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Looper's Delight
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No Top 10 list, but these are some things that have caught my ear lately: Stereolab -- "Dots and Loops" Very post-modern, deadpan-ironic take on the whole '50s Space-Age Bachelor Pad/Futurist Lounge Music idea. Not the sort of thing I would have expected myself to like from the descriptions I'd heard of it, but I played a promo copy at work and really enjoyed it. Still can't decide how much of it should be taken seriously and how much is a wry commentary on the retro-futurist slant. Bonus points for several odd-metered tunes, some jungle excursions, and the ever-popular cool, detached European female vocalists crooning heady obscurities over the whole willfully cheesy thing. Spring Heel Jack -- "Busy Curious Thirsty" This might be the best jungle album I've ever heard (which, given my pedigree, isn't necessarily saying much); I'd personally have to give it the nod over recent outtings by Photek, Squarepusher, Talvin Singh et al, even though SHJ are generally not taken very seriously by the jungle community at large. Big band brass samples, distorted basslines, and some allusions to Gamelan and 20th Century classical music (including one drumless 9-minute atonal epic that I still haven't made up my mind about). But it just seems to *work* more consistently and engagingly than any other drum-n-bass disc I've run across. Party music with brains, perhaps... (I doubt any one else on the list will know anything about these last two items, but if nothing else I might win an award for most obscure entry:) Zvuki Mu -- [don't know the title since I can't read Russian] A compilation album of the group Zvuki Mu, one of the definitive underground bands to emerge from the '80s Russian rock scene. This seems to be a compilation CD of various pieces from their career. Some truly beautiful and disturbing material here. Center -- "Made In Paris" A 1989 album by Center, another one of the premier '80s Russian rock bands, who recorded this record for Polygram France at the height of the post-Gorbachev media feeding frenzy that surrounded Soviet rock music at the end of the 1980's. Between the atypical harmonic sensibilities, the Russian lyrics, and the glossy '80s production aesthetic, this is like '80s AOR radio from another planet. [For the truly obscurely-inclined, I'm currently working with Center leader Vasily Shumov on a series of remixes of material from this record; you can download files by checking out http://music.calarts.edu/~shumov/radio/band/. There's much looping to be found, though perhaps not quite of the variety you might expect... For more info on Shumov and Center you can check out two home pages, at http://home.earthlink.net/~lavausa or http://music.calarts.edu/~shumov/radio/] --Andre