Sibylle Baier - Colour Green

Ive been meaning to upload this for a long time now but I simply forgot. Sibylle Baier, man oh man what a lovely fraulein. I fall madly in love with her each time I put this record on, simply one of the best folk records ever made. A friend calls her the only singer/songwriter in the same league as Leonard Cohen, female or otherwise, I wont argue that.



"Sibylle Baier is a German folk singer and actress whose musical abilities achieved belated recognition with the 2006 release of the album Colour Green, compiled from songs she had recorded in the early 1970s.
Having played guitar and piano as a young girl, she was moved to write her first song, "Remember The Day", after taking a road trip with a friend across the Alps to Genoa, via Strasbourg.
She appeared in Wim Wenders' 1973 film Alice in the Cities, and her music is also featured in Umarmungen und andere Sachen (1975) and in Wim Wenders' "Palermo Shooting" (2008) . Baier opted not to pursue an acting or singing career, and eventually moved to America where she concentrated on raising a family."



"The songs that went on to make up her album Colour Green were home reel-to-reel tape recordings Baier had made in Germany between 1970 and 1973. Some thirty years later her son Robby compiled a CD from these recordings to give to family members as presents. He also gave a copy to Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis, who in turn passed it along to the Orange Twin label. Orange Twin released the album in February 2006. She is expected to release a second studio album." [wiki]

to-nite

Wizz Jones.

For Lorraine:
An influential yet overlooked figure in the UK folk scene. Wizz plays with amazing technique and fast paced licks accompanied by breathie vocals with beautiful lyrics. He's chums with Bert Jansch of the Pentangle and artists such as Roy Harper and John Martyn regard him as a direct influence.




It looks like its'a dying, but its hardly been born.



Los Angeles, city of the angels. Wrong place to be if you're looking for a friend.

Bert Jansch - S/T

"Bert Jansch, is a Scottish folk musician and founding member of the band Pentangle. He was born in Glasgow and, in the 1960s, he was heavily influenced by the guitarist Davey Graham and folk singers such as Anne Briggs. He is best known as an innovative and accomplished acoustic guitarist but is also a singer and songwriter.
He has recorded at least 25 albums and has toured extensively starting in the 1960s and continuing into the 21st century. His work has influenced such artists as Johnny Marr, Bernard Butler, Jimmy Page, Ian Anderson, Nick Drake, Donovan and Neil Young, and earned him a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2001 BBC Folk Awards."


Nick Drakies might recognize "Strolling down the highway"

Neil Young - On the Beach

One of Neil's absolute best and part of the Ditch Trilogy.

played the silver fiddle

Tim Buckley - Lorca

"Lorca took this lilting, jazzy aesthetic further in, and further out: Buckley elongated his songs into monumental, leisurely trajectories, expanses of Song, whose emphatically simple laments take on the cyclical, hypnotic quality of something like Pibroch. Buckley (and the trio of Underwood, Colins and bassist John Balkin) eschew facile solo-ing or fancy improvisation for a taut, sensual exploration of tempo ... Tempo as texture, and texture as mood ... A transcription of late night intimacies, of sensual surety, a hushed and hallowed pulse. These are conversational songs. These are adult lullabies. These the sort of songs, as Lorca once said, that demonstrate that a moonlight night of one hundred years ago is the same as a moonlit night of ten years ago.

"Songs which were only a song still to come ... they guided the sailor towards that space where singing would really begin."
- Maurice Blanchot, The Song of The Sirens."

- Ian Penman

Git

Tim Buckley - Starsailor

Epochal.

"DESPITE ITS STRANGE time-signatures (‘The Healing Festival’ was in 10/4) and unusual instrumentation (flugelhorn, pipe organ, alto-flute), Starsailor still rocks, in its own singular and unorthodox way, thanks to the internal combustion engine stroked by Lee Underwood's scalding rhythm guitar, John Balkin's lunging and twisting bass, and the elegant frenzy of Maury Baker's drumming. Riding the group's implacable drive, Buckley's abstract expressionist ballet-for-voice is at its most untethered and gaseous. On the solo voice ‘Starsailor’, the singer multiplied himself into an astral choir. Sixteen strands of Buckley's eeriest vocal goo – overdubbed, but amazingly not treated with effects in any way – ooze and extrude, striate and shiver, forming a multi-octave meshwork of rippling filaments and quivering tentacles. It's like you're somehow inside Buckley's body – exploring its labyrinthine architecture of erotic energies and pre-verbal intensities, an inner-spatial honeycomb of bliss and dread, attraction and repulsion.

The only parallels for what he was doing on ‘Starsailor’ – and the most gravity-defying and ectoplasmic vocal manouevres on ‘Jungle Fire’ and ‘Healing Festival’ – are Gyorgi Ligeti's hair-raising choral music on the soundtrack of 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Diamanda Galas' Litanies Of Satan. The Ligeti comparison is all the more astounding given that Buckley had no formal knowledge of music theory, harmony, et al, and had never even taken a single voice lesson.

In rock, only Iggy Pop (the un-human snarls and expectorations of ‘TV Eye’) and Robert Wyatt (the muezzin-wail-meets-scat falsetto altitudes scaled in the final minutes of ‘Sea Song’) have taken the human voice as far as Buckley did on Starsailor. Weirdly, given that the album seemed to represent Buckley's final push to break free of being "a slave to the lyrics", the words were among his best ever – a sort of erotic-mystic Fauvist beat poetry, all "baited moans" and "I love you like a jungle fire". Larry Beckett, back on board, also came up with some triptastic imagery, like the title track's "Though I memorised the slope of water/Oblivion carries me on his shoulder/Beyond the suns I speak and circuits shiver." Starsailor was critically hailed, receiving a five-star review from jazz mag Downbeat and inspiring purple praise galore (Idris Walters described Buckley as a "vagrant in the void" and a "multioctave drifter in the oblivionosphere".) But the record bombed commercially, and the efforts at live translation went down like a cup of cold sick with audiences baffled by Buckley's forays into Dada-style bruitisme

or sound poetry – snoring, yodelling, barking. Devastated, Buckley sank into depression, drowning his sorrows with barbiturates, booze, and, when it came his way, heroin.

For a couple of years, he retired from the business, legendarily chauffeuring for Sly Stone and working in the ethnomusicology department of UCLA on the notation of Japanese and Balinese music. (Both these activities may actually be more of Buckley's tall tales.) He did a bit of acting, co-starring with OJ Simpson in a never-released movie called Why?, and writing equally unsuccessful screenplays like Fully Air-Conditioned Inside, the story of a struggling musician." - Simon Reynolds

Song to the Siren

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks - Real Emotional Trash (2008)

BAPZ!

Jon Brion.

I was just in a well-spirited argument with Abe about all this horseshit thats been passed off as music these days, I found it unfair that crap like MGMT and The Pains of Being a Ridiculously Long & Overzealous Name, gets praised til' kingdom come, true musicians and visionaries get the shaft. Case in point: Jon Brion.
Im tired of talking about how much I want to see Charlie Kaufman's opus Synecdoche New York, each time I mention that Jon Brion did the soundtrack, all i get are blank faces. "the guy that did the Punch-Drunk love soundtrack! I Heart Huckabees! Magnolia too!" Nothing. Then I have to get into this whole thing about how he produced Elliott Smith's Figure 8, Aimee Mann, The Wallflowers, Kanye West(UGH!), Eels; and that Fiona Apple album that never came out(seeing as Brion made it "unmarketable").
In 2000 Brion finally got selfish and cut a record of his own. Some would say that his past collaborations are heavy influences but he comes into his own. Extremely catchy, beautiful and heartbreaking all at the same time. Elliott Smith fans should feel right at home. One of my favorite pop records, gems throughout, it is out of print and underappreciated to say the least. Do yourself a favor, put that "The Fray" album in the microwave set it to 30 seconds, enjoy the fireworks(probably 1000x more entertaining than the album itself) come back here, and download Meaningless.


I don't easily forgive like I used to
And I seldom get carried away
No, you don't have the pull that you used to
But you can still ruin my day
Oh, you can still ruin my day


PT Anderson is a semi-deity


I cannot fucking wait.


"The Grays were a short-lived supergroup comprising singer/songwriters/multi-instrumentalists Jon Brion, Jason Falkner, Buddy Judge, and Dan McCarroll.
They only released one album, the out-of-print but highly regarded Ro Sham Bo (1994) on Sony/Epic Records"

Scott Walker - Tilt

This ain't the Scott your mom listened to.

"Tilt was Scott Walker's first album following over a decade of silence, and whatever else he may have done during his exile, brightening his musical horizon was not on the agenda. Indescribably barren and unutterably bleak, Tilt is the wind that buffets the gothic cathedrals of everyone's favorite nightmares. The opening "Farmer in the City" sets the pace, a cinematic sweep that somehow maintains a melody beneath the unrelenting melodrama of Walker's most grotesque vocal ever. Seemingly undecided whether he's recording an opera or simply haunting one, Walker doesn't so much perform as project his lyrics, hurling them into the alternating maelstroms and moods that careen behind him. The effect is unsettling, to put it mildly. At the time of its release, reviews were undecided whether to praise or pillory Walker for making an album so utterly divorced from even the outer limits of rock reality, an indecision only compounded by its occasional (and bloody-mindedly deceptive) lurches towards modern sensibilities. "The Cockfighter" is underpinned by an intensity that is almost industrial in its range and raucousness, while "Bouncer See Bouncer" would have quite a catchy chorus if anybody else had gotten their hands on it. Here, however, it is highlighted by an Eno-esque esotericism and the chatter of tiny locusts. The crowning irony, however, is "The Patriot (A Single)," seven minutes of unrelenting funeral dirge over which Walker infuses even the most innocuous lyric ("I brought nylons from New York") with indescribable pain and suffering. Tilt is not an easy album to love; it's not even that easy to listen to. First impressions place it on a plateau somewhere between Nico's Marble Index and Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music -- before long, familiarity and the elitist chattering of so many well-heeled admirers rendered both albums mere forerunners to some future shift in mainstream taste. And maybe that is the fate awaiting Tilt, although one does wonder precisely what monsters could rise from soil so belligerently barren. Even Metal Machine Music could be whistled, after all. " - Dave Thompson

Tilt

Storefront Hitchcock.

Jonathan Demme(Neil Young: Heart of Gold, Philadelphia, Silence of the lambs) brings us a great Robyn Hitchcock concert film in... well... a storefront.

Syd Barrett - Wouldn't You Miss Me?

A well-curated comp of Syd's best solo work. Some mighty fine and demented songs here. Enjoy the work of the world's most notorious psychedelic casualty.

Opel

Robyn Hitchcock - Black Snake Diamond Röle

Robyn Hitchcock is fuggin great. Black Snake Diamond Röle is his debut disc after departing the seminal band The Soft Boys. (Ill post some of their stuff later on) This album is highly enjoyable on many levels, musically, lirically and personally. It feels like a cool friend of yours laying down some tracks, really honest bared down lyrics, funny at times. Reminiscent of an early John Cale with a Zappa wit. If your a singer/songwriter-o-phile like myself this is a must have.

Do policemen sing?

Robyn Hitchcock - Invisible Hitchcock

Outtakes and such.

ey yo gimme dat shieet.

Scott Walker - 30th Century Man

I fucking love Scott Walker, I want you to love 'im too. If you're not familiar with the man here's the trailer to his documentary, featuring Bowie and Johnny Marr paying dues.

 Here's a Comp featuring some of his best work, I would've included "Mathilde" in there but thats just me. 

skeet skeet

here's "Mathilde" just for kicks:

Robert Wyatt - Old Rottenhat

For Howard.

More Wyatt greatness. This is an explicitly political album, and altogether darker and pessimistic.

PLA

Robert Wyatt - Ruth is Stranger than Richard

For Howard.

More amazing songwriting from the Seer of Canterbury, his third album. Includes Eno on "anti jazz ray gun".

Soup

Robert Wyatt - Rock Bottom

For Howard.

Go get "Comicopera" and enjoy the work one of the greatest songwriters of all time. And then get this masterpiece, his second album and to me still his best. Listen to "Sea Song", with a coda that melts the sternest heart, and you'll know why it's one of my top five favorite songs ever. A monumental achievement by Mr. Wyatt.

Hit the Road

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - The Good Son

More magnificent songs from Saint Nick. Includes "The Weeping Song" and "The Ship Song".

The hammer came down

Vintage Violence.

If you haven't heard this album you should be down right ashamed. 

download right now.

Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds - Tender Prey

Their third album, probably my favorite. Includes "The Mercy Seat", the heartbreaking "Watching Alice" and the menacing "Mercy". Almost perfect.

Get it