Jackson Browne vs. Buffy Sainte-Marie

Check out Jackson Browne's version of Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Piney Wood Hills" followed by Buffy's original 1965 recorrding.

Trevor Noah follows the money in music streaming

Trevor Noah looks into why streaming songs by your fave obscure artist isn't making them rich. Find out who's really getting paid. 

One For The Weekend: Gene Clark

Check out the rockin' version of "She Darked The Sun" from Gene's final concert on April 13, 1991. 

Finders Keepers compiles NWW list's German recordings

Strain Crack & Break Vol. 2 – a second helping of music from Steven Stapleton's Nurse With Wound List – is out June 18th.  

Here's the scoop...

With his ongoing commitment to like-minded archivist label Finders Keepers Records, industrial music pioneer Steven Stapleton further entrusts us to lift the veil and expose “the right tracks” from his uber-legendary and oft misinterpreted psych/prog/punk peculiarity shopping list known as The Nurse With Wound List. 

Following the critically lauded first instalment and it’s exclusively French tracklisting both parties now combine their vinyl-vulturous penchants to bring you the next Strain Crack & Break edition which consists of twelve lesser-known German records that played a hugely important part in the initial foundations of the list which began to unfold when Stapleton was just thirteen-years-old. From the perspective of a schoolboy Amon Düül (ONE) victim, at the start of a journey that commenced before phrases like kosmische and the xeno-ignant Krautrock tag had become mag hack currency, this compendium is devoid of the tropes that united what many would accurately argue to be the greatest progressive pop bands in Europe (namely CAN, Neu! and Kraftwerk) and rather shatters the ingredients across a ground zero landscape for both inquisitive fans and socially rehabbing musos to begin to assemble a unique self-styled identity. 

Exmagma dressed to impress

If Krautrock was the music that journalists told us lurked behind schlager (German pop) in the 1970s, then this record includes the music that skulked behind Krautrock and perhaps refused to polish its backhanded name belt. Including lesser-known artists like the late Wolfgang Dauner whose career proceeded and outlived the kosmische movement while consistently informing and outsmarting ‘em whenever they got stuck in their metronomic ruts, or how about Fritz Müller, the man who was to Kraftwerk what Stuart Sutcliffe was to The Beatles but had more in common with Yoko and quite rightly couldn’t give a shit about the Fab Four’s Hamburg roots. 

Elsewhere we have a plethora of German bands made for German audiences as they try and shed second hand flower power Americanisms and feel the benefits of much harder drugs and the realisations of difficult second album budgets while Kommune 1 newsflashes wipe smiles from everybody’s faces and replace them with opioid chic or acid-sarcastic grins. Bonzo Cockettes show us their Big Muffs and drummers ask for extra mics while Conny Plank goes for parliamentary office and gives babies good firm hand shakes for the camera. 

Strain Crack & Break Volume Two is the sound of Steve Stapleton’s sponge-like mind and the dividends of anyone who was brave enough to even peek inside those brick-thick gatefold covers never mind drop the needle, with tracks by Mr. and Mrs. Fuchs (aka Anima-Sound) who played their instruments completely naked throughout their anti-career alongside previously unpressed tracks by the scene’s leading Detroit-born African American drummer Fred Braceful who’s band Exmagma officially had the coolest record sleeves and track titles of ALL TIME (Torpedo Tits? Yes Please!). From an era where it was embarrassing to go into your local record shop and hum the tune over the counter, well that young lad Steve Stapleton was braver than that, and besides, these tracks are unhummable and at times unutterable. Did somebody in the crowd shout out for Joel Vandroogenbroeck! Good luck with that one. Stapleton is sharing. Even Stevens. 

Over forty years since Nurse With Wound’s first album was released, Finders Keepers Records and Steve Stapleton take connoisseurs of OUR kind of music, back to the disused elevator shaft towards ground zero. Arrriving at the same checkout from different departments, Finders Keepers and Nurse With Wound continue to sing from the same hymnal with this ongoing collaborative attempt to officially, authentically and legally compile the best tracks from Steve’s list, where many overzealous nerds have faltered (or simply, got the wrong end of the stick). 

After Strain Crack & Break Volume One merely scratched the surface of this DIY dossier of elongated punk-prog peculiarities, the second lavish metallic gatefold double vinyl compendium drives a much deeper groove, which, in accordance with Steve’s wishes, focusses exclusively on individual tracks of German origin – the country whose music forged the prototype of the NWW inventory in the form of his secondary school vinyl want-list in the early 1970s. 

Comprising of disassembled free jazz, unshowered stoner psych, hypnotic prog, deranged monk funk and fuzzed out Deutschmark bin bonzo beats this second volume of the series throws us straight back in the deep end, putting the Bad in Baden and the odour in The Oder with little need for cheap Cologne. 

Willkommen to another forgotten plateau found beneath the psychedelic underground, as Steve Stapleton and Finders Keepers dig new tunnels through the fabric of your vinyl wish-list, these German records are heavy, so find Solid Ground or watch you floorboards Strain Crack & Break before your bloody ears. 

Get a copy of Strain Crack & Break Vol. 2 via Bandcamp right here. Check out Association P.C.'s "Scorpion," Exmagma's "It's So Nice" and Brainticket's "Black Sand" followed by the complete tracklist. 

Various Artists - Strain Crack & Break Volume Two

1. Wolfgang Dauner - Output

2. My Solid Ground - The Executioner

3. Association P.C. - Scorpion 

4. Fritz Müller - Fritz Müller Traum

5. Exmagma - It's So Nice

6. Anima-Sound - It Loves Want To Have Done It

7. Tomorrow's Gift - Jazzi Jazzi

8. Out Of Focus - See How A White Negro Flies

9. Brainstorm - Snakeskin Tango

10. Thirsty Moon - Big City

11. Gomorrha - Trauma

12. Brainticket - Black Sand

Kyuss members Brant Bjork & Nick Oliveri reunite as Stöner

Stöner release their Stoners Rule debut album via Heavy Psych Sounds on June 25th. Check out two versions of "Rad Stays Rad"

Kevin Drew releasing new instrumental album as KDAP

Broken Social Scene mainman Kevin Drew is releasing his new instrumental album Influences via Arts & Crafts on July 16.

Here's the scoop...

KDAP (an acronym for Kevin Drew a Picture) is Kevin Drew. You may know him as the leader of Toronto indie-rock ensemble Broken Social Scene—but let’s imagine that he wasn’t. Instead, let’s imagine that the young man who spent his early 20s obsessing over Brian Eno’s ambient works, Morricone soundtracks, Chicago post-rock, and the early Warp Records catalogue never left the basement, never met his future BSS partner Brendan Canning in 1999, never discovered a wider community of musicians, and never worked up the nerve to sing about love and spit on stage in front of thousands of people. Now take that kid, time-warp him to 2021, hand him a smartphone with a DIY beat-making app, and drop him in a forest somewhere in the south of England. The result would sound something like Influences.

KDAP - Influences

Yes, like many records you’ll hear this year, Influences was a product of the pandemic. But it doesn’t so much capture the sound of lockdown as it does liberation, music unbound from the laws of traditional song structure and the crowd-pleasing pressures of fronting a popular rock band. The truth is, Kevin had been itching to make a record like this well before the world stopped turning in March 2020. After his two decades of playing with Broken Social Scene left him with a chronic back injury and a dearth of fresh songwriting inspiration, he longed for both a physical and aesthetic retreat, and to reconnect with the therapeutic powers of instrumental music that he first experienced as a teenager. The pandemic simply provided him with the time and space to finally make it happen, as he spent the summer of 2020 riding out COVID’s first wave in the London area.

But while the aptly-named Influences marks a return to the early inspirations that first prompted Kevin to make music some 25 years ago, it expresses those old impulses through an entirely new language, and exercises them in a completely different environment. This isn’t a basement record; it’s an outdoor record, written in real time during long walks through the woods of Slinford and along the canals of Islington on the smartphone production software Endlesss. For Kevin, this app wasn’t some mere time-killing toy, but a tool that completely transformed his approach to making music, its simple interface presenting him with infinite new possibilities and reigniting a childlike, what-does-this-button-do sense of experimentation. Instead of jamming with musicians, he was now interacting with his natural environment, intuitively switching up his beats and arrangements in response to changes in environmental stimuli, be it the discovery of a new vista or a cyclist whipping by and nearly killing him. The easy-flowing, artistically freeing nature of the music’s creation is reflected in the alias Kevin eventually adopted for the project—KDAP, a.k.a., Kevin Drew a Picture—and by the time he returned to Toronto following his UK retreat, he had accumulated nearly 45 song sketches.

Influences is positively pulsating with life, a kaleidoscopic constellation of strobe-lit electronics, rippling rhythms, and gleaming digital melodies that tap into a very 2021 feeling of existence.

Pre-order Influences right here. Check out "The Slinfold Loop" followed by the track list for Influences below.

KDAP - INFLUENCES 

The Slinfold Loop

Hopefully Something

Dooms Dive

Shadow Rescues

You and Me and Them

Wilner’s Parade

Explosive Lip Balm

Almost Victory (Keep End Going)

Happy 80th Birthday Lamont Dozier!

Celebrating composer Lamont Dozier's birthday with "Going Back To My Roots" and Teaspoon & The Waves' funky Soweto spin.