE WEAPON - Black Hand
CADENCE WEAPON - Vicarious
CADENCE WEAPON ft. Magilla Funk Monster - Poulet De Funk
TV ON THE RADIO - Playhouses
TV ON THE RADIO - Wolf Like Me
THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY - Emptyhead
THEY SHOOT HORSES DON'T THEY - Lowlife
ENVELOPES - Free Jazz
THE FIERY FURNACES - Police Sweater Blood Vow
THE WEATHER - How
THE WEATHER - Wherever There Is
PARTS AND LABOR - A Great Divide
PARTS AND LABOR - A Changing of the Guard
WIZARDZZ - Whispers from Wallface
THE LONG BLONDES - Lust in the Movies

My friend Gabe and I rented The Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder: Post Punk and New Wave. It's fun to watch for many reasosn, the first of which is the host. I remember watching Snyder in the 90s, and thinking how unlucky this guy must have been to have a show without a late-night studio audience. In the 70s and 80s, however, his show was quite the rage on NBC. His jokes were just as unfunny then as they were in the 90s but you have to give him some major points for geeky charm and unflinching tenacity. He's kind of like the Jian Gomeshi of our parents' generation, but so hopelessly square and almost totally unwilling to do any thorough research about the music at hand.

But he deserves credit for asking the "tough questions" while getting some telling answers and sometimes outrageous performances from his guests. John Lydon is an absolute bastard to him during an interview with P.I.L., almost refusing to speak to him, while a snarky and morose Keith Levine looks and speaks as if he'd spent a year living in the trunk of a car. Iggy Pop explains the difference between Dionysian and Athenian art. Patti Smith speaks of the influence Johnny Carson had on her as a performer. Elvis Costello cracks jokes about his early days trying to get attention by playing songs for record execs in their offices. Paul Weller expresses excitement over the fact that in the 80's there might have been "some 18 year old kid singing songs about how he hates The Jam." A particularly lengthy panel discussion sees Weller, Joan Jett, an LA Times rock critic, Bill Graham of the Fillmores and Kim Fowley take jabs and pisses at the debate surrounding punk upon its emergence into pop-cult vocabulary.

Pick up a copy of the aforemetioned DVD at Queen Video if you live in Toronto.

Before I move on to last week's playlist, I'd like to bid farewell to The Scherzo Pub in Kingston, Ontario. It will be closing its doors after almost two years of speculation on the matter. It was perhaps the best venue of all time in Kingston's quiet but occasioanlly redeeming live music scene. I have four years worth of memories at that bar, which gave me my own little rock n' roll paradise during an otherwise uninspiring stay at university.

ESB PLAYLIST 3/10/06

JUD JUD - Fast Song
NEW YOUNG PONY CLUB - Ice Cream
YOU SAY PARTY WE SAY DIE - Cold Hands Hot Bodies
YOU SAY PARTY WE SAY DIE - The Gap
YOU SAY PARTY WE SAY DIE - Love in the New Millenium
THE SECONDS - Tintal
THE SECONDS - Dedicated
DISGUISES - Ape Rock
NOT BITE - Red Transistor
SIMON BOOKISH - My Voice
0=0 - Little Moonlight (VIP Mix)
BLISSFUL WIZARD - July 23 2005
BLISSFUL WIZARD - Don't Give a Hoot
BLISSFUL WIZARD - Babe Have I Done Ya Wrong?
Y-PANTS - Beautiful Food
SIX FINGER SATELLITE - Cock Fight

I DIGGY DIGGY DUM

This week, we've been alternating between two universes here in the listening rooms of ESB Industries.

The first is Charlie and his Orchestra, the Nazi propaganda swing band we were obsessed with (for, yknow, historical reasons, of course) a few weeks back thanks to a link from WFMU. The other, almost in response, is Aaron Lebedeff, a Yiddish cantor from shtetl who appeared in a few films in the 20s. His records will forever be remembered by klezmerites as passionate, homeland kind of music that is almost untoucahble in terms of quality and soul-twisting joie de vivre.



AARON LEBEDEFF - Rumanye Rumanye (also sometimes called The Happy Rumanian)

While the song is sung mostly in Yiddish, it sounds as if Lebedeff is actually singing some Rumanian in there as well, although I can't be totally sure. Benny "Bell" Samberg did a spirited cover of this tune in Yiddish and English back in the 40s for the New York klezmer crowd. The best verse in Bell's version reads as such:

When I kiss a teenage girl, it tastes sweet like sweet potatoes
When I kiss an older dame, it tastes just like stale tomatoes
In Rumania at a show I met the sweetes girl I know
We would have married long ago, but my wife said "No no no!"

Yiddish humour c. WWII for ya, folks. Definitely your zeydie's kinda joke. Apparently there is a "jaw-dropping" remaster of the out there in the aether, which sound just as appealing as an English version.



ESB PLAYLIST 3/3/06

DIE! DIE! DIE! - Auckland is Burning
DIE! DIE! DIE! - Made Up in Red
TV ON THE RADIO - Tonight
LAND OF TALK - Sea Foam
LAND OF TALK - All My Friends
LAND OF TALK - Speak to Me Bones
FEMME GENERATION - 1! 2! 3! 4!
FEMME GENERATION - Adolph We Hardly Knew Ye
FEMME GENERATION - Aeropuerto Internacional
ST. JUST VIGILANTES - The Shallows
ST. JUST VIGILANTES - Rose Grenade
TSU SHI MA MI RE - Ebihara Shinji
TSU SHI MA MI RE - Umeboshi Plums - Big Seeds
TSU SHI MA MI RE - Pregnant Fantasy



Tsu Shi Ma Mi Re is a made up name that means nothign in Japanese but they're an excellent band nonetheless, and their album Pregnant Fantasy, is as equally funny as it is brilliant.



Thanks to Are You Familiar? for tipping us off to a good chunk of the show, for the second week in a row.