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Tuesday, Sep 12 2017, 6AM
Bantu Stephen Biko was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known as the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. He was assassinated on this day back in 1977. From his book titled "I Write What I Like": "The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed."
Engineer Phil Brown declared 'After The Flood' to be "probably the best engineering for me in the past forty years. Drums were miked far from the kit, sounds were allowed to echo through the studio space, mistakes were an integral part of the performance, and the album's dynamics are entirely genuine, the live feel of a jazz record."
Montreal-based Barr Brothers are at Neumos on December 16th in support of their upcoming album "Queens Of The Breakers", out October 13
The October 9th show at the Moore is sold out but there are still tickets for the 10th. Find all the dates and links to tickets from their website: www.thewarondrugs.net
Grizzly Bear is back in Seattle on December 8th at the Moore. “Given that our albums aren’t necessarily like, you listen to it once and you love it, I always want to give an album at least five listens,” Ed Droste of Grizzly Bear recently told Pitchfork. “Because it unfolds upon you. You keep discovering things.”
"L.A. Witch, a garage-rock trio whose music sounds like it should be blaring from a ghostly Thunderbird as it disappears into the midnight mist." Yes. They'll be at Chop Suey on Sunday October 8th and at The Shakedown in Bellingham on the 9th!
The new album "Going Grey" is out Friday, October 13th. You can also catch them at the Neptune on November 4th! Find videos and all the tour dates here: www.thefrontbottoms.com
Here are a couple versions of "What Do You Want Me To Say" performed live on KEXP. From the Triple Door: www.youtube.com and from CMJ: www.youtube.com
Enjoying the description of Filthy Friends from MusicFestNW: "Filthy Friends is a David Bowie cover band, OR they are Corin Tucker, Peter Buck, Scott McCaughey, Kurt Bloch, Bill Rieflin and occasionally Krist Novoselic OR they are unemployed rodeo clowns from Ringling Bros. circus."
Broken Social Scene are playing two nights at the Neptune - October 22nd & 23rd. You can download "Halfway Home" with the song of the day podcast here: blog.kexp.org
Back on April 15th, The New Pornographers stopped by KEXP for an in-studio session. See it here: www.youtube.com
The night before they recorded this song, Paul McCartney created 16 tape loops of guitar sounds and odd vocals that he brought in to the studio to create some of the effects. Several people remember standing around the room holding pencils for the tape to loop around and back into the recording machine as the various sound effects and instrumentation were faded in and out. The vocals were forced through a Leslie (revolving) speaker. Lennon desired the effect that the listener could hear the words but not hear him, like a group of Tibetan monks chanting on a mountain top.
During the 1995 Glastonbury Festival, Noel Gallagher, a long term acquaintance of The Chemical Brothers, offered to record with them. Around 12 months later they decided a track they had been working on, which they had done in the style of The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows," needed some vocals so they sent a tape of it to Noel. He worked on it overnight and the next day they recorded it with Noel providing the vocals. The original working title was "Tomorrow Never Noels." Heh.
LCD Soundsystem's 1st #1 album. ou can get it on 140g double LP from their site: www.americandreamdfa.store
Can founder Irmin Schmidt in a 2004 interview: "When I founded the group I was a classical composer and conductor and pianist making piano recitals, playing a lot of contemporary music but also Brahms, Chopin and Beethoven and everything. And when we got together I wanted to do something in which all contemporary music becomes one thing. Contemporary music in Europe especially, the new music was classical music was Boulez, Stockhausen and all that. I studied all that, I studied Stockhausen but nobody talked about rock music like Sly Stone, James Brown or the Velvet Underground as being contemporary music. Then there was jazz and all these elements were our contemporary music, it was new. It was, in a way, much newer than the new classical music which claimed to be 'the new music'."
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is the first collaborative album by Brian Eno and David Byrne, released in February 1981.
Recorded by Eno and Byrne prior to their work on Talking Head's fourth album Remain in Light (1980), sample clearance issues delayed its release until several months after the latter. Eno described the album as a "vision of a psychedelic Africa."
RCA released Scary Monsters... and Super Creeps on this date in 1980 with the promo line "Often Copied, Never Equalled", seen as a direct reference to the New Wave acts Bowie had inspired over the years.
Daughter is not the first band you'd expect to record the soundtrack for a video game. But that’s just what they’ve done. Life Is Strange: Before The Storm is the prequel to 2015’s award-winning Life Is Strange by Square Enix, the Japanese developer also responsible for the Final Fantasy and Tomb Raider franchises. (A press release explains, “It was a boundary-breaking video game, with principal characters drawn from real life facing everyday issues, touching upon difficult situations such as bullying, suicide, teen pregnancy as well as tackling the complexities of love and friendship.”) Daughter have crafted a 13-song soundtrack album...
Can a rock tour go 'green'? Refillable water bottles, compostable bags, CO2 offsets, and all the other things U2 is doing on their current tour: www.u2.com
It might be a couple months away but you want to get this on your calendar. The National will be live on The Morning Show Wednesday, November 29 at 9:30! Get down here as early as 8am to get on the list!
Langhorne Slim will be live on The Morning Show this Thursday at 8:00 AM from the “Backstage” room at Sound Stage Studios on Music Circle in Nashville for AmericanaFest! You can hear more tracks from the new album out November 10th and preorder it here: www.langhorneslim.com
Portland's Marmoset Music is releasing a new compilation album called Transference on December 1, and “for this project, the producers at Marmoset excavated a collection of 100 or more year-old songs in the public domain, considering each one as a timeless design worthy of a modern interpretation. Marmoset then presented the collection to a diverse swath of its extended artist community, with the invitation to collaborate.” You can stream "Out Among The Sheltering Pines" from The Helio Sequence and preorder the album here: marmosetmusic.bandcamp.com
"Undersea" is the result of Kilbey’s suggestion that the band should pretend to be another one altogether, like Sgt. Pepper willfully choosing the brown acid.
“Tim borrowed my son’s little electronic drum kit,” Haug reveals, “so we had a mutated kit, half acoustic/ half electric, and we were just firing off each other.”
“Peter is like the mad professor of guitar theory. I’ve learned a lot from him over the last few years but I’m not trying to analyze the harmonic integrity of anything. If it sounds good, I’ll keep going down that path. I think we complement each other really well in that way.”
Released on this date in 1980, early copies of the album came with the sleeve enclosed in a lime-green paper bag. There was a Canadian version that came packaged in a black plastic bag with the XTC logo in silver printed on one side.
The band's name is hidden in the cover artwork. The seagull, ship's mast and moon spell out XTC.
There's a video for "Up All Night."
See it here: youtu.be You can preorder the new album "Colors" but the vinyl version is only in red.
BRMC have also announced a North American tour. They'll be at the Showbox on February 20th. Tickets go on sale September 15th.
Released on this date in 2000, Relationship of Command was recorded over a seven-week period starting on January 17, 2000, following a tour supporting Rage Against the Machine. The album was recorded at the Indigo Ranch Studios, in Malibu, California, and was produced by Ross Robinson. Known for his unorthodox production methods, Robinson at one point took bass player Paul Hinojos for a drive in his SUV through the hills of Malibu to get his adrenaline going prior to recording. There has got to be more to that story than a cruise in an SUV.
Remembering Johnny Cash on the anniversary of his passing back in 2003, aged 71—less than four months after his wife, June Carter Cash.
Stevie Wonder wrote this song as a tribute to music, specifically to Duke Ellington who had just passed away in 1974. "I knew the title from the beginning but wanted it to be about the musicians who did something for us," Stevie said. "So soon they are forgotten. I wanted to show my appreciation. They gave us something that is supposed to be forever. That's the basic idea of what we do and how we hook it up."
The True Loves are live onThe Morning Show Friday, October 20th at 9:30 AM. Come on down and see them!
We love Charles Bradley here at KEXP. Check out his most recent stop by the station here: blog.kexp.org
Garage-soul veteran King Khan, of King Khan & The Shrines and the King Khan & BBQ Show, is returning in the fall with his first ever official solo album. The upcoming "Murder Burgers" was recorded in Oakland with producer Greg Ashley and his old band the Gris Gris. khannibalism.bandcamp.com
Terror Watts are from Birmingham, UK. Tom Hughes (vocals/guitar), Jake Wilks (bass) and Olly Caunce (drums) have the the straight-forward ethos of "only writing songs that we can have fun with, more influenced by the bands we all grew up with, such as Weezer and Descendents".
The video, which featured the band larking about on bicycles and a giant flying bed attracted Stephen Spielberg's interest so much, he offered the group a Monkees type TV show. They turned him down.
Ray Davies performed this with Jackson Browne on Davies' 2010 collaborative album See My Friends. In an interview for Daniel Rachel's book The Art of Noise: Conversations with Great Songwriters, Davies recalled that Browne was taken with a particular lyric: "He said, 'I don't need no friends?' He said it twice. I said, 'Yeah.' He said, 'That's the most beautiful thing I've ever had to sing. It doesn't make sense on the page but when you put it with the music...'
I hadn't thought about it that way. The melody takes the curse off the grammar fault. The choice of words, the way they're pronounced, sometimes gives an emotion that's unexpected. Don't is the killer word because it's not correct. Great lines are only great because of what precedes them, maybe sometimes when they happen after."
Hiss Golden Messenger will be live on KEXP from AmericanaFest on Thursday at 7am. You can catch them at the Tractor on November 2nd and the new album, 'Hallelujah Anyhow' is out September 22nd!
The video to "Cruel To Be Kind" was one of the first music videos aired on MTV, and is a combination of actual footage of Lowe's wedding to Carlene Carter, as well as a humorous re-enactment of the wedding, featuring Carter as herself, Dave Edmunds as their limo driver, Terry Williams as the photographer, Billy Bremner as the baker, and Jake Riviera (Nick's manager at the time) as the best man. The wedding took place on August 18, 1979, at the Tropicana Motel in West Hollywood. All family stayed there for the wedding and reception (also featured in the video). Filming for the video took so long that Lowe was actually late to the wedding.
Ted Leo is playing the Crocodile on November 8th. Here is the full list of tour dates: www.tedleo.com
“It’s natural, if you do see yourself as an artist, to progress and not play it safe,” said keyboardist Tom Cowan. “Bowie pre-empted the modern condition of not being able to stay in one place for very long, and I get frustrated with bands who stay still. Because then it does become a career.”
In his 2003 interview with Performing Songwriter magazine, Bowie explains that the song "Inchworm," which was sung by Danny Kaye in the 1952 movie Hans Christian Andersen, was a big influence on "Ashes To Ashes." Said Bowie: "I loved it as a kid and it's stayed with me forever. I keep going back to it. You wouldn't believe the amount of my songs that have sort of spun off that one song. Not that you'd really recognize it. Something like 'Ashes to Ashes' wouldn't have happened if it hadn't have been for 'Inchworm.' There's a child's nursery rhyme element in it, and there's something so sad and mournful and poignant about it. It kept bringing me back to the feelings of those pure thoughts of sadness that you have as a child, and how they're so identifiable even when you're an adult. There's a connection that can be made between being a somewhat lost five-year old and feeling a little abandoned and having the same feeling when you're in your twenties. And it was that song that did that for me."
Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz is a fan of Funk, and it was a P-Funk show in New York City that inspired this track. When he heard the crowd imploring the band to "Burn Down The House" he got the idea for the title. As he explained in a 1984 interview with National Public Radio (NPR), he and Talking Heads bassist Tina Weymouth created the original track in a jam, then took it to the band where they refined the groove. To form the lyrics, they picked words that fit the rhythms, which is why the words don't make a lot of sense.
“The first time I heard Silversun Pickups I heard ‘Kissing Families’ and just about lost my mind. It was like the first time I heard ‘Good Morning Captain’ from Slint. One of those songs that builds and builds to the point where you put down what you’re doing just to listen and right then explodes out of your speakers. That song and that band are the kind that makes your job as a KEXP DJ easy. Not even a question that I’d champion that band. Live, always great. The lead singer may be the funniest man I’ve seen front a band. I couldn’t decide if I liked the music or commentary better! Can’t wait for the full length….” – John In The Morning circa 2006
Whirring was a featured song of the day back in 2011. Find it here as well as a video of a performance live on KEXP from SXSW blog.kexp.org
"I Am One" is one of the few Smashing Pumpkins songs credited to both lead singer Billy Corgan and guitarist James Iha. After this song was released, Corgan took creative control over Smashing Pumpkins and wrote most of the band's music by himself.
Wolf Parade will be playing the Showbox on January 13th! But you can download Valley Boy from the song of the day podcast now! blog.kexp.org
"I'm Your Fan: The Songs of Leonard Cohen" is a tribute album to Leonard Cohen, released in 1991, produced by the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles. The album features Cohen's songs interpreted by some of the most respected rock acts of the time, including this one from Pixies!
This was used in a June 2008 anti-smoking advertisement commissioned by the New South Wales government in Australia with the theme "everybody knows smoking causes these diseases... yet you still do it."
