Thursday, September 15th, 2005 ... 9:30 p.m. - midnight ... KZSU, 90.1 FM

Emergency fill-in slot after sports. Goal was to slap on some long experimental tracks and coast through the show, listening via laptop to the end of the San Jose Giants finals game 1. Decided to start off easy though, in deference to the sports crowd, and ended up playing more than an hour of folk/pop, using some of my best tricks from past years (Beth Lisick, Allette Brooks, and "Shopping Cart," mainly). A good time.

Then, about 11:30, I switched into experimental noise. Back when I was impressionable and young, I'd catch this kind of stuff on college radio late at night. Hopefully I'm warping some other young minds myself tonight -- giving back, as it were.

Format:
ARTIST -- "TRACK TITLE" -- ALBUM TITLE (LABEL, YEAR)

Adrian Legg -- "St. Mary's" -- Guitar Bones (Favored Nations Acoustic, 2003)

* Al Stewart -- "The Immelman Turn" -- A Beach Full of Shells (Appleseed, 2005)

I'm an Al Stewart geek, I admit it. Great to see he's still churning out music and drawing from his folk roots (as opposed to his Alan Parsons lite-rock years). This is a great track, a strong tempoed, catchy song in the sea-shanty style that Al does so well.

A gorgeous, wintry album from this local group. Most of their other stuff has been upbeat and cartoonishly funky. Nothing wrong with that, but this album gets a special place in my heart for its deeper, colder wistfulness.

Gilbert is an African-American urban-folkie type ... you know, stuff that NPR would love, with a bit of a "Black" touch, if I may say so. Pleasant, polite stuff. This was one of the earliest CDs I reviewed for KZSU, back when I had a lot more time to explore the breadth of music we get. Good days.

Christine Lavin -- "Shopping Cart of Love: The Play" -- Live at the Cactus Cafe (Philo, 1993)

Awesome and hilarious. The studio version, on Attainable Love, is understandably tighter, but this one adds some nice embellishments and audience humor.

Another one from my early days. The line "Please don't leave us here alone in this silicon hell" from the chorus made this a fave with some of us. Allette is a Stanford alum who sent us a few CDs back then; we haven't heard from her in a while.

Yes, the same Beth Lisick who's now famous for writing Everybody into the Pool: True Tales. I played this CD to death back when, and I still try to get it onto my regular show regularly (spun it just a couple weeks ago, I think).

* John Vanderslice -- "Angela" -- Pixel Revolt (Barsuk, 2005)

An electronics-laden track from Vanderslice. Interesting and still quite poppy.

... into another electronics-packed track, very pretty and melodic. This is an EP that shows lots of variety -- jazzy stuff, strings (loud to the point of distraction), this one.

An awesome, heartbreaking album. What's also sad (on a different level) is that this is the only track I've played from it so far. What can I say -- it's a short and immediately catchy track and a great advertisement for the disk. The longer tracks, which call for more involved listening, are deeply rewarding and emotional, and they draw from a superdiaspora of Balkan folk, blues, and other roots musics stirred up by Jewlia Eisenberg. You need to hear this CD.

* Stephen Malkmus -- "No More Shoes" -- Face the Truth (Matador, 2005)

A record full of surprising twists and turns. The Baud of Euphony, a fellow DJ with broad and exquisite taste, recommended this track, which starts as a pleasant enough rocker and moves into a gritty, gutty guitar solo. The first track of the CD, "Pencil Rot," is just plain nuts.

Using this track to transition from pop into noise and experimental stuff: The change begins here. UTAC is a nice album (Baud says he likes it, too, which is a nice stamp of approval) that blends catchy rock songs with all manner of sonic experimentation.

Heavy prog-metal guitars. Other tracks on here are gentle and even pretty, lots of major 7ths and even some acoustics. DJ Mike notes that the prettier tracks sound like later work from the band Isis, which I guess I'll have to check out.

Various binaural field recordings (meaning with headphones, the sounds have direction like in real life -- not just left/right but front/back and above/below). Lots of stuff mixed together: various world musics, traffic sounds, human voices, recorded from 1991-99 in Bali, the Phillippines, Turkey, Europe, Cuba, and America. A nice collage of stuff, although 72 minutes of it seems a bit much.

I played tracks 8 through 14. Track 13 included a nice surprise: an acoustic bass playing on through the clatter. Turns out it was recorded at Beanbender's, the late lamented music venue in downtown Berkeley that was a haven for just this sort of stuff. You go, Chris!

Gratuitous Beanbender's-related link: www.plonsey.com.

* Martin Tetreault and Otomo Yoshihide -- "Lyon No. 3" -- 2. Tok (Ambiances Magnetiques, 2005)

Second in a series of noise duets performed on turntables. (No vinyl, I don't think -- it's the sounds of scraping and bumping on the needles. Think glitchy bursts of static; amplified contact-mic kinds of sounds.)

Shimmering landscapes, a cool-metallic mix of drums, koto, electronics, and other-worldly voices.

Tim Berne -- "Impacted Wisdom" -- Nice View (Winter & Winter, 2005; orig. released on JMT, 1994)

Diving into the jazz thing now, a 38-minute track with Berne (sax), Mark Dresser (bass), Herb Robertson (trumpet), Steve Swell (trombone), Bobby Previte (drums), Marc Ducret (guitar), and Django Bates (keys). You go back to Tim Berne's early/mid-90s stuff -- or any of these guys' records, for that matter -- and you'll find all-star New York City lineups. Great, great music germinated there.

This one's been rereleased on Winter & Winter, which is resurrecting the JMT catalog bit by bit (Stefan Winter was the guy behind JMT, and he's only recently secured the rights to get the music back out there). Look for The "Paris Concert" CDs from Tim Berne's Bloodcount to come next year or the year after -- great, great stuff.

-- Go back to Memory Select playlists.
-- Bay Area free/improv music calendar: http://www.bayimproviser.com.