I’m listening to Brainwashed radio on the prehistoric tangerine iBook in the kitchen while I’m making pancakes for the fam on this fine Saturday morning. Some excellent tunes have wandered by, including:
- Cabaret Voltaire – Here to Go [Extended Mx]. Came in in the middle of this, but it made me want to dance. I suspect that WeatherGirl and Sub-Evil Boy would have dug it, which isn’t true of much stuff Brainwashed is likely to play :-).
- Michael Prime – Timeslips. Some cool ambient sound stuff. Reminded me of several ReR records, including Lauren Weinger’s wonderfully atmospheric Silo, Peter Cusack’s very cool (ho ho!) Baikal Ice, and Chris Cutler’s excellent pair Twice around the earth and There and back again.
- Hox – 7f’s. Some wonderful heavy-beat noise dance fun. Sub-Evil Boy couldn’t help jamming out a bit when he wandered through with some dishes. I could definitely imagine spending money on that…
- The Hafler Trio – The Closed Bread/An Elderly Testament. More cool ambient stuff, but much more constructed (vs. found) than the Michael Prime piece. Reminds me of Tod Dockstader and David Less Myers’ Bijou.
I quite like both Brainwashed’s radio and podcast, and have often thought that ReR really ought to do something similar. Their music is pretty hard to conceptualize, especially if you’ve not listened to much of it before, so I think written descriptions aren’t a super effective way of conveying how cool some of it is. A podcast on the other hand…
Sure, it would require some careful editing (lots of their releases are very long, like Fred Frith’s recent Impur, which clocks in at nearly an hour), and I’m sure they’re running on a shoestring, but Brainwashed certainly shows that it’s possible. I’ll bet there’s some clever fan or three out there that would do something like this in return for access to the catalog.
Maybe I should send them an e-mail encouraging them to look into is…
