Blasphemy On the Disco (Bunnies call to action)

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Hola fellow horsemen, mermaids and mermasters (cause maids are so 20th century),

DB2012For those of you who have the dis-pleasure of knowing me in some form or another know quite well that I do dedicate quite a big chunk of my menial majestic existence to music. I always feel the urge to share all the good vibes I come across (legally ofcourse, FBI I am serious, never ever gave anything for free – virginity included). So culminating this incredible year was Disco Blasphemy 2012, a nice cap on one hell of a blasphemous podcast series that I launched back in July of last year. That followed District Funk which if you’ve been reading this esteemed rantatious blog for a while would know all about.

So without further ado, here comes the best tunes in my sleeves this year. Get your freak on, grab a disco bunny and do blasphemous stuff. Just do it (be safe though).

Tracklist

01- Dexter Wansel – Time Is The Teacher
02- Billy Paul – Let’s Make A Baby
03- Jazzanova – Rendezvous
04- Patrice Rushen – Where There Is Love
05- DJ Jazzy Jeff – The Definition (ft. Kel Spencer)
06- Ryo Murakami – Just for This
07- Skudge – Ontic (Rolando Understands Remix)
08- Moomin – Raw Like 97
09- James Mason – Nightgruv
10- Tiger & Woods – Gin Nation
11- Dusky – Henry 85 (Fcl Weemix)
12- Blawan – Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage
13- youANDme – Mouche (Luke Hess Electric Dub)
14- Mic Newman – Knickerbocker
15- Smallpeople – Move With Your Vision
16- Detroit Swindle – Guess What (Leftside Wobble Remix)
17- Homework – Cmon Start Moving
18- Drew Sky – Razzmatazz
19- Hodges, James & Smith – What Have You Done For Love
20- First Choice – Let No Man Put Asunder (12″ Remix)
21- Leron Carson – Dedicated
22- Rene Bandaly Family – Tanki Tanki
23- Objekt – Porcupine
24- Wil Maddams – My Turn
25- Phors – Fading Away
26- Phors – Shining Star
27- Everything But The Girl – Compression
28- Detroit Swindle – Jick Rames
29- Chasing Kurt – Galaxy Hero (Deep Space Orchestra Remix)
30- Pan/Tone – Stay (Nikki Gibler Remix)
31- Andrés – New For U
32- Joy Orbison – Ellipsis
33- WK7 – Do It Yourself
34- Tony Lionni – Afterhours
35- Green Velvet – Never Satisfied (Studio 54 Re-Re Mix)
36- Bicep, Ejeca – You (Steffi Remix)
37- Azuni – Raw Chord
38- Midland – What We Know (Motor City Drum Ensemble Remix)
39- Groove Armada – Don’t Take Your Love Away
40- Lee Jones – Moment (George Fitzgerald Remix)
41- Deep Future – You Need It (Detroit Swindle’s ‘Never Enough’ Interpretation)
42- Chris James – Kind of Heavy (Andre Crom Remix)
43- Jask – Life
44- Rahbani Brothers – La Tehtab Alayeh
45- Ziad Rahbani – Abu Ali
46- Erol Evgin – Sevdan Olmazsa

And finally, here is a cool widget with all the Disco Blasphemy sets so far:

Case Study – Sex Panther: 60% Of the Time, It Works All The Time?!

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Folks, I’ve been baffled by this conundrum posited by the great San Diego’s KVWN-TV Channel 4 Evening News’s field reporter Brian Fantana in the bible of a movie that is ‘Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy’ around 3/4 of a decade ago and I’ve decided it’s about time we address this highly politically charged revolution-inducing issue once and for all.

Let us firstly look at the direct excerpt from the movie:

Brian Fantana: [about Veronica] I’ll give this little cookie an hour before we’re doing the no-pants dance. Time to musk up.
[opens cologne cabinet]
Ron Burgundy: Wow. Never ceases to amaze me. What cologne you gonna go with? London Gentleman, or wait. No, no, no. Hold on. Blackbeard’s Delight.
Brian Fantana: No, she gets a special cologne… It’s called Sex Panther by Odeon. It’s illegal in nine countries… Yep, it’s made with bits of real panther, so you know it’s good.
Ron Burgundy: It’s quite pungent.
Brian Fantana: Oh yeah.
Ron Burgundy: It’s a formidable scent… It stings the nostrils. In a good way.
Brian Fantana: Yep.
Ron Burgundy: Brian, I’m gonna be honest with you, that smells like pure gasoline.
Brian Fantana: They’ve done studies, you know. 60% of the time it works, every time. 
[cheesy grin]
Ron Burgundy: That doesn’t make sense.
Brian Fantana: Well… Let’s go see if we can make this little kitty purr.
[snarls]

Analysis:

The logic behind this statement is the following:

Wise yet baffling advertising, has Sex Panther fooled us?!

In a pool of randomly chosen women, a man who has musked up with Sex Panther (a cologne illegal in 9 countries and made with bits of real panther, so we know it’s good) will guarantee that from that pool at least 60% will be 100% attracted to the musked man.

However, on a second glance, this cannot be the full premise, as Ron Burgundy himself notes “that doesn’t make any sense”. This means that another deeper re-evaluation of the statement needs to be conducted!

Deeper Re-evaluation that NEEDS to be conducted:

Sex Panther ... in action

Could this camel have musked up with Sex Panther? We may never know!

For starters, let’s look at the second part of the statement ‘it works every time’. This implies a definitive result, 100% of the time, so there is no room for failure and any man on sex panther will get action regardless of the 60%. So why the need to mention the 60% in their advertising. Are Sex Panther hiding something here? How could they have gotten away with it? And if so, what could it be? Also, did I forget to wear my pants this morning?

In theory, Sex Panther have not disclosed how their testing was done, one wouldn’t be sent to bedlam if they proclaimed that it is at least a slight possibility that Sex Panther might have included non-humans in that study. Taking that into account, could Brian Fantana actually be saying that 60% of the time, a living thing on Sex Panther will get females of ANY other living species 100% of the time?

Brian Fantana’s cologne cabinet, never seizes to impress Ron Burgundy.

In reality it actually makes perfect sense, because what Brian Fantana is actually hinting at is that 60% of ALL time (till infinity and beyond), it will work 100% of ALL the time. And as you know from your mathematics class:

where x is all time.

Therefore, one must come to the conclusion that as time approaches infinity, you will continue to have a 100% chance of attracting 60% of all living things of all time, which practically means everything you know, statistically.

Conclusion

Blackbeard’s Delight … a safer alternative.

Sex Panther is therefore a very dangerous potentially fatal tool, pungent enough to smell like Indian food in a used diaper but also musky enough to make the females of an unknown number of species (even potentially including humans) fall at your knees with deadly desire. It is therefore highly un-recommended and most probably kill you (don’t want to be eaten by a female Lioness). My advice would be to stick to lamer but safer alternatives such as London Gentleman or Blackbeard’s Delight and you could (further studies might need to be conducted here) be fine.

The West London Tube Station Conundrum

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Turnham Green Church on one cold and creepy foggy January evening.

Greetings humanoids!

One of the things that has intrigued me for quite a while is this strange supernatural phenomenon that seems to have befallen West London decades ago but no one seems to care / give a ‘flying lizard humping a crab in the air’ about. Allow me to elaborate…

I have been inhabiting this part of Londinium for long enough now to know what airline is hovering above my head purely based on the time of the day and sound of the engine (and I pseudo-support a 3rd Heathrow runway). And this breadth of experience as a West Londoner, as handy as it is in day to day life, means that I do indeed spend most the time in the shower thinking of this particular conundrum.

Keep this map as a reference, you’ll need it as I ramble along (click on each place-mark for more info).


View Larger Map

Let us start from the beginning and introduce several lemmas directly correlating to the map above.

Lemma 1: Turnham Green station was named after Tunham Green the park
Lemma 2: Chiswick Park station was named after Chiswick Common
Lemma 3: Chiswick Park the business park (a dystopian Orwellian-esque village like nightmare place), was name after Chiswick Park station
Lemma 4: Gunnersbury station was named after Gunnersbury Park

Now according to a Freedom of information request by some awesome individual back in 2008, Tfl responded with this extremely informative spreadsheet outlining the distance between every two outstanding stations on all ‘London Underground’ lines. Couple that with my out of this orbit spreadsheet data skills, I was able to calculate the average distance between any two stations on the same line, and it turned out to be 1.31km (0.81 miles).

District Line - West London

If we were to follow the natural sequence of stations on the two branches of the district lines (picture above), it would go like this:

Ealing Broadway branch (westbound w/ distance):

TURNHAM GREEN CHISWICK PARK 0.95
CHISWICK PARK ACTON TOWN 1.22
ACTON TOWN EALING COMMON 1.03
EALING COMMON EALING BROADWAY 1.50

Richmond Branch (westbound w/ distance):

TURNHAM GREEN GUNNERSBURY 1.59
GUNNERSBURY KEW GARDENS 1.71
KEW GARDENS RICHMOND 2.14

Taking into consideration the average distance mentioned above it would seem that the distance between Turnham Green and Chiswick Park is indeed rather strange, could it be that Chiswick Park was never meant to be there? Was it a fluke? The station was opened in July 1879 whereas Turnham Green station came 10 years before that in 1869!

Confused? So am I. Let’s solve this bitch:

It turns out that it was not Turnham Green that is at fault for causing all this solid and extremely life changing confusion. It was actually Chiswick Park, which in it’s early days was actually named ’Acton Green’, in reference to the adjacent park!! And taking into consideration that Turnham Green was the only station serving the area 10 years earlier, it just makes a whole lot of sense that it was named after what then was the closest church and park (because people have like little imagination sometimes).

Gunnersbury Manor

This brings us to our final piece of the puzzle, Gunnersbury. This was quite strange, because for quite a while it was evident to everyone living on the west side of Chiswick that Gunnersbury was really the park and the park took it’s name after the manor (later turned museum) on the site (and a mesmerizing building may I add as well!). So how can a park, roughly a mile away, closer to Acton Town and Kew Bridge give its name to Gunnersbury? The answer is we just don’t know, but what is now known is that the station actually opened as ‘Brentford Road station’, in a clear reference to what is now Chiswick High Street which on a straight path will probably take you straight to Brentford (or Sao Paolo, if you make it to Heathrow and sneak on a plane).

So there you go my minions, hours spent in the shower, flying my own rocket and even cleaning my own dishes pondering over this conundrum have finally yielded a result. Eureka!

Album in History: Shakatak – Night Birds

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'Night Birds' - Sounds ahead of their time (from space?)

In the long, diverse and sometimes even seemingly pedantic world of Jazz history there have been certain artists that have gone on to be so instrumental in expanding and diversifying the genre that they have created sub-genres solely revolving around their sounds. And while obvious names like Herbie Hancock, George Duke, Frank Zappa and Bob James immediately spring to mind, other relatively low-key performers like Shakatak have been just as influential. It is that very notion which makes defining Shakatak’s sound such a difficult task, not that I believe in “defining” and “labelling” sounds anyways!

After the racially fuelled disco-demotion nights, which exposed deep social problems that characterized much of the late 70s / early 80s period in mainstream America, a sound which fused the four on the floor electronic time signatures with elements of jazz, funk and disco was born, we now refer to it as post-Disco! At the time it was just a natural reaction to a movement characterized by its rejection to the notion that cultural America was changing, and that racism and homophobia were on the decline! Counterculture was taking over the American youth, culminating in anti-globalization collectives which had already established itself in the 60s largely as a youth movement sprawling from the disenfranchised social fabric destroyed initially by Nixon and later the Raegen years, or as brother Gil Scott-Heron called him, Rae-gun!

Musically, this was perfect fertile grounds to develop Disco, which hate-riddled demolition nights aside, wasn’t really developing all that much as it was. That’s not to say that several offshoot genres hadn’t already taken a life of their own by then. Giorgio Moroder had already developed his own brand of Hi-NRG Disco (exemplified in his collaborations with Donna Summers), and kids in Detroit and Chicago were listening to Kraftwerk and already discovered that 808s and 303s are more than just pretty Japanese machines that make robot sounds. What the disco demolition nights did however, was exponentially speed up that process, and in a matter of years dance music witnessed arguably its greatest evolution to date.

In England, that change was profoundly felt, and while in the later years of the 80s it was manifested in the meteoric rise of Synthpop, especially in northern parts, Jazz-Funk was the genre of the moment in the early to mid-years of the decade. ‘Night Birds’ in many ways exemplified that era, yet somehow came at a time when Jazz-Funk was both quite unknown to the wider public and largely rejected from Jazz’s inner-circle. Smooth Jazz pioneer Bob James faced similar objections from the Jazz community when One, Two, Three and BJ4 were released, even though he never claimed them to be Jazz in the first place!

‘Night Birds’ as an album achieved limited commercial success initially despite it’s quite obvious pop connection (and one hell of an awesome cover art work!). But this was never about sales, what makes this album so special is the ineffably rich compositions and instrumental innovativeness spearheaded by the band’s pianist Bill Sharpe. George Anderson on the other hand provided that killer brass so evident in Streetwalkin’. A spectacularly well harmonized eclectic album with just the right amount vocal hooks covers everything from early day Bossa jazz to swanky jazz-funk, which it largely put on the map!


Shakatak – Streetwalkin’ – Kay’s ‘One Very Cold Yet Funky Morning’ Edit

Fiat: We are all fine with Sexual assault now!

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Fiat: Mamma mia!!

Folks, I don’t know about you, but last I checked (which was last evening), we were not all fine with the idea of hoards of horny young men chasing women in their cars and physically removing them from the vehicle like a prey (and breaking into dance). Sounds grotesque? Tell that to Fiat, whose new commercial sees ‘Jenny from the block’ driving around in a Fiat 500 while being chased by hundreds of men, the ad then takes an interesting twist when she gets pulled out of the car, and breaks into dance?! I’m sorry my Italian friends, but in real life that could have very well taken a turn for the worse (Lara Logan anyone?), just sayin…

Maybe that’s just Jenny’s new idea of getting over her divorce, maybe it’s just her midlife crisis, maybe I left the oven on in the kitchen yesterday and it could even be that Zombies are real. In any case, here it is:

Track of the Month: Portico Quartet – City of Glass

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Portico Quartet's third self-titled album

Let’s face it, it hasn’t been Jazz’s finest hour for quite a while. Apart from a few legends still doing their thing, the scene in the past couple of decades has been quite devoid from fresh talent and more so from fresh ideas. But that all changed in recent times when the likes of Jaga Jazzist, Floating Points, Flying Lotus and Henrik Schwarz found a spark that has long been missing from the versatile genre, electronic fusion.

Back in the 70s, the likes of George Duke and Frank Zappa were experimenting with Jazz like there was no tomorrow. And the once fundamentally stringent multi-faceted idiomatic genre, became a playground for all kinds of imports from across the globe. All of a sudden, Jazz became a melting pot of everything from African tabla solos to ostinato time signatures (exemplified in Herbie Hancock‘s Mwandishi).The period saw one of Jazz’s biggest evolution to date, the abandoning of the swing beat in favor of the backbeat.

Live at Rough Trade East (31st Jan 2012)

Flash forward to 2012, and it seems like jazz is everywhere again. Youngsters are going to record stores and browsing hundreds of fusion movement vinyls, previously a rarity, now a common sight. And in that vein, it wasn’t surprising that a day after Portico Quartet released their third album, a 45 minute appearance at Rough Trade East on Brick Lane was a full house affair.

But to label any track on that album as jazz or jazz fusion would be nothing short of misleading. It is much more than that, but somehow simplified to sound much less. A quirky dubstep bassline meets an ineffably well structured 2 step beat, suddenly morphing into an ambient reverb-atious landscape with a cello propagating you through it all like a ripple that never fades.