we have no spooks in our house

I was planning to have this whole big long huge black-n-orange-toned Halloweeny post that woulda been full of dark and spooky tunage up in this space today...but various flavors of chaos and sad luck conspired to flip that script against my wishes. So instead, please find attached the most party-ready of the songs I had planned for All Hallows Eve alongside a set of tracks that coulda shoulda woulda gone up last week had the fates and stars and my own dumb ass had their collective acts together...

Phon.O "Trick or Treat (Funkstörung's Phunked Up Rmx)" - You want some candy? I'll put my mask on.... Here with a message for all you erstwhile ghosties and goblins who might be planning to go doorbell ringing tonight is Carsten Aermes--otherwise known as the German electronics wunderkind Phon.O--which features none other than Kevin Blechdom taking on the role of Bizarro 50 Cent in the candy shop. When Phon.O first turned up around 2000, he was putting out a fairly civilized and urbane variant of minimalist glitch-dub. But over the years he sought to "rough up" his image a bit, and ended up with last August's Burn Down The Town, a comparatively raucous full-length array of tracks featuring tropes from ghetto-tech to grime-dancehall to booty-bangin' hip-hop (Tigerbeat6, his North American distributor, calls the album "D'n'B meets BDSM").

Funkstörung's remix of "Trick Or Treat" doesn't try hard to make sense of Blechdom's lyrical anarchy, but it does jack the affair up with a precious dose of glitched-up, post-Cuisinart Prince-style funk, baking a much-needed layer of new jack soul onto what was already a fairly high-calorie dish. The song's peppered with all manner of fake-erotic grunts & groans, along with playground taunts and a bit of bewildering gangsta-feminíste balladeering towards the end (I die for my bitches! I die for my hoes!). It's sort of a traditional Haloween party tune recontextualized as an epileptic seizure. It whips though you and leaves you on the floor gasping for another bite. [grab both Burn Down The Town and the Trick Or Treat EP (which also features a Kit Clayton remix) from Forced Exposure. Bonus: You can get yr Kevin Blechdom solo releases there as well!]

The Drones "Sharkfin Blues" - The Drones' sound roars straight out of a solid Australian tradition of crashed and burned, alcohol-wrecked and relationship-ruined blues-rock; they sound like they've been raging for a thousand long days and weary nights from the same loveless and ancient outback pub that spawned acts like The Birthday Party, Scientists, Crime and the City Solution, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, the Beasts of Bourbon, and The Dirty Three. Every Drones song is an eschatology of sorts, sung from the viewpoint of people who haven't quite reached the end of the world yet but can see it quite clearly from where they stand.

"Sharkfin Blues" is from Wait Long By The River And The Bodies Of Your Enemies Will Float By, their enigmatically-named second album, which was released in April in their home country (where it's now up for the J Award for Australian Album of the Year) and had its North American debut last week. It's a true howling howitzer of a punk-rock blues ballad, lit aflame with soaring, distorted guitars and frontman Gareth Liddard's seemingly stretched-to-the-breaking point vox. But amidst the pain and the suffering implicit in this maelstrom, there's a certain sort of celebratory catharsis going on as well. The man is going down with his ship in this song, but he's taking the poisons of the world with him, lending us a momentary respite from the large and small insanities that plague our daily lives. [get it from Forced Exposure]

Coldcut "Everything Is Under Control (feat. Jon Spencer & Mike Ladd)" - Speaking of yowling, howling, raggedy-voiced garage rock 'n' roll bluesmen, here's Jon Spencer, doing what he does best alongside indie rapper Mike Ladd, in service of a forthcoming track by Coldcut that blends hip-hop beats with searing guitar licks and deep-bass synth pulses. Ladd weaves a dense rap thick with conspiracy theories and paranoia, systematically linking black helicopters and "Illuminati partners" with Dick Cheney and Rupert Murdoch. In the meantime, Spencer lays down the Voice of Authority, which wants you to know that everything's oh, clearly under control--in that charming "oh FEMA's on it's way, it'll be here any, um, day now" tongue-in-cheek kinda way. In other words: the world is coming apart at its seams, but if you just sit tight and keep watching Fox and Friends and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, you won't need to worry about a thing. Get on up and get down, baby. Your soul's under control. [The Everything's Under Control EP will be released November 14 and will contain this track plus a whole stack of remixes. "Everything Is Under Control" is the lead single from Coldcut's upcoming full-length album Sound Mirrors, which is due January 2006.]

Jan Jelinek "Lithiummelodie 1" - After all that noise and drama, you need to relax. This track from Kosmischer Pitch (Cosmic Pitch), Jan Jelinek's new album of mesmerizing, minimalist, loop-based sound constructions, might be just the thing.

Jelinek's a huge name in the electronic music scene that Phon.O (see above) left behind; his click 'n' cut constructions broke new ground when he used them to utterly recontextualize jazz music with 2001's Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records and soul classics in 2003's La Nouvelle Pauvreté, while his recordings under the names Farben and and Gramm broke new ground in microhouse, turning petri dishes into rave parties all over the world. Kosmischer Pitch may be Jelinek's masterpiece-to-date, though. Each track opens a window onto a pastel-hued wonderland of subtle sound, where sound loops and odd rhythms overlap, combine, reconfigure, and recontextualize each other over the course of long periods of time. In each case, seemingly simple layerings of sound reveal vast spaces of depth and discovery. It's one of those recordings that sounds slightly different each time it's played, depending on a wide range of variables, from the listening environment to the time of day to the mood you happen to be in when you press Play. There are rooms within rooms in this house and you can go on exploring them forever.

"Lithiummelodie 1" was my favorite of all the tracks on the album, mainly because I adore the way it starts out like a slowed-down minimal house groove, only with plucked guitar chords--and then slowly gets overtaken by what sounds like an entire tropical forest, and then fades away to a low, groaning hum before disappearing altogether. It's oddly majestic, in it's own small way. But to really get what I'm talking about, you need to hear this track in the context of the album as a whole. [buy Kosmischer Pitch at--yep, that's right--Forced Exposure]

((((^_^))))
Apologies for the three-week hiatus. Thanks to all of you who kept checking in these past several days!

NZ/OZ trip, less than two weeks away now...!

Will write more down here soon....