ale{atori}c

I hope my friend Aubrey won’t mind me outing him here. He and I share many of the same tastes in both musical genres and acts that are out of fashion more often than not; and it’s rare to meet someone whose love for this music not only goes beyond a worry about what’s cool or hip (and not just stuff that’s ironically hip to love, like ABBA, or Yacht Rock) but is based on the music that truly moves or inspires you, even if it gets you laughed out of the room when you admit your secret shame.

He and his partner Shae run Citizen Objects, makers of fine quality art and music, and their under-appreciated record blog is a love-letter to music lost-in-the-stacks.

Check it out at the Aural Dustbin.

OM.

My friend proswell has re-released “Konami” on his own Eerik Inpuj Sound netlabel. It’s 8 years old but now remastered; a really nice collection of impulse tracker songs in the IDM genre. For fans of Boards of Canada, Autechre, etc.

You can download Konami at Bandcamp. You can pay any amount you like, even $0.

Group Doueh: Treeg Salaam LP SF048

I found out recently that the obscure world music label Sublime Frequencies (both the music and the label are somewhat obscure, but not nearly as obscure as say Backporch Revolution), founded by the guys from the Sun City Girls had a way for me to easily rectify my almost complete lack of possessing the ability to listen to any part of their catalog on demand.

You can get the entire SF catalog through SF 039 here. It’s just a data DVD, so I am sure there’s lots of awesome pictures, art and liner notes that you’ll miss, but almost all of these CDs and LPs are out of print, so for someone like me, this was about the only way to get them.

Included is the relatively well-known (among world music fans) album by Omar Souleyman, Highway to Hassake: Folk and Pop Sounds of Syria. But there is also lots of really great cassette tape field recordings from deep in the jungles of Southeast Asia, radio broadcasts of unknown pop songs and chatter from Africa and the Middle East, religious and tribal music from some forgotten provinces of Asian highlands, and way too much more to even begin to comprehend.

I’ve been playing the collection in iTunes on shuffle for a few days now, and I still haven’t gotten sick of it.

I thought I had posted this link to the blog before, but it appears that I have not. Apparently, it was featured earlier this week on NPR.

http://www.opensoundneworleans.com

Just discovered this: Electronic Music from the Middle Eastern Avant-Garde (1959-2001).

I liked the Darius Dolat-Shahi one in particular; reminds me of BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Terry Riley, and Raymond Scott, with the eastern sound of the stringed instrument the setar, reminiscent of Greek rebetika.

On the other hand the spoken word (LAY-LA! A WOMAN! ) in the Halim El-Dabh bit are kind of hard to digest.