Doom subs Decca - 3/22/02: Floating Worlds

This is the playlist for a substitution pickup show broadcast on KZSU on March 22nd, 2001 at 6pm. I was taking over for Decca that week, so some sort of focus on World Music made some sense. I seized on this as an excuse to play a lot of Vietnamese music...

So there's a hell of a lot of Vietnamese names here, rendered for now in a pretty cheesy straight ASCII fashion, e.g. an e with an accent over it is "e'", an a with a hat is written "a^", and so on. Usually.

preamble

Eh, maybe later

sound beds

For background music while I was talking, I was relying pretty heavily on Yusuf Lateef's "Noctures" as well as the old reliable voice-of-doom theme, the Zoviet France double album "Shouting at the Ground".

first set

Ngoc Lam & Que Lam - "Full Moon Fair"
off of Mekong River
Track 3 - 3:22
Release 1992
Some of the first Vietnamese music I ever heard.
Listening to it now, I can identify a melody I've heard in a number of Vietnamese recordings. A traditional standard?
Richard Lainhart - "Bronze Cloud Disk"
off of Ten Thousand Shades of Blue
Track 1 - ~ 30:00
Long electronic drone track, sounds something like tibetan temple bells
AFILE
This was played overlapped with:
Yusuf Lateef - "Warm Intensity"
off of Nocturnes
Which was also played overlapped with:
Zoviet France - "?"
off of Shouting at the Ground
Which was also played overlapped with:
Hu'o'ng Lan & Ngo_c so'n - "Bal Tinh [pardon my ASCII]"
off of ?
Track 1 - 6:41
Vietnamese pop with really nice, almost spooky sounding high female vocals. A little less synth cheese than usual.
Controlled Bleeding - "Can You Smell the Rain Between"
off of Can You Smell the Rain Between
Track 7 - 8:24
Deep, plodding ambient with sudden echoy percussion bursts.
AFILE

second set

Liu Xing - "High Strings"
off of Talking to Myself
Track 7 - 4:30
Slow, somber, played on the zhong-man (a 4 string lute)
AFILE
Red - "The Old Revolution"
off of Songs From a Room
Track 6
This album is a cover of an entire Leonard Cohen album, with varying degrees of electronic fucked-upness. This track is one of the more normal ones, but it's still fairly warped.
AFILE
Yoon Il-Loh - "A Moody Person's Life"
off of Asian Takeaway (Compilation)
Track 14
A collection of odd pop music from different parts of Asia: this track is from Hong-Kong

third set

Phil Ranelin remix of Nobody - "Vibes from the Tribe"
off of Phil Ranelin: Remixes
Track 7
The Wire magazine recently shipped with a Hefty Records
Sampler, largely of electronica incorporating jazz melodies.
The two best tracks were by Phil Ranelin: peharps not a surprize then,
that this CD made it into KZSU's A-file.
AFILE
Tra^n Van Khe^ & Tra^n Thi Thuy Ngoc - "Nhona`ng"
off of Viet Nam Poe'sies et Chants
Faith and the Muse - "Hollow Hills "
off of Vera Causa
Disk Morning, Track 5
This is a cover of a Bauhaus track, which by coincidence I had been considering playing this for this show... I went for this very good cover version instead, and thereby got an A-file credit out of it. (You may not care about this very much, but little things like this help make a DJs day.)
AFILE
Khac Chi Ensemble - "Spirit of Vietnam"
off of Spirit of Vietnam
Track 1
1999

fourth set

Belle & Sebastian - "I Love My Car"
off of I'm Waking Up to Us
Track 2
A 3 song CD EP
Slightly silly song, with a slightly silly 60s British orchestral rock sound to it, that reminds me a lot of things like the soundtrack to "the Magic Christian".
(The Dangerbaby, on the other hand thinks this is just a total Beatles rip-off, and can't believe that I played it.)
The main reason I did play it was because I wanted an excuse to rant slightly about people's driving during this "drive-time" show. Today's tip: don't answer the phone when you're driving, even if you do "love your car".
AFILE
Julian Cope - "Autogeddon Blues"
off of Autogeddon
Track 1
Great acoustic folk-rant about the evils of a car centered society.
"I had a dream in the middle of the day/And my waking dream, won't go away-ay-ay...."
('Twas a total screw-up on my part playing this outside of "safe harbor" though... there's an awfully prominent "motherfucking" near the beginning of this song, which is a definite FCC crime here in the land of the free.)
Phong Nguyen Ensemble - "?"
off of Song of the Banyan
Track 3
Hu'o'ng Lan - "Co~n Thuong Go'c Be^p Cha'i He`"
off of Track 1 - 6:00
Lead: sounds like italian cheese accordion for a moment.
Beautiful female vocal vietnamese pop, as you should expect from Hu'o'ng Lan by now

fifth set

Ze Manel - "Na Kaminho di luta"
off of Maron di Mar
Track 6 - 4:54
AFILE
For an "afro-pop" track, this has a very serious sounding male vocal, and a very simple musical arrangement. I gather this is an analog of american protest folk, which is certainly what it sounds like.
President's Breakfest - "Love Supreme III"
off of III c
Track 7 - 8:42
Nice to see that this excellent Bay Area avant-jazz improv group is still active.
This track is more-or-less a cover of the John Coltrane piece, but this particular cut happens to lead with some rather Hendrix sounding guitar noise. Ah well, some segues are so inappropriate they work pretty well anyway.
AFILE
Anna K. 'Nebe' - "Sky "
off of Music Without Borders (collection)
Track 8 - 3:15
AFILE

sixth set

Phu'o'ng Thanh - "Khi Ta Ye^u Nhau "
off of ?
Track 1 - 4:29
The most questionable piece of pop-trash I played on the whole show: female vocals, with a refrain like "Hey, hey, hey, haa-aay!". Just don't call it "disco" to my face.
Phong Nguyen - "Tam Nhac Dan Tranh"
off of Music for Vietnam & Cambodia
Solo improvisation on the "Dan Tranh" (which if I remember right is a horizontal stringed instrument like the japanese koto or the western zither).
Thich Nhat Hanh & Sister Cha^n Kho^ng - "Inviting the Bell"
off of Drops of Emptiness
Track 1
Vietnamese zen chanting

The 45 minute set on the theme: Floating Worlds

Macha - "When They First Saw the Floating World"
off of Macha
Track 1
Usually these guys are billed as "indie rock played on eastern intruments", though if you ask me it's western folks doing an indian influenced variation of trance-techno.
Controlled Bleeding - "Prisoner"
off of Can You Smell the Rain Between
Track 2 - 7:04
Nice Dark aquatic sound
AFILE
Played simultaneously, overlapping:
Johnny Collins - "Haul Boys Haul"
off of Sea Chanties/ Chants de Marina
Track 3 - 3:10
Fred Frith - "Open Ocean"
off of Clearing
Track 2 - 5:12
A definite oceanic sound on this track, from the greatest living creative guitarist, currently in residence at Mills College in the Bay Area
Played simultaneously, while reading:
Peter Lambourn Wilson - "?"
off of Pirate Utopias
I read some passages near the conclusion of the book, emphasizing the democratic character of the Barbary Corsairs, speculating that their political attitudes may have helped see the later revolutions in England, America and France.
Peter Gabriel - "Here Comes the Flood"
off of Exposures
These days we would probably say this was "re-mixed" by Robert Fripp, whose name the album "Exposures" goes under.
Robert Fripp - "Water Music II"
off of Exposures
Played simultaneously, while I read:
http://www.ecoboot.nl/artikelen/floating_houses.html - "?"
off of Floating Houses
Read an excerpt from a news story found on the web, about some Dutch company whose solution to flooding is what looks like some astoundingly un-seaworthy houseboats.
Flying Saucer Attack - "3 Seas"
off of Sally Free & Easy
Track 2 - 8:30
Waves of filtered static sounds.
A CD EP with just two tracks. The linear notes indicate that these tracks are released on CD only because of some difficulty with pressing them as vinyl.
Played simultaneously, while I read:
Ted Nelson - "Floating Worlds"
off of From a talk at a colloquia organized by Douglaus Englebart
Ted Nelson discussing one of his latest software designs (circa 2000). I presume that the name is influenced by his current residency in Japan...
George Lewis & Miya Masaoka - "Harbor the Desire"
off of Duets
Track 8 - 5:14
Excellent local Bay Area kotoist Masaoka and trombonist Lewis improvise together.
Played simultaneously, while reading:
Asian week, 6/18/94 - "?"
off of Asian week
Passage about the attitudes toward sexual liberation in the Edo period Japan.
Tim Curry, et al. - "?"
off of Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack
The (unitentionally obscure) association here has to do with living in a world of "absolute pleasure".
? - "Nakawarai No Mambo"
off of ?
Not a lot of information here, eh? There's not much I can say... Most of the text on the record is in japanese.
This is a 45 RPM single, pressed by Columbia in 1960.
The cover is a purple sleeve featuring a black and white picture of a japanese woman in traditional dress.
This is fast, crazy, japanese mambo music. Female vocal.
Louis & Bebe Baron - "Introduction"
off of Forbidden Planet soundtrack
Played simultaneouls, while I read:
Freeman Dyson, 1972 - "?"
off of Infinite in All Directions
Short quotation about the possibility of colonizing the comets in the Oort cloud.
Sun Ra - ""Satellites are spinning" (?)"
off of Calling Planet Earth (CD 3)
Track 6 - 2:38
I don't think that this was *really* a version of "satellites are spinning", and I should've known that, I remember hearing something about the track listings being wrong on this triple CD box set release. The melody sounded something more like "sunrise in outer space", (there are no lyrics).
? - "Mua Xuan"
off of Green Planet Vietnam
Track 2 - 8:27
A mellow, floating aquatic sound... used this as a sound bed to close out the show.
By the way, it is not my fault in this case that I don't have performer information on this CD. (What's the idea behind this kind of thing? Is it supposed to be "field recordings" of funny peoples lacking in any individuality? Did they just stick a microphone in the air, without finding anyone who could interpret to determine everyone's names?)

last track

Bowery Electric - "Floating World"
off of Lushlife
Track 1
Lead: rain sounds, goes into hiphop beat (which was convienient for transitioning to M. Smooth's show)

Appendix

KZSU

That is to say, KZSU, the Stanford radio station, available at 90.1 FM in the SF Bay Area and at realaudio.stanford.edu everywhere there's a sound card. More about that over at kzsu.stanford.edu

More Doom:
http://obsidianrook.com/kzsu
Feedback:
doom@kzsu.stanford.edu