#it's SUCH a good album opener. those opening chords just chime in like a bell being rung

[daddy-long-legssss]

She's Thunderstorms

"I remember writing this one when there was a storm going on. They get like mad storms over there [in New York], like, apocalyptic. I’m always trying to think of different interesting ways to like describe somebody but compliment them too. So in that one, I like the idea that she’s not even a thunderstorm, she’s more than one. I quite like the fact she’s plural. ‘Thunderstorms’ meaning just, y’know, awesome!"

[x]

[rocknutsvibe]

Top 10 Byrds Songs

I’ve found myself dipping into The Byrds catalogue a lot more ever since Tom Petty passed away. Petty’s cover of “I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better” got me going one day, and ever since then I’ve been rediscovering the brilliance of these guys. I keep thinking that if things had worked out differently they could have been the definitive American Beatles, one of the three or four greatest bands of all time, but sadly, in the end The Byrds just couldn’t hold everything together.

What an amazing array of talent they had. Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Chris Hillman and Gene Clark were excellent singers, songwriters and musicians, each and every one of them, and that is some kind of versatility. They were highly influential Rock pioneers, and many if not most of the songs on this list were highly original and truly trailblazing.

I have deliberately included only one Bob Dylan cover, the big one that launched their career. If the Byrds had a fatal flaw it may have been doing too many Dylan covers. They officially recorded at least 20, which is ridiculous, and it’s also sort of like cheating because you know the songs are already good. More importantly, your reputation as a major musical innovator is compromised if you’re covering somebody else’s work so much of the time.

If The Byrds had made twenty or even ten more songs as good as the ones below instead of doing 20 Dylan covers, who knows how big they might have been? Easier said than done, but as the saying goes, to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven. Or in the words of modern day street poets, it is what it is.

  10. Mr. Spaceman

Did a young Tom Petty hear this song on the radio in 1967 and say to himself “that’s what I will sound like someday”? It sure seems like it because it’s all there, the vocal inflection, the humor, the gifted songcraft. And another hint of the country direction the Byrds were headed in.

  9. Tribal Gathering

David Crosby never felt his contributions were given a fair hearing in the band, and the truth is that the Byrds never moved much towards the jazz-flavored stylings that Crosby favored. If they had given Crosby more space The Byrds would have made more music like this, the same kind of signature sound Crosby would eventually bring to his new partners Stills and Nash.

  8. So You Want To Be A Rock ‘N’ Roll Star

It was early ’67 and people were already getting jaded about Rock Stardom. This short and sweet slice of scathing satire was apparently inspired by the Monkees, the pre-Fab Four. But dig the exotic rhythms, Chris Hillman’s amazing bass line, and Hugh Masekela’s trumpet flourishes, I’ve never heard another song remotely like it.

  7. Hickory Wind

A best-of Byrds list has got to include something from Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, generally believed to be the album that gave birth to Country Rock, and it’s got to be a song by the grievous angel himself Gram Parsons, the driving force behind the band’s hard country turn, and a shooting star who deeply influenced Rock before tragically flaming out at age 27. You can’t get any closer to the root than he did.

  6. Wasn’t Born To Follow

A lot of people really love this one because it was featured in the movie Easy Rider, a perfect fit because breezy, rootsy Byrds music works so well on an open highway on a sunny day. You should try it if you haven’t already. The band manages to give this Goffin/King number both a country and a psychedelic treatment, a rare double in the same song.

  5. Chestnut Mare

In 1969 Roger McGuinn was one of a number of Rockers who wanted to combine their music with theater, it was the thing to do back then. McGuinn’s country Rock opera never got made but a few songs survived, including this shimmering, spellbinding cowboy story which was a big hit in the U.K. And we all know the horse is a metaphor for something.

  4. I’ll Feel A Whole Lot Better

Track 2 on their debut album, written and sung by drummer Gene Clark, again, this is pure pop perfection that should have been a huge hit. You can hear the Lennon/McCartney influences in the chord changes and structure, but those influences would disappear by the next album as the band found its own confident voice.

  3. Mr. Tambourine Man

Any one of these top three Byrds tracks could be their very best, I could flip a coin to choose between the three of them. But this is the one that started it all. It begins with one of the most memorable licks in Rock history, one that McGuinn ripped off from Bach, and it alone would have made the song stand out. But then the incredible harmonies kick in, bringing Dylan’s vest-pocket mythologies to the unwashed masses for the first time, and suddenly we’ve got a significant cultural artifact on our hands, Folk Rock was being born, and the magic swirling ship was just setting sail.

  2. Eight Miles High

The Byrds were the leaders of the Country Rock movement, but you could also argue they were Psychedelic Rock pioneers too. This song blew a lot of minds when it came out in March 1966. This was six months before the Beatles’ Revolver and its psych trailblazer “Tomorrow Never Knows”, and nobody had ever heard the kind of psychedelic and atonal guitar playing that McGuinn lets rip on “Eight Miles High”. McGuinn said he was channelling Ravi Shankar and John Coltrane and wasn’t intending to be psychedelic at all but it doesn’t really matter. The track was a game changer and one of the most important songs in Rock history.

  1. Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season)

McGuinn’s Rickenbacker chimed like church bells across the land in the Fall of ’65, heralding nothing less than a new awakening for a new generation. You can still taste the bittersweet in it today, hope for the future tinged with the sadness of the past, the wound of JFK’s assassination still fresh at the time. Lots of genius at work here: McGuinn’s arrangement, Pete Seeger’s melody and two big lyric contributions – the repeated title phrase plus the words “a time for peace I swear it’s not too late” – and whoever wrote the rest of these insightful, powerful, timeless words in the Book of Ecclesiastes.

So what are your favourite Byrds songs?

Photo credit: By Joost Evers / Anefo (Nationaal Archief) [CC BY-SA 3.0 nl (http://ift.tt/2CeOqg8], via Wikimedia Commons

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[ricardosousalemos]

Shinichi Atobe: From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art

It might not feel like it now, at a time when the internet has rendered so many mysteries of the era moot, but from the mid 1990s until not long after the turn of the millennium, Berlin’s Chain Reaction label was among the most cryptic operations in electronic music. Label heads Moritz von Oswald and Mark Ernestus, better known as Basic Channel, kept a defiantly low profile, and the label’s artists trafficked in a dizzying array of aliases; some, like the solo project known simply as Various Artists (Torsten Pröfrock, aka T++, Erosion, et al), continue to flummox databases decades later. The label’s sound didn’t exactly lend itself to transparency, either: grainy dub techno emphasizing collective ethos over individual ego, in which shadows and murk threatened to drown out techno’s steady footfall.

Chain Reaction’s most enduring mystery came with its penultimate release, in 2001: Ship-Scope, a near-perfect EP of shimmering ambient techno credited to one Shinichi Atobe, a total unknown. Unknown he remained: Chain Reaction gave up the ghost two years later, and Atobe dropped out of sight, seemingly for good. Many listeners assumed that he was really another Chain Reaction artist in disguise. Then, in 2014, Demdike Stare’s Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker, allegedly following a tip from the Basic Channel office, claimed to have tracked down the artist at home in Saitama, Japan; they came away with an album’s worth of unreleased material, some new and some archival. The result, Butterfly Effect, built upon Ship-Scope’s dream-world architecture with a tantalizing assortment of styles, from glistening, minimalist house to dissonant musique concrete to lumpy rhythm studies poised somewhere between Dettinger and Burial.

Whoever Atobe may be—and the promise of an upcoming live debut in Japan suggests that maybe he really is just a reclusive dude—the past few years have found the project definitively revitalized. Since Butterfly Effect, he has released a Ship-Scope reissue, the mini-album World, and the short Rebuild Mix 1.2.3 EP, a remix project in which Atobe’s hand obliterated all traces of the original. From the Heart, It’s a Start, a Work of Art fleshes out his catalog with 40 more minutes of music, and it is uniformly striking stuff. While not as wide-ranging as Butterfly Effect, it is richer and fuller than World, and though it retains ambient music’s atmospheres, it focuses squarely on dancefloor energies while amping up the emotional content.

That’s particularly true of its two most substantial cuts. In “Regret,” bright chords reminiscent of DJ Sprinkles flare over a bare-bones boom-tick rhythm, with hi-hats chirping like crickets. In “Republic,” a flayed open hi-hat suggests peak-time techno at its most severe, yet watery synths and midsection-caressing sub-bass suggest almost shoegaze-like vibes. Both tracks are little more than static loops, all but unchanging over the course of their nearly 10-minute run, yet their hypnotic repetitions and naïve melodies wrap you up in a kind of cocoon.

It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what it is that’s so enveloping, and so moving, about Atobe’s work. Some of it comes down to his tonal sensibility. Like “Rainstick” and “The Red Line,” from his debut EP, his best tracks here seem to emanate a rosy glow, and his chord progressions, simple as they are, are masterful exercises in tension and release. Not everything is such a wistful reverie, though. “The Test of Machine 2” sounds like an etude for melting wind chimes, while “The Test of Machine 1” hammers uneven kick drums over a backdrop of bell tones and mechanical clatter, like a fax machine eating an old Jeff Mills cassette.

For many, the most fascinating material here will be three tracks that build upon the Shinichi Atobe mystery. Before Chain Reaction ever released Ship-Scope, claim Canty and Whittaker, Atobe recorded a three-track EP that was cut to acetate—a vinyl-like material, often used for dubplates, more susceptible to wear and tear than the wax used in commercially released records—in an edition of five. But it was never commercially released until now, having been allegedly remastered directly from one of those crumbling acetates. “First Plate 1” is a luminous dub techno sketch that certainly sounds like it could have been recorded in 2000, with a muted, compressed quality reminiscent of a seventh-generation cassette dub. The vinyl crackle is even thicker and creamier on “First Plate 2,” a deliciously dubby stepper that suggests a more narcotic take on Basic Channel’s Maurizio project. And on “First Plate 3,” surface noise settles over a resonant dub-techno roller like a low mist hugging the countryside.

The story raises more questions than it does answers: Why were only five acetates made, and then no records pressed? Why didn’t they utilize the original master disk for the reissue, or, better, the original DAT or digital file? And why, if they really did work off of such a damaged acetate, did they choose to emphasize all that surface noise, rather than minimizing it? It’s impossible to tell how much of the sound design is intentional, and how much is a result of the alleged remastering process. But as with William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops or Burial’s “Distant Lights,” the degraded sound quality becomes an integral part of the music’s emotional experience. Wherever and whenever the music has come to us from, it wears all the signs of a great journey. And as with bards of yore, it’s the storytelling, not the veracity of the tale, that keeps us rapt.