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- Albums and Singles
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
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samples:
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- Administrator
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- Jonathan Dean
- Albums and Singles
![JUDEE2 JUDEE2](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/judee_sill-heart_food.jpg)
More occult and religious imagery again, with a new thread of directness and honesty only hinted at in her first album: "I've been looking for someone/Who sells truth by the pound/Then I saw the dealer and his friend arrive/But their gifts looked grim/Now I'm tired of hanging on...Beautiful pearl, o when will you reappear?" The yearning for spiritual cleansing and reawakening is palpable throughout Heart Food, which despite its Chicken Soup for the Soul title, is nothing less than a cry to heaven from the darkest depths of hell. It's an absolutely remarkable album, and one that, if there were any justice in the world, would be mentioned at least as often as critically-acclaimed mediocrities like Carole King's Tapestry or Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. In "The Phoenix," Judee prays for salvation and rebirth in the midst of an eschatological nightmare: "On phosphorous wings the phoenix floated/The fires froze and the sea was hushed/And when I tried to speak, the sun imploded/And the ware will wait in my guts/Till the devil bites the dust." I don't think I'll ever get tired of the odd paradox of these songs, with lyrics worthy of David Tibet's most apocalyptic nightmares coexisting with muted easy listening-style arrangements for guitar, piano and strings. Heart Food's finest moment comes with the final track, the seven-minute "The Donor," in which Judee Sill builds a stunning choir of layered voices singing the Kyrie Eleison, transforming the liturgical hymn into a haunting, ritualistic call for mercy from a cruel and arbitrary God. After a long silence, the album oddly concludes with a brief Irish jig. Heart Food was Judee's swan song to the world, as the album again failed to ignite the interest of the public, and she dropped out of society, disappearing into an underworld of drugs and prostitution, only resurfacing with the news of her death from a heroin overdose in 1979.
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- Jonathan Dean
- Albums and Singles
![JUDEE JUDEE](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/judee_sill-judee_sill.jpg)
Sure, Judee had the same MOR production values and soulful twang as a Carole King or a Carly Simon. She had the same ability to pen honest, heartfelt lyrics that spoke to the universal human condition. Sure, her debut album was produced by Graham Nash and Bob Harris (her ex-husband and the producer of Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon). And yes, she was discovered by David Geffen and signed to the Asylum label, home to Mitchell and scores of other successful singer-songwriters. However, she also had a penchant for complex occult religious symbolism and a melancholy streak that could become downright depressing. She also struggled with a lifelong heroin addiction, a fact she never shied away from in her lyrics. Her songs were about yearning, romantic or spiritual, often both in one song. Judee navigated a wholly unique lyrical world full of angels and prophets in the shape of children, messiahs and demons in the shape of ex-lovers, and God and Satan as ever-present influences in her life. On her solitary radio hit "Jesus Was a Cross Maker," she resurrects a familiar Gnostic idea, comparing Jesus to Satan and vice-versa, pointing out the essentially enigmatic nature of both good and evil, and the hedonistic call of both. It's frankly not surprising that Judee Sill's music never caught on with a bigger audience, considering lyrics like these: "Once I heard a serpent remark/'If you try to evoke the spark/You can fly through the dark/With a red midnight raven/To rule the battleground'/So I drew my sword and got ready/But the lamb ran away with the crown." All of this coexisting with seemingly innocuous 70s folk production: warmly resonant nylon strings, gentle orchestral fills and the odd flourish of flute or clarinet. Adding to the strangeness, Judee's voice is almost always heavily filtered, fed through several doublers, triplers and harmonizers, lending an oddly psychedelic plasticity to her deceptively pastoral songs. Judee Sill is an incredible debut album, one that deserves to be rediscovered by a new generation of listeners. For years, it's been impossible to find this album or it's follow-up Heart Food outside of expensive Japanese bootlegs of questionable pedigree, or the super-expensive Rhino Handmade CD editions that came out earlier this year. Thankfully, 4 Men With Beards, a specialty vinyl reissue label out of San Francisco, has rectified this situation with a pair of reasonably priced vinyl reissues presented exactly as the original albums were upon their initial release, right down to Judee's personal message to the listener: "May you savor each word like a raspberry."
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- Jonathan Dean
- Albums and Singles
Tigersushi is obviously trying to exceed the benchmark they set for themselves with last year's Miyage mix orchestrated by vegan DJ collective K.I.M. This double-disc mix is billed as the second volume in the How To Kill The DJ series, and is by far the most schizophrenic, eclectic and downright random collection of tunes ever presented under the pretext of a continuous DJ mix. The first volume was a relatively tame affair mixed by Ivan Smagghe, containing a standard cross-section of danceable material drawn from vintage 80s sides, with a full complement of newer electroclash and dancepunk material.
Part Two, as conceived by DJ Optimo, takes a completely different tactic, preferring sheer volume and eclecticism to any notion of consistency. His bizarre behemoth of a DJ mix fuses together close to 70 tracks from a myriad different styles all over the musical map—from 70s psychedelic funk and rock to 80s Detroit techno, from leftfield disco to completely tangential trips into outsider, avant-garde and industrial noise music. On this particular voyage, it's not at all surprising to hear Soft Cell's "Sex Dwarf" rubbing shoulders with Carl Craig's "Demented Drums," or later to hear Gang of Four's "Damaged Goods" fade out into The Langley Schools Music Project's version of "Good Vibrations" (for the uninitiated, the LSMP is a gymnasium full of Canadian grade school kids playing gamelan percussion and singing guileless versions of famous pop songs).
Because of the sheer number and variety of songs selected for the mix, Optimo does not let any track play for very long, editing most down to one or two minutes, and endeavors seamless transitions between each, even when attempting something insane like fusing a mashup of Akufen and Monte Cazazza to a mashup of Nurse With Wound's "Two Shaves and Shine" with Blondie's "Atomic." I'm aware that this sounds completely fucking insane on paper, but it somehow succeeds. If it's not very satisfying in the sense of a dance-friendly party mix, it does appeal on a purely intellectual level, as hidden connections are revealed between disparate strands of music that might have been thought nonexistent. For all of my DJ ambitions, for instance, I never would have thought of gluing the bubbly tropicalia of Os Mutantes' "A Minha Menina" to Pablo's classic "Cissy Strut," but it sounds amazing.
The second disc, entitled Espacio for no apparent reason, forgoes the short-attention-span mixdown of the first disc in favor of letting each song play out in its entirety. As such, it's more of a "chillout" disc than the first, as thee infinite beat is not kept in perpetual motion, and tracks such as the Angelo Badalamenti theme to David Lynch's "Mullholland Drive" or Arthur Russell's beatless voice-and-cello "Another Thought" could by no stretch of the imagination considered dance songs. Kudos to Optimo for including such excellent, if completely random selections as Sun City Girl's "Opium Den" and The Only Ones "Another Girl, Another Planet" on the same disc. For sheer eclecticism and varied musical taste, Optimo's How To Kill The DJ Part Two is the one to beat, although beyond the initial novelty, I'm not sure what particular use it has for the average listener.
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- Jonathan Dean
- Albums and Singles
![miceandrats miceandrats](http://www.brainwashed.com/brain/images/jan_dukes_de_grey-mice_and_rats_in_the_loft.jpg)
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- Administrator
- Albums and Singles
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