8/13 - Guess I Got My Swagger Back

A good list for getting up in the morning, going out and doing your best, all to the beat.

Nilsson - Gotta Get Up
I've traded my party nights for routine and rising with the sun. Strangely enough it's pretty wonderful. Harry Nilsson, subverting the 60s mainstream and being as wonderfully at-odds as ever, catches the feeling of simultaneously regretting happier days and bouncing around to uplifting trumpet blows perfectly.

Brian Eno & David Byrne - The Jezebel Spirit
This is how you make a brilliant avant-garde album; you gather samples of street preachers, radio broadcasts, arabian folk music, and as here, an exorcism; you scatter it throughout the funkiest post-Talking Heads-grooves you can muster, you perfect every little sound in the mix and then you name the whole package after an experimental Nigerian novel. Boom! A milestone in music and an infectious piece of zeitgeist music.

Madvillain - Great Day
What I've really been listening to during the week are the Four Tet-remixes of this album. As great as the originals are, the remixes are pure bliss to me. A meeting of geniuses. The instrumental versions are masterpieces in themselves, but when you add Doom's tumbling, reference-peppered rhymes on top it it does indeed get "groovy like stuff you'd put on movie food".

He just came from over there; the grass IS greener 

Roisin Murphy - Night Of The Dancing Flame
What can you say; more awkward beats, more horns. More joyous work-mode.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds - We Real Cool
This man; does he ever misstep? Maybe with Nocturama, but otherwise? Nah. The new album offers menacing ballads for the IT-age. It's pretty amazing. I could have chosen any of the songs, but this just seems to capture it all; the vast scope, the aching beauty, the anachronistic collisions:

Sirius is 8.6 light years away
Arcturas is 37
The past is the past and it's here to stay
Wikipedia is heaven

A couple of embellishments this week:

Jamie Lidell released a new album, and though I haven't listened to it yet, this brilliant rendition of my favourite tune of his was a good reminder that I should do so:

And David Bowie's new video, although not as good a song as the last one, is a great little film:

7/13 - Sun and Revolution

It's time for the second Top 5 written about in English! Have I reached any new followers? Who knows. Feel free to compliment me on my eminent choices in the comments-field.
This week has been marked by extreme weather-changes and a constant push to produce artwork while keeping the waves of doubt at bay. The music then, is an arty clattering with flecks of sunlight:

Donovan - Sun
I had another intro planned, but then I was in the sculpture studios this morning, listening to this while doing a bit of casting, with the first rays of spring cascading onto the floor. And for carefree ditties on a sunny day, there's noone better to turn to than Donovan

Life's very unstable
It's built upon sand

Squarepusher - Planetarium
I realised I've not listened enough to Squarepusher's latter albums. The way this builds is quality, almost on a Go Plastic-level.

The Knife - Neon
Eagerly awaiting the new album, going back to the first stuff I heard by the Dreijer-siblings.

Ornette Coleman - Humpty Dumpty
Now this guy is one of the very epitomes of cool. Not only did he more or less create the genre of free jazz, he also ventured into funk, played on the soundtrack for Naked Lunch, and sports a number of the boldest and most influential sleeve designs I know (the design for Ornette! was paraphrased by Clinic, and the title of The Shape of Jazz To Come was paraphrased by Refused, only to mention two). Also, the music itself is lovely, and great to listen to while you're drawing.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Adagio in E Major, K. 261
I had another of those sweet moments. On Sunday morning at 7.45am I was venturing home after a night shift at the hotel. The air was high and crisp, the sun was straddling across the horizon to throw its first reflections on the windows of Glasgow's higher towers, even the blue highrises on St. George's Rd looked pretty, and I was listening to Wolfgang Amadeus in my headphones. I felt serene and quite alright with being alive and all that.


If Spotify had had their shit together regarding complete discographies I would have had Public Enemy's Revolutionary Generation on the list this week. Partly, of course, because it's a brilliant track from an equally brilliant album, but also because I suddenly realised that Chuck D's delivery of the lines

Strange as you say, I say revolution
Need for change brings on revolution
The great book just look see solution

 ...has been borrowed by Azealia Banks to give punch to the immortal line

I guess that c***'s getting eaten

No? You're saying an intonation is not enough to qualify as a reference? That it's just the meter of the line that happens to give a similar effect? Pah! Listen again. It's too perfect. Azealia knows her hip hop-history and music detective Yxell busts another case wide open.

6/13 - International Premiere

It is here. A new chapter in my blogosphere. A new beginning for music-blogging. After years of geeking away in an ignored corner of the internet I am now making my weekly event TOP 5 available to an international audience. For those who understandeth Swedish; the old blog is still there. For those who wonder what the heck this thing is; click on the 'About' link above. For those who want to go straight to the listening-component of the project, click the link to the right of this post. Is anyone still around? Then read about this week's choices, made to suit an uplifting and life-affirming new beginning:

Flesh Quartet - Play Me
Yes, play me! beckons the Swedish string quartet that excels in making dainty violins hiss like cornered badgers. A melodic start to say the least.

David Bowie - Cygnet Committee
Space Oddity; the breaking point between bright-eyed hippie sentiments and the cheek-in-tongue coolness of his masterpieces. And in the middle of it, this anthemic lament over twisted ideals and distorted utopias; celebrating life despite a revolution gone wrong. 

Kate Bush - Love and Hunger
...and then comes Kate and helps keep the hope up. 
We're building a house of the future together. 

James Blake - Retrograde
I am so psyched. His debut remains one of my favourite albums of the twentyteens, and this first song from the new record absolutely floors me. Purists may complain that he has sold out his experimentalism and gone full pop, but who. the fuck. cares. when it sounds so devastatingly gorgeous.

Ray Charles - I Can't Stop Loving You
Had a filmnight in the flat and watched Metropolis (the anime) with the boys. Many stunning scenes, and amazing use of music throughout. Never more so than when this song floods in:

And as a delightful bonus; this is pretty damn magnificent. Lots of Sound, the Vision-part mostly taken up by Beck's glittery jacket. And yes, I do wonder sometimes.