VIDEO: Wreckage Of My Past (trailer)

MTV turned an Ozzy Osbourne interview into a running joke which helped put him in the spotlight to an audience who knew nothing about his work with Black Sabbath and his solo career. There is much more to the man than the reality show he was a part of, and this forthcoming documentary is an attempt to show him in a different light.

It’s called Wreckage Of My Past, directed by Mike Piscitelli. Older Ozzy fans may have felt his journey into reality TV was an unusual one, so if Ozzy was once proud to sing “Mama I’m Coming Home”, maybe this is his homecoming.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=4621976&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=ffffff&fullscreen=1

WRECKAGE OF MY PAST from MIKE PISCITELLI on Vimeo.

RECORD CRACK: Frank Gossner shows what true record digging is all about

When record collectors talk shop, conversation can often lead to someone saying “damn, someone must be sitting on a pile of those records”. This is a photo of Frank Gossner, an avid collector of Afrobeat music from West Africa who has turned his love of African music into a career that has lead to doing DJ sets and compiling reissues for record labels.

This photo is a document of a recent journey to Ghana and Nigeria, but you’ll have to read his journey towards the records. The actual color photos of what he found are amazing, one of the photos is captioned “My head was about to explode”. Any of us who have done any level of digging and collecting will know what it means to find something decent, but this is, in the words of the Geto Boys, the other level of the game.

You can find out what I mean by clicking to this entry on Gossner’s Voodoo Funk blog. This is that cache DJ Shadow referred to in Scratch, that mountain many of us aspire to find someday, even if it means wearing a gas mask.

Some of the records found on this trip have been compiled for a compilation album called Lagos Disco Inferno,to be released on March 16th by Academy LP’s.

An older interview with Gossner can be found here.

(Mahalo nui to Stephanie “DJ Stef” Ornelas for the link.)

SOME STUFFS: Muneshine & Saint are now The Residents (but not The Residents)

From Toronto you have Muneshine.

From Long Island, New York you have Saint.

Together, they are The Residents, and when they released the album Open House in Japan last year, fans of both of them were wondering when it was going to come out stateside. Through Domination Recordings, they are making the album available as a free download. Open House features Rob Swift, Understanding, Edo G., Cadence and Ohmega Watts among others.

You can download it by going here.

Keep in mind that the hip-hop duo known as The Residents have nothing to do with the well known San Francisco-via-Louisiana avant-garde band who have been around since 1969.

There is a slight tie-in, since the cover art for Open House seems to be based on the homes from the intro to the 1980’s ABC sitcom, Full House, which was based in San Francisco:

RECORD CRACK: Portland’s UHF tunes into the other frequency with new album

UHF are a band out of Portland, Oregon who combine psychedelic and psych rock with pop. By doing this, they know how to corrupt your emotions, as they have for the past twelve years.

They have a new album coming out called Here Come The Ghosts (Second Story), a 21-track album that is being released as a 2-record and 2CD set. The CD and MP3’s can be purchased through CDBaby, and the vinyl version will most likely be made available through UHFweb.com.

If you happen to be in or near Portland on Saturday, March 6th, the band are having an album release party at The Secret Society (116 NE Russell {map}), with local stalwarts Derby and Ravishers starting up the festivities.

RECORD CRACK: N.W.A’s “Straight Outta Compton (Explicit Content Only Version)”

Five years ago, someone out there created a version of the N.W.A song “Straight Outta Compton” and basically removed everything but the expletives. What was a four minute song was shortened to a 19 second track of “fuck”, “fucka”, “fuck”, “shit”, “pussy ass” and a lot more.

The man behind the project is fi5e, known to his closest friends as Evan Roth, and now he has decided to do the entire Straight Outta Compton and edit it down to its essence. Of course not every song on the album was dirty, there are four tracks that were profanity free. You can now download the entire “Explicit Content Only Version” of Straight Outta Compton for free, all three minutes and some seconds of it.

To make it interesting, you can now buy this on vinyl as a 12″ single. All three minutes of this fills up Side 1, so quality will be quite good for something that consists of dirt word snippets. Aah, but you’ll want this for the B-side as it is a “Explicit Content Only Version” of Eazy-Z‘s classic solo album, Eazy Duz It. The 12″ single is pricey, but if you’re a completist it will be worth it. Click here to download the “Explicit Content Only Version” of Straight Outta Compton for free, or order the 12″.

(Mahalo to Donwill of Tanya Morgan for the tip.)

VIDEO: Comfort Fit’s “Bit By Bit”

This is an older video (the video came out last November) but was only made aware of it recently, so I pass it along. This is from Comfort Fit‘s album, Polyshuffle, on the Tokyo Dawn label.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=thisbosmu-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=B002JB9CTS
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=thisbosmu-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=10FE9736YVPPT7A0FBG2&asins=B002ZJEDBG

VIDEO: Au’s “Ida Walked Away”

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=9318284&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Ida Walked Away from takcom™ on Vimeo.

The Portland duo Au have used the services of director Takafumi Suchiya to create a video for the song “Ida Walked Away” from their EP Versions (Aagoo) (which I reviewed here). The video is visually stunning, as critics might say, and suits the song quite well.

SOME STUFFS: Josiah Wolf tours for two

Last month I posted news on the first solo album by Josiah Wolf, and mentioned on how he would be doing double duty when he would go on tour to support his solo album and the works of his group, Why?. Wolf has just announced a number of new concert dates, most of them being Wolf on his own with supporting artists, while a block of shows in late May/early June will be a Why?/Josiah Wolf double feature.

02/27 Covington, KY Mad Hatter
03/05 Cincinnati, OH The Monestary ** RECORD RELEASE SHOW**
05/21 Chicago, IL Schuba’s
05/22 Minneapolis, MN 7th St. Entry
05/25 Missoula, MT The Palace
05/26 Seattle, WA The Vera Project %#
05/27 Vancouver, BC Biltmore Cabaret *#
05/28 Portland, OR Wonder Ballroom *#
05/30 Eugene, OR WOW Hall *#
05/31 Eureka, CA Nocturnum #$
06/01 Reno, NV Biggest Little City Club #
06/02 Oakland, CA New Parish of Oakland *#
06/03 Pomona, CA Glass House *#
06/04 La Jolla, CA Che Cafe
06/05 Tucson, AZ Solar Cultural Gallery
06/08 Salt Lake City, UT Urban Lounge
06/09 Denver, CO Hi Dive
06/11 St. Louis, MO The Firebird
06/12 Bloomington, IN The Bishop

* = w/ WHY?
# = w/ The Donkeys
% = w/ AU
$ = w/ Citay

As announced previously, Jet Lag will be released on March 2nd (next week Tuesday).

RECORD CRACK: Esther Duijn brings new electronic sounds via vinyl

Esther Duijn has been entertaining fans and nightclub fanatics in the Netherlands and throughout Europe with her music and extensive DJ sets. She continues to push the possibilities of sound with a new 12″ single on a brand new label in Portugal, Exquisite Music.

Side A is a track simply called “Track 1” and is credited to D.A.D., which is Duijn, Anonym, and Steady Douglas. Anonym is the only American in the trio, and is very secretive about his work (thus his name). Side B features “Zuidwest” by Duijn and Douglas.

The 12″ was released on February 12th and can be ordered through Decks.de.

Duijn has also archived a number of her DJ sets on her Soundcloud page, which you can download for free.

RECORD CRACK: Autechre go a bit “Over” for vinyl pressing of new album

The vinyl pressing for Autechre‘s forthcoming album, Oversteps, is very impressive. The double-LP is described as such:

Double heavyweight 180gram vinyl, each disc packed in its own printed inner and outer card sleeves

900mm x 600mm double-sided poster printed on Offenbach ultra fine stock, folded within its own card sleeve

Housed in printed and debossed rigid slipcase

It looks like a deluxe box set. You can see different perspectives of the packaging by clicking to the Warp Records website. Warp has March 23rd listed as the release date.

If you’ve pre-ordered the album (LP or CD) from Autechre’s website, you are now able to download the album right now for free right now. You’ll be able to download it as high quality (320kbps) MP3’s), or as WAV files, either as 16bit/44.1kHz (standard CD audio) or 24-bit/96kHz (hi-resolution DVD-Audio quality). It’s nice to see that a band cares so much for the music and the packaging equally.