In a last-minute bid for radio infamy, I took to the airwaves today from 6:00 to 8:00 PM, assuming control of the DJ booth for Tony Dushane, whose regularly scheduled show Drinks With Tony was cancelled this week. Doing a music show during the daylight hours gave me the opportunity to play some more mainstream or upbeat material than what I gravitate towards on Mindtrain. It still ended up being pretty weird and warped out. I had a good time and I hope to be doing some more substitute DJ shifts as the opportunity arises…

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The playlist gives artist name, song title, and album title (in that order). A space between lines of text indicates the break between sets where track announcements were made.

Playlist for Drinks With Ferrara 01 – 17 August 2011

• The Modern Lovers – Roadrunner – The Modern Lovers

• Scott Walker – You’re Gonna Hear From Me – Scott
• Jackie Gleason – A Taste Of Honey – The Romantic Moods Of Jackie Gleason
• Petula Clark – A Sign Of The Times – Her Greatest Hits
• Julee Cruise – You’re Staring At Me – The Art Of Being A Girl
• Diana Rogerson & Andrew Liles – Can I Tempt You With All This? – No Birds Do Sing
• The GTO’s – Wouldn’t It Be Sad If There Were No Cones? – Permanent Damage
• The Peter Ivers Band & Yolande Bavan – Cat Scratch Fever – Knight Of The Blue Communion
• White Noise – Here Come The Fleas – An Electric Storm
• Coil – Things Happen – Love’s Secret Domain
• Nurse With Wound – (I Don’t Want To Have) Easy Listening Nightmares – Alice The Goon
• Forms Of Things Unknown – Shave ‘Em Dry ‘Til The Cows Come Home – Black Trenchcoats & Swastikas ‘N Shit
• The Stooges – See That Cat (T.V. Eye) – 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions

• Brainticket – Brainticket, Parts I & II – Cottonwoodhill
• Coil – Disco Hospital – Love’s Secret Domain
• Lizzy Mercier Descloux – Hard-Boiled Babe – Press Color
• The Virgin Prunes – Come To Daddy – A New Form Of Beauty
• Mars – Helen Forsdale – The Complete Studio Recordings: NYC 1977-1978
• DNA – Horse – DNA On DNA
• The Fall – Slates, Slags, Etc – Slates

• John Cale – Sudden Death – Helen Of Troy

Mindtrain tends to focus on music from those recordings that have become favorites of mine over the past four decades, in other words, older and not-so-recent releases. There’s so much new stuff coming out each week that it’s impossible to check out all the potentially interesting music I hear about (and much of what I hear about is either through word of mouth or via the New Releases lists that Forced Exposure and Aquarius Records put out regularly).

But this week I have tried to feature some 2011 releases that seemed noteworthy or exceptional to my ears. First of all, there’s a spotlight on some new electronic music. Cyclo. (the project name has a dot on the end), not to be confused with Cyclobe (who I played on the first two programs), is a duo of Ryoji Ikeda and Carsten Nicolai who put out one excellent CD in 2001 and just released their second one this year, entitled Id. Those two gentlemen are in my estimation the best artists working the minimalist ‘glitch’ vein of electronic music today, and their collaboration is as focused and compelling as you’d expect from having listened to their many solo recordings. Then there is another Carsten Nicolai project, in which he goes by his usual name of Alva Noto and teams up with Ryuichi Sakamoto. They’ve put out five CDs together over the years (including one with the Ensemble Modern), and the new one is every bit as quietly penetrating as the ones before. It’s called Summvs, a title which continues their practice of titling their pieces and albums with marginally unpronounceable strings of letters. If you’ve not heard the music of this duo, I would best describe it as a seamless union of the genre of ambient piano music a la Harold Budd with the electronic precision of lowercase glitch electronica. Beautiful. And thanks to Facebook, I recently discovered the music of one of my 600 friends, Fabio Minardi, who just put out a short album (free to download) entitled Genetic Control Frequencies, under the artist name FMcontrol. Trippy, brutal, extreme blasts of precisely organized analog noise, I was knocked out by how great this stuff is. You can check it out on his Soundcloud page at http://soundcloud.com/elixirfm.

Probably my favorite album to come out this year is the new Fovea Hex CD, Here Is Where We Used To Sing. Fovea Hex is essentially the creative vehicle for Clodagh Simonds’ extraordinary vocal compositions, although for this album she is joined by another wonderful Irish singer, Laura Sheeran. This music is enchanted and enchanting, magical and haunting, and both melancholy and uplifting at the same time. Musical comparisons with This Mortal Coil and some of the late Hector Zazou’s productions would be apt. This new CD is their second work, and it continues their practice of enlisting first-rate artists into the production, such as Brian Eno, Michael Begg and Colin Potter, of whom the latter two are featured on a bonus CD of extended remixes entitled Three Beams. This is New Age music with the gravity and profundity of Arvo Part.

I also felt compelled to include a track from a recently released live recording by the legendary British acid-folk band Comus, taken from their Swedish reunion gig from 2008. They do inspired versions of the songs from their first album on East Of Sweden, along with one impassioned cover, the Velvets’ “Venus In Furs.” The rest of the program consists of old classics from the 60s through the 90s, including an atypical song by Steppenwolf, from the first rock LP I ever bought (at age eleven), At Your Birthday Party. Enjoy…

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The playlist gives artist name, song title, and album title (in that order). A space between lines of text indicates the break between sets where track announcements were made.

Playlist for Mindtrain 03 – 16 August 2011

• Unrest – Imperial – Imperial F.F.R.R.

• Patty Waters – Moon, Don’t Come Up Tonight – Patty Waters Sings
• Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto – Pionier IOO – Summvs
• Cyclo. – Id#00 – Id
• Ryoji Ikeda / Iannis Xenakis – Per Se – Persepolis + Remixes (Edition I)
• FMcontrol – GFHH Space Quadrant2 – Genetic Control Frequencies
• Can – Future Days – Future Days
• Steppenwolf – Mango Juice – At Your Birthday Party
• Dave Ball – Mirrors / Sincerity – In Strict Tempo

• Fovea Hex – Falling Things (Where Does A Girl Begin?) – Here Is Where We Used To Sing
• Unrest – Champion Nines – Imperial F.F.R.R.
• Myrmyr – Thunder Stars – Fire Star
• Princess Tinymeat – Wigs On The Green – Herstory
• Llovespell – Access – Every Song Is A Llovesong
• The Sword Volcano Complex – The Other Side Of The World – Phosphorescent
• Nico – Sagen Die Gelehrten – The Frozen Borderline (1968-1970)
• Comus – Venus In Furs – East Of Sweden (Live At The Melloboat Festival 2008)
• Faust – Lauft… Heisst Das Es Lauft Oder Es Kommt Bald… Lauft [Alternative Version] – Faust IV (Deluxe Edition)
• June Tabor & The Oyster Band – All Tomorrow’s Parties – Freedom And Rain

• Fovea Hex – Cup Of Joy (Colin Potter Remix) – Three Beams

This edition of Mindtrain presented me with an opportunity my morbid sensibility did not want to pass up, as it fell on the 42nd anniversary of the evening on which Sharon Tate and three others were murdered by Manson Family members at the Polanski home on 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles. At the time of the murders, I was too young to have paid much attention to the news. But I later became rather obsessed with Manson and his followers and what they did. As ‘True Crime’ goes, you can’t deny that it’s a fascinating case and a landmark event in the history of mass murderers. Yeah, I kind of got even more ‘into’ the whole thing during the Industrial music era when groups like Throbbing Gristle made it ‘cool’ to dig Charlie, but I don’t now (nor did I ever) wish to condone what they did to those people. Nevertheless, I continue to be fascinated by the dark extremities to which human consciousness and behavior is capable of venturing.

And so this program is dedicated to Charles Manson and to his followers and his victims, real and alleged, living and deceased. All the music on this show is related in some way to those people and what happened – either directly inspired by Manson, related to Sharon Tate and/or Roman Polanski, or poetically suggestive of the homicidal course of events on August 8th-9th, 1969.

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The playlist gives artist name, song title, and album title (in that order). A space between lines of text indicates the break between sets where track announcements were made.

Playlist for Mindtrain 02 – 09 August 2011

• Ilhan Mimaroglu / Freddie Hubbard – Sing Me A Song Of Songmy, Part I – Sing Me A Song Of Songmy

• John Moran – Act 1: The Murders (Night Highway #1) – The Manson Family (An Opera)
• Death In June – We Said Destroy II – All Pigs Must Die
• John Moran – Act 1: The Murders (SUBJECT: The Beatles) – The Manson Family (An Opera)
• Krzysztof Komeda – Through The Closet – Rosemary’s Baby (Original Soundtrack)
• Death In June – All Pigs Must Die – All Pigs Must Die
• John Moran – Act 2: The Family (SUBJECT: Lynette ‘Squeaky’ Fromme) – The Manson Family (An Opera)
• Carmine Coppola & Francis Coppola – Letters From Home – Apocalypse Now (Original Soundtrack)
• Death In June – No Pig Day (Some Night We’re Going To Party Like It’s 1969) – All Pigs Must Die
• Current 93 – KillyKillKilly (A Fire Sermon) – The End Of Red Dreams (A Remix By Andrew Liles)
• Giddle & Boyd – Rocket USA – Going Steady With Peggy Moffitt

• John Moran – Act 2: The Family (Charlie In A Field, Forever) – The Manson Family (An Opera)
• The Beach Boys – Never Learn Not To Love – 20/20
• Oxbow (With Kathy Acker) – The Stabbing Hand – Let Me Be A Woman
• The Beatles – Helter Skelter – The Beatles (White Album)
• John Moran – Act 3: The Hall Of Justice (Susan Atkins, On The Staircase Of Justice, Leading To Night Highway #3) / Act 3: The Hall Of Justice (The Family In A Courtroom, Manson Leaps At Judge!) – The Manson Family (An Opera)
• Psychic TV – Always Is Always – Dreams Less Sweet
• Psychic TV – Roman P – Godstar: The Singles (Part Two)
• Krzysztof Komeda – Lullaby – Rosemary’s Baby (Original Soundtrack)

• John Cale – Leaving It Up To You – Helen Of Troy
• Current 93 – To Feed The Moon – The End Of Red Dreams (A Remix By Andrew Liles)

Underground Radio changed my life. Underground Radio was what they called freeform AOR FM stations back in the late 1960s. It was in 1969 that I first heard WBCN in Boston, and at that time it was one of the most radically unconventional ‘rock’ radio stations in the country. Although it was a commercial station, their DJs (they called them ‘airmen’ and some of them were female) were allowed to play whatever they wanted, with no restrictions, and you could hear music sets approaching an hour in length and featuring acid rock, Greenwich Village folk, Delta blues, free jazz, classical, comedy, and anything else, all mixed in together (usually sequentially, but some late-night DJs even did simultaneous mixes: I remember one night hearing a freeform collage made up of the new Firesign Theatre album, Ravel’s Bolero, Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin’s “Je t’Aime (Moi Non Plus),” and an obscure spoken word piece by Toru Takemitsu). As Eric Burdon sang in “Spill The Wine,” “this really blew my mind!”

But things got even more interesting (and much weirder) one rainy Sunday afternoon when I was listening to WBCN on the car radio in my Dad’s Ford Falcon, and I heard Lumpy Gravy by Frank Zappa. I was twelve years old at the time, and I’d never heard anything as bizarre and unorthodox as this before. Like, #@%&*#^*+$#!*?#!, man! Hearing Zappa led me on a lifelong journey of musical discovery, and confirmed my outsider status as weird music aficionado. After that, I started buying every record by the Mothers of Invention, and reading magazine interviews with FZ in Circus, Crawdaddy and Creem, where he talked about Edgard Varese and Cecil Taylor, John Cage and Eric Dolphy, etc, and so I began exploring and buying music I’d never even heard before. And as I continued listening to ‘BCN, it wasn’t long before I discovered other artists such as Captain Beefheart, the Velvet Underground, White Noise and others, always passionately interested in discovering new and unusual sounds while remaining a rock & roller at heart.

But back in the 1970s (at least in Eastern Massachusetts where I grew up), WBCN wasn’t the only radio station that played music outside the mainstream. There were about half a dozen college stations in addition to the prestigious PBS outlet WGBH, all non-commercial and mostly clustered down around the low end of the FM dial, coming out of Boston, Worcester and Providence, R.I. If I got bored with what the DJ was playing on ‘BCN (and that station really started veering toward a more conventional AOR programming structure around 1972 or so, when they moved their studio from the heart of the red light district up to the top of the Prudential Building and started running commercials for motor vehicle companies and so forth). There was WBUR, coming out of Boston University, which had a lot of great jazz programming. And Brown University in Providence to the south had a great station called WBRU, and that was where I first heard Faust in 1973, around the time they signed to Virgin and released The Faust Tapes. This was another great mind expansion for me, and it led to my personal discovery of the whole previously uncharted territory of ‘import records’ and all the amazing bands from the UK and Europe who put out fantastically inventive music on labels that were not generally distributed in the US. So while I was getting into all this weird music, it was the same time as I was digging prog and glam stuff and the other groups who never made it onto American Top 40 radio, from Gentle Giant to Roxy Music.

And then Punk happened. And New Wave. And Industrial. An ever expanding musical universe, to the point where even the most dedicated musical explorer can’t begin to discover half of the stuff that’s out there these days, what with the explosion of the internet, independent record labels and distributors, bedroom musicians… and radio stations like this one!

So back when I was a teenager, holed up in my bedroom listening to Yoko Ono’s Fly on my Nikko receiver, Miracord turntable and Advent loudspeakers, I used to think that if I had a radio program of my own, I’d like to call it “Mindtrain,” after the propulsive, rocking freakout track of the same name on Yoko’s double LP. I’ve waited a long time to make this happen, and with the help of the people who’ve brought this station into existence, here it is!

The music on this first episode of Mindtrain runs the gamut from psychedelia to warped out trip hop, avant-garde jazz to adult contemporary, No Wave to dark ambient/industrial. Old favorites from my youth and fresh new releases from this past year. And this is only the tip of the iceberg, folks. Listen and enjoy…

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The playlist gives artist name, song title, and album title (in that order). A space between lines of text indicates the break between sets where track announcements were made.

Playlist for Mindtrain 01 – 02 August 2011

• Yoko Ono – Mindtrain – Fly

• The Move – It Wasn’t My Idea – Message From The Country
• Ildfrost – Poppycock – Possum Play Falcon
• Cyclobe – Ayin Acla (Third Dream Of The Night Circle) – Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window
• Pixyblink – Condemnation – Flameless Lantern

• Paul Haines / Carla Bley & The Jazz Composers Orchestra – Why – Escalator Over The Hill
• Alejandro Jodorowsky – Topo Triste – El Topo (Original Soundtrack)
• Scott Walker – Wait Until Dark – Scott 2
• Swing Out Sister – Somewhere Deep In The Night / The Vital Thing – Somewhere Deep In The Night
• Cockney Rebel – Ritz – The Psychomodo
• Mary & The Boy – Mama – Mary And The Boy
• Rhea Tucanae & Pixyblink – Star-Winds – Fungi From Yuggoth

• Mary And The Boy – Death / Cock – Mary And The Boy
• Maki Asakawa – Flash Dark – Black
• Paul Haines / Carla Bley & The Jazz Composers Orchestra – End Of Rawalpindi – Escalator Over The Hill

• The Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band – Could’ve Moved Mountains – Demonlover (Original Soundtrack)

What I play on Mindtrain is what I like – the music I’ve discovered and grown to love over the last forty-odd years of avid listening and collecting. There are no restrictions or discriminations as to style or genre or era, and the program is as much about breaking down musical barriers as it is about creating unexpected links and connections (call it ‘the art of the segue’). Some of it is old and some is new. Some of it is obscure and out-of-print, but much of it is available to those who take the time to hunt it down (that’s what the internet is for). I strenuously encourage listeners who discover new and previously unheard music on this program to Google artist names and visit www.discogs.com to learn more, and to support the music by purchasing digital or physical releases when available.

This initial test broadcast of Mindtrain was done from the remote studio of Doktor Sleepless (host of the Interstellar Nihilism program here at Radio Valencia). Song selections were made pretty much ‘on the fly’ as I was learning how to present my first radio show (ever). Clumsy segues between songs, dead air and flubbed track announcements were unintentional and more or less unavoidable. There is some fine music here, nonetheless (and the music is what this show is all about).

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The playlist gives artist name, song title, and album title (in that order). A space between lines of text indicates the break between sets where track announcements were made.

Playlist for Mindtrain 00 – 26 July 2011

• Cockney Rebel – Cavaliers – The Psychomodo
• Grace Slick – Theme From The Movie “Manhole” – Manhole

• Department S – Is Vic There? – Sub-Stance
• Edmund Welles – When I Woke Up, Everyone Was Gone – Imagination Lost
• Peter Ivers – Audience Of One (Alternate Version) – The Untold Stories
• Gavin Friday & The Man Seezer – Dazzle And Delight – Each Man Kills The Things He Loves
• Marc Almond & Michael Cashmore – The Sleeper In The Valley – Feasting With Panthers
• Ordo Equitum Solis – Reis Glorios – Animi Aegritudo
• Monica Richards – A Good Thing – Infra-Warrior
• Bowery Electric – Deep Sky Objects – Bowery Electric
• Ultravox! – Hiroshima Mon Amour – Ha!-Ha!-Ha!

• Paul Haines / Carla Bley & The Jazz Composers Orchestra – Rawalpindi Blues – Escalator Over The Hill
• Cyclobe – Augural Sun – Wounded Galaxies Tap At The Window
• Oxbow – Pannonica – Fuckfest / King Of The Jews
• John White – Son Of Gothic Chord – Machine Music
• Judy Nylon – Sleepless Nights – Pal Judy
• Nature And Organisation – In Heaven – Third Terminal Position
• Department S – Going Left Right – Sub-Stance
• Leo Kottke – Louise – Greenhouse