I’m not gonna write much about about New York psychedelic legends Silver Apples, their music and history has been posted all over the internet in the last few years, plus you can go check their website for yourselves after you’ve listened to this dark and demented homage to love gone wrong that they released back in 1968. Yes 1968. Some folks were just waaaaaaay ahead of their time…..
Well it’s 40 years on, and the voodoo is going strong as one of the original members is performing again under the Silver Apples moniker, and in fact here’s a video of him from just a few months ago putting the pox on you..
“learn to ride a horse and wield a sword, for we have entered into the new dark ages.
fvck the world not the planet!”
or so proclaims the website of this very pagan Berlin based girl/boy duo.
Welcome to Crossover, who have released quite a selection of cosmically dark electro jams since they formed back in 2001. Though some of their music leaves me feeling indifferent, some blows my f*kin mind, in fact this isn’t the first song of theirs I’ve posted on my blog..
So if you enjoy this lo-fi slow burner, why not check them out for yourself..?
[another selection from the vaults of my musical youth]
The Pop Group were a bunch of musical post-punk no-wavers from Bristol in the UK, who between 1978 and 1981 released several singles, and two albums - “Y” and “For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?”.
I picked up “For How Much Longer…” sometime after it’s release in 1980. It was noisey, percussive and politically inspired, but somehow seemed more exotic than alot of the other post-punk music I was listening to at the time, partly due no doubt to the singer Mark Stewart’s often deranged vocals..!
After they split the darkly exuberant Mr Stewart formed “Mark Stewart & The Mafia” and released a bunch of music on Adrian Sherwood’s experimental “On-U Sound” label, while other members went on to form bands Pigbag, Head, Maximum Joy, and Rip Rig & Panic. I’ll post some of their music here in the future..
The Pop Group may have only been around for 3 years, but they left quite a mark on their local city, being widely acknowledged for helping create the Bristol music scene that followed, and influencing such notable Bristol bands as Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky etc..
It’s also safe to say they had a noticable influence on the modern disco-punk sound that includes such bands as LCD Sound System, Outhud, Chik Chick Chik etc..
The Pop Group’s original vinyl releases are hard to come by these days, but thanks to those musical boffins at Soul Jazz records in London you can pick up a compilation album of The Pop Group and Mark Stewart that they released a couple of years back. Check it here along with more info about the band..
Anyways here’s a video of them performing “She is Beyond Good and Evil” from 1979..
Who were Krautrock influenced avante garde DIY punk pioneers. They formed in 1972, put out their first record in 1976, released a couple of studio albums, and a couple of compilations, then split up in the eighties. You can hear there sound in so many other ‘punk’ bands who followed after them. There releases also included a bunch of experimental ‘ambient’ music, long before the genre even existed..
they were an Icelandic post-punk band that included a young Bjork in her pre-SugarCubes days..
They released 2 albums on the anarchist punk label ‘Crass Records’ including the track in the video below, and I was fortunate enough to see them live in concert 1984 along with anarcho-punk pioneers Flux of Pink Indians. I clearly recall Bjork’s unique and wildly expressive voice, and phenomenal stage presence, but it wasn’t ’til I met her in person at a squatted acid-house party in London in 1990 that I also recognized her as the singer with KUKL..
I’m gonna post some of their edgier stuff in the future, but for now here’s a youtube clip of them performing ‘Anna’..
As a kid I was rarely teased about my unusual name. And considering I attended mostly traditional working class schools where fist-fighting, bullying and vicious teasing were as commonplace as pimples, I clearly got off easy..
But there was one name my friends briefly branded me with, after she got a song to the top end of the British music charts - “Lena Lovich”. As a result of that short-lived but annoying name calling I’ve always felt a certain connection with her and her crazy braids, and I’m glad to say she made a couple of decent post-punk tracks along a path of mostly pop-induced musical quirkiness. So here she is - Jeno (oops, I mean Lena) Lovich! Enjoy..
not the first time I’ve posted something re; Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, but it inspires me that this talented woman was looping beats when I was still a twinkle in my parents eyes..
