Captain Beefheart (aka Don Van Vliet)
Zoot Horn Rollo (aka Bill Harkleroad)
Antennae Jimmy Semens (aka Jeff Cotton)
The Mascara Snake (aka Victor Hayden)
Rockette Morton (aka Mark Boston)
Drumbo (aka John French)
Influences
Howling Wolf and other great blues and jazz musicians.
Captain Beefheart is mostly known for either the raw yet more accessible mid 60's bluesy sound from their first album Safe As Milk, or the flipside infamous chaos and sublime clattered alchemy that is Trout Mask Replica - both of which are totally awesome!
For those who haven't heard any of the Beefheart stuff before, i would categorise it (nearly) always as of some kind of primal blues. When they began, the sound is deffo closer to the 'normal' blues sound that everyone who has involuntarily appropriated the past 40 years of watered-down-white-boogie will recognise as the concept that we know as 'rock n roll'.
But even on the early records it's never just basic lame treading of R'n'B water - Beefheart's rich, deep, wise and extreme voice set them above and beyond from most of the zeitgiest and the band were also pushing a much more authentic and uncivilised pulse. As the band progress on the next few albums they start to deconstruct and stretch the formula with awesome results (see Mirror Man, Strictly Personal), until they unleashed the truly groundbreaking Trout Mask Replica. This album probably deserves a whole thesis in itself, but basically in short - it's a pretty fuckin unusual album! On the first listen you may think it is an utter cacophony or some kind of atonal structureless free jazz, but on another listen or two you might be lucky enough to begin to hear the soul, inner melody and genius of this eschew and still highly avant-garde album (made in 69!).
It's important to say that in preparation for this the recording, the captain forced his band to live in the woods for many months before - isolated from all human contact with little food apart from beans(!). It is during these months that the captain seemingly 'broke' the musicians, forcing them to rearrange their whole cognitive thought process about how to play music. Eg. If a guitarist wished to play a long note, he must not do that and instead bend the string and play something high pitched with 'droplets'! When it came to leave the woods, the band had invented a completely new type of fucked up music and composed all the tracks for the album. My favourite example of this sound is the closing track of the album - 'Veterans Day Poppy'. It begins as raging blues, before it's somehow fades into one of the most beautiful and sad yet highly abstract tunes that I've ever heard (I'm still baffled how they've done it).
Anyway regardless of it being an avant-garde classic, I personally think this album has much more in common with the original 'blues' than all the 60's Yardbirds/Canned Heat/white R'n'B etc. I personally like quite a bit of all that stuff too, but if you get a chance to hear the very early recordings of the blues – that proper stuff ain't the lame 4/4 comfortable-shoe-shuffle still pedaled by the likes of Mark Knopfler - it's warty and
full of the personal rhythms and crags of the performer. I genuinely don't think that Beefheart was trying to be 'weird' with this stuff - he clearly fuckin means it!
Check it out!
Anyway, i'll probably follow on from this article with something about Lick My Decals Off Baby - which I think is their finest work. In the meantime check out the clip below to see them at their most fucked up.
- written by Joe at Cult Cargo.com
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Been a while since we chatted...just wanted to share this with you pre christmas...
Paul Shrimpton 2009 / Copyright Nuisance Films.
"TELEPORTAL"
Gory zombie horror....Video games can be bad for your health.
Many Thanks to Alex Chandon.
Music by The Dark Poets. ("Headfuck" - Leigh Dunning/James R Hunter - free download from www.darkpoets.com ) ( "Teleportal Theme" Simon Ward/James R hunter )
Music Copyright control 2009. The Dark Poets/Some Bizzare www.somebizzare.com
....FRIZZ RECORDS is proud to announce our fourth LP release...
LEILA ADU has been described as 'A Nina Simone for the Noughties', and her two acclaimed albums infuse a broadly 'art-rock' approach with elements of torch song, speakeasy blues, avant garde jazz, gamelan, post-rock textures, and a David Lynch style dreamlike b-movie melodrama. As her website has it, exploring the "dissonant edges of familiar forms", but with that kind of 'dissonance' that they once accused Thelonious Monk or Debussy of, the kind that soon betrays it's own compelling melodic and harmonic logic to the attentive listener...
'Dark Joan', Leila's third album as a solo artist, was recorded in Chicago with the legendary Steve Albini (PJ Harvey, Joanna Newsome, Nirvana, Pixies), and Albini's genius has been to strip her sound back to it's essence, and hold it's most distinctive qualities up to the light. It doesn't hurt that this is by far Leila's most powerful set of songs to date, and if anything we are lead even deeper into her world by the pictures painted with just piano (or in some cases harpsichord or a grime-encrusted electric piano) and that voice...
Capable of anything from delicate heartbreaking purity to a fearsome dramatic power, her powers are seemingly limitless, yet unlike most other singers of her calibre, never does she resort to melodrama or show-boating, or any kind of pastiche, instead she employs her resources fully in the expression of her distinctive musical vision and the deep well-spring of her imagination. Nothing ever sounds as though it could have not been sung...
....FRIZZ RECORDS is proud to announce our second official LP release...
"Modern Mediaeval" is the third LP from singer-songwriter DAVID GARSIDE, and the first to receive the full Frizz Records vinyl treatment. It’s also clearly the most fully-realised statement of his distinctive vision so far…
It’s an easy route to locate David in the tradition of his ‘classic’ influences (McCartney, Nick Drake, Stevie Wonder, Joni Mitchell, The Beach Boys, Love, Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel, Dexy’s…), but there are few songwriters working today that have absorbed these influences so fully, and arrived at a mature style as David has…
This is ’singer-songwriter’ music in the sense that it’s focus is on song-craft and the unfolding of the lyrical vision of a single individual, but if so then it’s definitely at the sophisticated end of the scale (’progressive’ if that term isn’t too loaded…), filed alongside ‘Bryter Layter’, ‘The Hissing Of Summer Lawns’, ‘Pretzel Logic’ or ‘Surf’s Up’...another FRIZZ RECORDS instant classic!
"Modern Mediaeval" can be downloaded from the iTunes Store
The album is also available on heavyweight vinyl LP, or on Digipack CD from www.FrizzRecords.com & all good retailers
....FRIZZ RECORDS is proud to announce our first official LP release...
"It's Not The Wand, It's The Magic" is the debut release from AUGUST, the London based band centred around the songwriting partnership between vocalist VEDINA MOSE and multi-instrumentalist / producer RAPHAEL MANN (MR HUDSON / JOY JOSEPH / ART TERRY), with master drummer CLEAN CUT MARK and clarinetist / vocalist MAREE CHOIE completing the core line-up, and a supporting cast including ART TERRY (keyboards), SHOHEI KAWAMOTO (AKA Japanese producer Baraki, Bass clarinet, soprano sax and flute), and KAI HOFFMAN (French horn)
Always an act that juggled a diverse set of influences, the album has been compared to artists as diverse as KATE BUSH, PRINCE, DE LA SOUL, SLY STONE, MADLIB, SERGE GAINSBOURG and THE DELFONICS, for its concoction of wild experimentation and traditional song craft, organic production and futuristic electronic touches, funk bass & drums and jazz & orchestral references, infectious melodies and lyrical flights of fancy...with nods towards classic soul, JB funk, Studio One, 60s pop, psychedelia, left field hip hop, new wave, doo wop, tropicalia, high life, & avant garde jazz, without any song ever fitting squarely into any of those categories...new music, basically...and an instant classic!
"It's Not The Wand, It's The Magic" can be downloaded now from the iTunes Store
The album is also available on heavyweight vinyl LP in a sumptuous gatefold sleeve, or on Digipack CD from www.FrizzRecords.com & all good retailers
TODOUNO es un proyecto de rock que incluye personas especiales. Algunos fragmentos del documental LIBRE ya se pueden ver en:/TODOUNO is a rock project that includes people with learning disabilities. You can watch some LIBRE documentary fragments at: www.myspace.com/todouno Encontranos en Facebook. Apoyá a TODOUNO/Find us in Facebok. Support TODOUNO.
ETHNIC GROOVES, FUNKY STUFF, WATHEVER YOU WANNA CALL IT. A HUGE CALF SKIN BASS DRUM THAT CAN'T LIE, VIRTUOSO GUITARS, ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES COMING OUT OF THAT HAMMOND B3 MONSTER. REAL MUSICIANS RAISED ON A STEADY DIET OF CHICAGO BLUES, MEMPHIS ROCKABILLY, STAX SOUL & KINGSTON DUB PLAYING THE KINDA MUSIC WHERE EVERY NOTE COUNTS. FANTASTIC DRUM SOLOS, ABSTRACT MOODS, NASHVILLE GUITAR LICKS, A TOUCH OF BE-BOP. NEW ORLEANS GUMBO, DEEP BASS, BOOM-BOOM-BOOM LOVERS, A SWAMPY BLUESY BACKGROUND, ORGANIC SOUNDS>THE ELECTROROOTS PROJECT by Fabian Jolivet - Featuring Rick Holmstrom, Skip Edwards, Freddy Koella, Deacon Jones, T. Nakamura, Pete Mazich, Jah Faith, Tony Martin, Oliver Steinberg, Geoffrey 'Mouth' Grange, Carmelo Luggeri, Botafogo, Ciro Fogliata, Michael Tempo, etc...
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