When I first started DJing at KTRU again, there was this album in the new bin that always caught my eye, and why wouldn’t it?

I am shocked by how much I’m into this album.  I want to try to make my first hip-hop out of the first track at some point.  Also: math!

Remember how, in this blog’s first post, I geeked out on drumlines and said how I’ve always wanted to start a punk rock marching band?  Well, I think that what I meant was brass band.  I’ve spent a couple of hours this afternoon digging through shit on Emusic.  Of course, I should probably get ahold of some Dirty Dozen or Rebirth, and I probably will at some point.  But right this uninformed second, here’s what I think I’m going to end up with:

The New Birth Brass Band. Here is a video that makes me sad, not just because I was stupid enough to miss this. SERIOUSLY WATCH THIS IT RIPS AND LOOK THERE’S THE MCDONALD’S BY THE GREYHOUND STATION!

Oh, dancing white people. What are we going to do with you?

Okay, so then here’s the Youngblood Brass Band from Madison, WI.  Hopefully if I get their first album there won’t be any terrible rapping or spoken word.  Good rapping is acceptable (Talib Kweli is on it).

And lastly, the Gangbe Brass Band from Benin, who add traditional African percussion and singing.  You have to be fascinated by this kind of cultural conversation.  This I’m definitely buying.

The Wikipedia article up there hints at Polynesian brass bands towards the end.  oooOOOOooo!  Also, who should be in my punk rock brass band?

That is Steve Stein, aka Steinski. It’s an old picture, maybe from when he first started making music, I don’t know.  I found out about him a couple of weeks ago on Emusic via this retrospective.  I posted a much smaller thing about him at Metafilter.  However, I am still freaking out about how awesome his music is and how crazy his story is, so I’m going to post more stuff (including more music) here.

Steinski’s origin story is, to me, irresistible: back in 1983, white dude in his mid 30’s, hip-hop fan, ad guy, spends a weekend with his pal Doug “Double Dee” DiFranco in Doug’s recording studio putting together an entry for a Tommy Boy Records remix contest.  Sort of on a goof, mostly because they wanted to meet Afrika Bombaata and the rest of the judges.  The record they create becomes one of the most influential tracks in hip-hop and today’s remix/mashup culture: it’s the first pop record made up entirely of bits of other people’s music

Here’s that track.  If you want immediate proof of its present-day influence, skip to about 2:30 and think, “Girl Talk.”

Back in ‘83 there was simply no mechanism for clearing 60+ samples, so the record was never commercially released.  Nonetheless, it became a club hit and was followed up by two similar, and similarly awesome, records: Lesson 2 (James Brown Mix) and Lesson 3 (History of Hip Hop), my pers fav and with a great video to boot:

I’ve been a fan of hip-hop since I made my dad take me to see Breakin’ in the theater, and listening to The Lessons (as these records became known) has been a complete revelation, in no small part because hip-hop has referred back to these tracks over and over again. A couple of obvious examples: the final “What does it all mean?” sample in the Play That Beat remix (which became a Steinski trademark drop and came from here at 1:25) can be heard in countless hip-hop and techno tracks. The sample at 3:48 in Lesson 2? Yup (original original source).

As to the 2-disc What Does It All Mean? retrospective itself, he Lessons make up the first three tracks. The rest of the tracks on disc one are all clever, mostly good, some great, some intentionally unsettling (the JFK-assassination dance party of The Motorcade Sped On being a prime example).  Initially, disc one is all I picked up from Emusic because two discs by someone I wasn’t familiar with was too big a commitment, amirite?  When my credits re-upped, I grabbed disc two.

Holy.  Shit.

Turns out that disc two is an hour long mix Steinski created for Coldcut’s Solid Steel radio show, and it may be the best hip-hop mix I’ve ever heard.  Maybe.  Certainly one of the most incredibly dense and entertaining.  New samples, punchlines, ideas are thrown into the mix every few seconds.  He told me via email that it took him a year and a half to put the whole thing together and it fucking sounds like it (I was dumb enough to ask him whether or not it was performed live).

Oh, and Steinski was 52 years old when this aired in 2003.  I don’t know exactly why that blows my mind, but it does.  Dunno, to me this doesn’t sound like the work of an almost-AARP-eligible white dude.  This doesn’t either (btw, from 1:20 there into the next verse cracks me the fuck up every time).

For real, the What Does It All Mean? retrospective is one of the most bad-ass, entertaining recordings I’ve heard in I don’t know how long.  I’m obsessed.  Get it.  Get it.  Get it.*

Bonus material cribbed from my Metfailter post:

DJ Shadow, Cut Chemist & Steinski recreating The Lessons live: Part 1, Part 2
Steinski talks about the origins of The Lessons
Download all three of The Lessons at waxy’s blog
Steinski on NPR’s Sound Check

*although since most of this material existed as bootlegs for so long, much of it can be found on the web.  still.  pay the dude.

I first encountered Asa Chang on tour with Jana and John and Dan.  We had stopped by Revolver just to say hello and they gave us a bunch of CDs they had lying around for van listening.  I don’t remember what any of the others were.  And certainly none of us had heard of Asa Chang & Junray.

The first time we threw Tsu Gi Ne Pu on at random, Jana and I were both like woah.  I think that Jana pulled rank and claimed the CD for herself, although maybe I ended up with it.  If so, I have since probably lost it.  Oopsy.

In any case, besides just being awesome and weird, this “mini-album” and I shared a special moment. 

The last show of the tour, which was a financial disaster from beginning to end, was in LA and was fucking retarded (aren’t they all).  It was at some fancy jazz/singer-songwriter club, we got no drink tickets and drinks were retardedly expensive, no one was there to see Jana, we had to pay for parking, we were one of five acts (none of them local, I think) and, lastly and worst of all, the club paid us exactly $0.00.  So Dan peed on the bathroom floor and we bolted.  Fuck that shit.

The plan was to drive to El Paso (approx. 12 hours) and get a hotel room at the awesomely weird and moderately filthy Mesa Inn, a place my band had stayed at once or twice on various travels.

I’m not sure if I’m getting the timeline correct or not because I remember it being very late at night when we got there, which doesn’t make sense.  In any case, upon arriving we discovered that there were no rooms available there or at the equally cracktastic $25 hotel up the street.  After some exhausted and pissed-off conversation, it was decided that the thing to do would be to push through to Houston, another 12 hours.  Either it was about 4:30am when we got to El Paso and I agreed to take the first shift or I volunteered to start driving at about 4:30am provided that I was allowed to sleep immediately.

This, by the way, was the second time I’d participated in a 24-hour Los Angeles-to-Houston drive.  At least this time there wasn’t a deathly sick Heath trying to sleep on the floor of the van.

In any case, it was very early in the morning and I was the only person awake in the van.  I was alert and alone and happy in this warm little capsule containing my friends, hurtling through the mostly-otherwise-unoccupied West Texas interstate.  At some point when I’d run out of talking podcasts to listen to I threw that album on.

So this was the soundtrack as the sky started to slowly change colors behind a sillhouette of pitch-black mountains as I beat a path for our homes.  Have patience.  Download it. And listen to the whole thing–I think I actually pumped my fist in the air at the first climax midway through.  It was pretty fucking spectacular.

Asa Chang & Junray – Toremoro, from Tsu Gi Ne Pu

Today/tonight could be fun if you live in Houston.  Here are my aspirations:

• Woozyhelmet CD release at Artstorm…woah, Artstorm’s been around for over a year! Woah, Philip Durbin’s show is closing today!  I am definitely going to this.
• The Thing which I want to go to even though I don’t like jazz because 1. I like Nameless Sound and 2. I want to try to see more non-rock stuff.
• Noise and Smoke.

The sweet part is that all of this should be free for me due to my dumb/awesome day job.

LATER THIS WEEK:

• Danielson’s playing here on Wednesday.  Huh, it looks like Kork is no more and that Erik Carter and Jonathan Frye are doing it on their own.  You go, girl.
• I mostly let the whole “lots of bands skip Houston” thing slip past me because I don’t go to as many shows as I used to, but c’mon, Marnie Stern: you’ve got a day off before your Austin show and TWO DAYS OFF after it.  Everyone knows her new record is fucking great, right?  Marnie.  I know you’re only doing this once, but if you come play Houston I will find a way to scrape up $100, medical bills be damned.  Let’s see if we can work something out.

Oh wow, check out this awesome new video for my favorite song off of Marnie Stern’s new album.  Sorry, can’t embed.

A few quick things while I’m working on my first longish post.  I’m using writing muscles I haven’t used in forever, so it’s taking some time.

• I’m reading The Rest is Noise (see above) and it’s good so far, even if you don’t know shit about Schoenberg or Mahler or Wagner or whoever, like I don’t.  There’s also a sweet companion website with excerpts of some of the works discussed in the book, although I have yet to listen to any of them.  My plan is to use this book as a guide to stuff I should download on Emusic in order to get a better grasp on 20th century classical music.

I stumbled across a couple of interesting podcasts this week:

• The Tone Generation is about “the development of electronic music across the world in the classic era of analogue technology.”  I’ve only listened to the first episode so far and it was about British people making creepy clangy music that’s not much fun to listen to.  I find the subject interesting enough to give it a few more shots, though. Odeo, iTunes.
• Solid Steel was a radio show that the Coldcut guys started back in 1988.  I haven’t started downloading anything yet, but it looks like a lot of the podcast is made up of “best-of” archived stuff, and the “best-of” these guys in that era is probably pretty fucking tight.  Odeo, iTunes.

In high school I was a band fag.  Percussion.  Which was great because our football team blew and our band was great and commanded most of the rah-rah energy around.  I was really fucking good, too.  Then the fascists kicked me out.  Apparently it was minorly scandalous but I don’t really remember.  In any case, I will probably always have a boner for drumlines and drum and bugle corps and shit like that.  For instance, this:

Gets me every time.  What can I say.

Also, after listening to this album really loud in the car today I realized that despite having heard a healthy amount of Balinese gamelan stuff (mostly at KTRU) I had never actually seen it performed.  TOTAL INTENSITY:

Houston has a gamelan orchestra but my friend Elissa has barred me from joining it.  I have no idea why, but I’m sure she knows best.

So after happening across that Top Secret Drum Corps footage at the top, I remembered that I had wanted at one point to start a punk rock marching band, which I assume would be a small collection of people who halfway remember how to play their high school band instruments figuring out arrangements of “Oh Bondage Up Yours” and making up dumb marches, which sounds great to me.  Googling “punk rock marching band” doesn’t bring up as much as one would expect, but it did lead me to Mucca Pazza.  Check this shit out, fun starts at about 1:27:

Like that, only angry and with fire!

So I thought that that looked like fun, or at least like more fun than whatever you’re doing tonight, so I checked their tour dates and WOULD NOT YOU KNOW IT: they were here less than a month ago!  I heard nothing of this!  And where the fuck else would they play?

Photo from Breakfast on Tour.

Please note that Benjamin Wesley played, too, and I’ve been meaning to catch him.  WHY WAS I NOT ALERTED?