Не заметить Шона — персонажа внезапно появившегося в молодой киевской тусовке — было решительно невозможно. Уже больше полугода парень из Сан-Франциско живет в Киеве, преподает английский и потихоньку расширяет свой круг местных знакомств. Вернее, это сами новые знакомые находят его, потому что Шон Скермерхорн (он любит произносить свою странно звучащую даже для американца фамилию по слогам) — очень интересный персонаж. Парень в социально-культурном плане проделал путь от красти-панка с полуметровым ирокезом на голове до тедди-бой шеголя-преподавателя. Соответственно менялись и его музыкальные предпочтения, с которыми он нас сегодня и познакомит. «Лет ми спик фром май харт ин инглиш» — так сказать. Не поленитесь и прочтите!
I. Miles Runs The Voodoo Down
Miles Davis, Bitches Brew (1970)
— Bitches Brew. The best album ever made. In this, He intended to showcase the beauty of jazz improvisation. The Man is nearer to god than anything else.
— It was a tough choice for this track, the title track Bitches Brew is really the heart of this album. In really listening to Bitches Brew one can begin to actually feel the tension between the great leader and his followers, little traces of reluctance that evolve into spontaneous swelling waves of free form expression; a thick fog of white foam from the Rhodes pianos, massive swells from the horns who lead the waves jesters, jabs, and punches. The bass end acts as the shore, reacting to the waves, and maintaining their lapses. The percussion section is omnipresent as the waves crash down with their gong and all fades into the dissonance of oceanic abyss. The Bitches Brew Recordings are the ultimate noise experiment, the all-encompassing, most beautiful art form; utmost my greatest inspiration.
— Miles Runs The Voodoo Down comes along side B at a time when the tension has nearly evaporated and everyone seems to focus more on the groove, with more of an objective in sight, and a deeper understanding of direction and purpose can be felt. It’s spiritual shit, that Voodoo, dig?
II. Suită Maškaradă
Taraf De Haïdouks, Maškaradă (2007)
- In this group there’s around twelve musicians, aged twenty to seventy eight, they’re from a small three thousand person commune in Romania called Clejani about 40 km south of Bucharest. They’re known to be followers of the ancient musical traditions of the Romani-Gypsies called the “lautari."
-In this recording they decided to tackle a handful of classical compositions of such composers as Bela Barok, Isaac Albéniz, Aram Khachaturian, and probably a few more. Needless to say, they do it beautifully; they have maintained their own incredibly unique virtuoso character into this magnum opus.
-As for the question of why I nitpicked this track out of all their recordings, truth is it’s been the first thing I tune on for the past few weeks. It is consuming. This track particularly is deeply emotional, it seems to weep at times, to confess love, to forgive, and to seize its listener higher and higher unto the heavens. As the initial piano notes resonate, they hit you, their blossom enraptures you, the violins and accordions join the procession swinging in from low to high in a mourning hymn while the bass and cimbalom align perfectly chanting the steps to be taken onward. There’s some kind of pan-flute that perfectly accents the strings at the very highest notes, it all takes place as if at a funeral of their most beloved brother, a minor suite fête. The mark of an earthly departure and one of eternal rebirth, for in that very mourning hymn one can still sense hope, as if it’s us who has departed and it is us who is eternally bound. As the cimbalom takes lead we’re face to face with all earthly things, until the string section returns in full force; we’re sent soaring unto a blinding abyss as we’re reminded of the richness existence can offer. There is nothing more authentically, genuinely, sincerely beautiful that listening, really listening to these mere few minutes.
III. Только С Тобой
Ленинград, Мат без электричества (1999)
— To me this is the sound of post-soviet Russia and Eastern Europe; young, harsh, hedonistic and strong, yet incredibly attractive. With the alluring punch of the Balkan brass-esque harmonies I envision Saint Basils Cathedral in all its grandeur, of Russia's architecture, history, art, the general feeling that comes to mind when I think of ‘our dear mother Russia.’ It's a beautiful, powerful sound. The bass leads you, drags you gently and lifts you up, caressingly across the floor, the brass elevates you, soaring around Basils surreal golden domes, and the man in front reminds you it’s all human, of his emotion, of his violent yet sincere and humane demeanor.
— It's something else, so much more than any kind of punk or balkan brass that has preceded it. Especially so when noting its context of being birthed merely a decade after the collapse of the soviet union with all the chaos of the 1990s in Russia that proceeded the fall. To achieve full-supreme indulgence, I advise the entire Мат без электричества album rather loud, among the company of Russian bears and with a large bottle of водка, black bread, garlic, and salo.
IV. B Ward
Rudimentary Peni, R.P. EP (1981)
— The name is pronounced phonetically, just as it sounds; the best ‘punk’ band ever. How does one attempt to bring justice to an artist with merely forty-two seconds of their work? One cannot. However, of The E.P’s of R.P. this is a great forty-two second introduction at seeing what you might begin to experience. Of the most popular tracks on this EP and the Farce EP, this one is rather underplayed. Within the first few seconds you’ll hear the characteristically RP British guitar muff, a psycho speedy synth-jazz-like bass line, Blinko’s gremlin sounding aie yai yai yai’s, a speedy snare roll into the first line: “discord in B-ward, a cliché never bored.” Every fucking time I hear a line from this band, every single time, I think of how I’ve yet to get that damn Rudimentary Peni tattoo, and how much I want it. I think of my punk youth, of smashing the state with anarchy and 40z, of blasting this album in my Mothers car while I waited for her in the parking lot of a grocery store and plotted anarchic schemes of against my high school. This band along with Crass and Subhumans top the genre and the era! It was hard not to choose either of those bands for this track, so please, do yourself the education and listen to everything those two and this band have recorded! “[…] Discord in b-ward siggy siggy siggy fraud? Discord in b-ward a goal that's never scored. Discord in b-ward excreaciating smell hell! Discord in b-ward just trust in your lord. Discord in b-ward eaten not gnawed. Discord in b-ward good deeds fast flawed.”
V. Choking On A Piece of Meat
Poets of Rhythm, What Goes Round (2002)
— Can you really trust anyone who doesn’t listen to funk? No, of course not. That’s why I’ve brought you this raw funky piece of Curtis-nostalgic instrumentalism, it will, if given proper mind, in fact melt your face off and put ‘soul’ back into your vocabulary. The band is rumored to be rooted in Berlin, rumor i.e. wikipedia. I say rumored because it’s hard to believe these dudes aren’t straight from The South, especially so as such masterpieces on this album have the chorus of “funky, funky North Carolina.” Further in my skepticism is the fact that this album was recorded in the twenty-first century. Too fucking good to be true.
— Of course again, it was a tough choice for this track, between Poets of Rhythm another group called The Whitefield Brother, who if you haven’t heard are Uber-mind blowing. Mixing elements of contemporary rap, soul fueled cool-brass parts, along with funky funky African rhythms, with jazzy-slick bass lines, their Eathology album (2009) is obscenely good, it’s baad. I would kill to see it in action.
— Thus, if we take that very leap of faith in our dear Internet resources, the “rumors” come to tell us that the former band includes members of the latter. Not necessarily surprising given all the authentic African/ African-American influences of rhythm and soul in both these groups. But these guys can’t be white. They just can’t. Thanks to youtube it has been brought to my attention that these dudes are in fact very white, and are very much from Germany, who also very much possess an incredible capacity to grove as if it was their natural bread and butter.
— Getting into the track, within the first notes of the horn section you instantly feel it in your blood, and if you don’t, you have to realize you’re inhuman. Your head starts to move automatically in each direction, your foot begins to tap, and you clap your hands, you clap those hands! The organ sucks the sweat from your pours and causes you to look upward and massage your face in a mixed attempt to keep it from melting off and trying to believe your own ears. The guitar wah hits you in the gut. Before you know it, those chocolately-sweet two minutes and twenty-four second are gone. You’re left like a fiend in Harlem circa 1976 with out no juice. The meat is a tender fillet-mignon, so juicy, so rare, you never want it to end, but as the title indicate you too have choked On A Piece Of Meat and thus hacked it back into oblivion. The only way to renew your fix it is to find this album in its entirety on vinyl, invite a woman over, or maybe three, regardless of your sex preference, smoke some grass, drop the needle, see what happens…
Get down.
