Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
2/25/22
This is not a post - Italian Film Soundtracks from the 60s & 70s.
All cheap as free, on FaceTube. Share and enjoy.
Bikini Beat, Easy Tempo Vol 7
1/19/22
RIP Marty Roberts, One falf of Marty & Elayne, the house band at The Dresden Room.
Well, Marty Roberts has passed away.
For the year I lived in LA, there was only one place that always made me feel at home, and like could have been happy living there permanently: the Dresden Room. Each time I went to see Marty and Elayne play there, I chatted them up during their break and requested old songs that apparently nobody else asked for. They were always very kind and generous with their time.One time, I asked if they knew Quiet Village. Marty looked a little surprised and said nobody had mentioned that song in a really long time. They'd be happy to dust that one off. So, I put my fiver in their jar and took my seat, and soon Marty and Elayne went into Martin Denny's Quiet Village, including a jungle-drums jam that went on for ten minutes and earned them a standing ovation.
Marty & Elayne were fun and kitschy, and they were nice enough to remember me from my previous visits to the Dresden. Thanks for everything, Marty. I'm glad I got the chance to get to know him a little bit while he was around. My condolences to Elayne Roberts.
1/27/20
12/16/19
12/9/19
12/6/19
3/15/19
1/9/19
Dismal Folk Songs
CRITICALLY IMPROBABLE UPDATE!
Well, against all likelihood, it looks as though this post is starting to make the rounds on Facebook, and folk songists have started folk songing these titles.
https://www.facebook.com/
For easy reference, here are other albums and song books we have posted.
Songs of the North American Oak Tree
Songs of the Great Maritime Disasters
Sister Mary Croftwassen - Bastard Pie.
https://phil-are-go.blogspot.
https://phil-are-go.blogspot.
Easy Funeral Hits
https://phil-are-go.blogspot.
https://phil-are-go.blogspot.
10/17/18
RCA Quadraphonic - Flew like a lead zeppelin.
Gather round, children, and listen to a story of hope and disappointment.
In 1970, RCA wanted everyone to buy a new audio system for the new four-channel (which came to be known as "quadraphonic" or "quad") music system. At that time, consumer-level stereophonic (two-channel) systems were still sort of new. Anyone with a stereo "hi-fi" system would have been considered an early adopter.
This RCA ad wanted you to drop everything and rush straight out and buy a new quad system. Now, stereo systems have twice as many components as mono. Two amplifiers, twice the speakers, twice the everything, pretty much. As a result, they cost about twice the money that a monophonic system did.
Along comes quadraphonic, and they cost roughly twice as much as stereo, with four times the components as a mono system, of course. How much was that? Well, the system pictured in the RCA ad sold for $250. Run off to the CPI inflation calculator page and we can see that $250 was about $1300 in today's money. Yowza.
Having just bought a stereo hi-fi a few years previously, would you be prepared to jump to a quad system already? To the well-heeled douchebag subscribers of Esquire, it may have been a no brainer. It was also 1970, so, amazingly bad decisions on the part of pop culture were coming fast and furious. Maybe a $1300 bookshelf music system (look at the size of the speakers in comparison to the cassette slot) seemed like a solid decision? Maybe you would have looked forward to throwing this in the trash when hexaphonic sound systems came out a few years in the future? I mean, why wouldn't you assume that was on the way, right? Spoiler alert: that didn't happen.
Time would show us that not many people were into quad. Not very many albums were recorded in quad, and before too long, Dolby Labs would figure out how to make a stereo signal feed four or more speakers through clever phase detection. Stereo was pretty good enough, it seemed. Five-channel and seven-channel surround systems, which extracted multichannel audio from a two-channel encoded audio signal, would embarrass your lame-ass quad system by simply being more cleverer with less hardware. If you haven't listened to music on a surround system, you're missing out. It's pretty cool.
Of course, we are now looking at an entire generation raised on hyper-compressed music played through twenty-dollar computer speakers or came-free-with-my-iPhone craptacular earbuds, so, hi-fi, or "high fidelity" is sort of a dead thing for now. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention the superpopular bass-is-all-I-care-about Beats brand of headphones, which are as close to high-fidelity as the squeaky earbuds they, in many cases replaced, to be honest. People love those too, because they're expensive.
Come to think of it, hi-fi early adopters at least cared about accurate sound reproduction. Maybe those douchebags weren't so silly after all. Is the idea of four speakers more ridiculous than choosing a pair of headphones because you like the color, or headphones that are engineered with permanent bass-all-the-way-up circuitry? The last time I tried to buy a pair of headphones in a store, the clerk looked at me like I was nuts when I told him I wanted to hear them before buying them. Apparently, caring about how accurately a music system reproduces sound makes you an eccentric outlier.
Maybe the douchebags weren't so silly.
Maybe the douchebags weren't so silly.
3/8/18
3/7/18
Microman - Prog rock icon.
So, when I was a kid, like a thousand years ago, Star Wars was, as they say, The Shit. Yes, of course I had those. Hugely upstaged by the Star Wars toys were a weird line of toys imported from Japan, called (in the U.S.) "Micronauts". They could not have been more different from the Star Wars toys. Star Wars was gritty and, uuh, "realistic". Since nobody does crazy like Japan does it, Micronauts were surreal and very disco.
Everybody had chrome heads and bodies made of translucent colored plastic, but some had diecast metal parts. The design was all over the map. Also, while Star Wars figures only had four joints (shoulders and knees), Micronauts were articulated like G.I. Joe, with a central elastic band holding all their limbs on. Knees, elbows, wrists, ankles, and head all moved, and lots of the articulation points were ball joints. They were downright floppy. You could also take them apart and combine them in different ways.
The bad guys were always comparatively huge, and looked like they were built from other robots.
So, Micronauts were the trippy alternative to Star Wars. A few weeks ago, I trolled FaceTube to see if I imagined them, or if they actually existed. Turns out I wasn't crazy! Here's a commercial from the American market that launched the line.
But in their native Japan, Micronauts were called "Microman". And guess what? Their commercials were way, way better...
In the above clip, shortly after the guy shouts "STRONG BREAK!!! ROBOTO-MAN!!!!", the music starts. My eyes got all big. What the hell is this? It sounds like a Mini-Moog and a drummer who uses cocaine as non-dairy creamer. Fuck yeah. This is prog rock and no mistake. It's also the perfect weirdo music for a freaky line of space toys like Microman. At the end of each commercial in this clip, it ends with the logo and and a gravely-voice guy singing "Mee-koh-ru-MANNN!" Bad. Ass.
So what's the logo at the end of the commercial? I can't read Japanese, but it probably says Microman.
Well, we do know that the Japanese use a special alphabet to allow them to phonetically spell out anything that otherwise won't work in their natively pictographic written language. Here's the Katakana chart they use to pronounce stuff like, for example, English phrases like "Microman", or "mee-kokh-ru-man".
Each syllable in Katakana consists of a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound (ko, ru, me, etc.) To pronounce a consonant without a vowel after it is generally not how their language works. There is, however, a syllable for the lone letter "N", fortunately. Realizing this, it explains why, when a Japanese person tries to pronounce "ice cream", it comes out as "ai-su-ku-re-mu". Any time an English word ends with a naked consonant, force of habit makes a Japanese speaker tack on a vowel. Listening to the different takes of the "Mi-koh-ru-man" singer, you can hear him trying to sing "man" pronouncing it a little different sometimes.
So, let's verify the that the Microman logo actually says "Microman", using the available Katakana syllables. The page I got the logo from (http://www.microforever.com/25threscuem25x.htm) names the graphic as "microman rescuelogo".
So, "Microman Rescue Team". It looks like, for the last word at the bottom "team", they switched back to standard Japanese Hiragana. Google translate was able to shed a little light on how that may work, but maybe there's someone out there who actually understands Japanese that can straighten it all out in the comments?
Anyway... the music. Early 70's prog rock. Love it. The first thing I thought of when I heard the music in that commercial was Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Compare the Microman music to Eruption, side 1, track 1 from ELP's 1971 album, Tarkus. I'm not calling it a ripoff, but rather, they're cool and fun in the same way. You can't go wrong with some analog synth.
And look at the Tarkus album cover. That's practically an action figure right there. Part armadillo, part tank. When I was a kid, I would have played with a toy like that for sure.
A friend of mine said the Microman music sounds like Gentle Giant, another prog band form the early 70s. Their song, Alucard, sounds kind of Micromaney...
As one commenter on the FaceTube Microman video says...
You're damn right he does.
So, after all this, maybe you've decided you're enough of a weirdo to want a Microman shirt? I sure am. So, we've made two. You can pick the shirt type and color, as always. And, don't forget to adjust the size and placement of the graphic if you want.
This one is the much-analyzed Microman rescue Team shirt. Nobody will know what the hell your shirt is. Cool.
https://shop.spreadshirt.com/PhilAreGo/microman+(micronaut)+rescue+team?q=I1015262946
This one is just a neat picture from the package of Death Mark, presumably an evil Microman enemy (or an Acroyear, in Microman parlance) whose part robot, part airplane, all weird. We vectorized him in Adobe Illustrator from these box images (see below), and yeah, that took frikkin' forever. Sheesh.
https://shop.spreadshirt.com/PhilAreGo/microman+death+marck?q=I1015308511
 |
| Image found at... http://tokyotoybastard.blogspot.com/2016/06/for-love-of-microman.html |
The bad guys were always comparatively huge, and looked like they were built from other robots.
So, Micronauts were the trippy alternative to Star Wars. A few weeks ago, I trolled FaceTube to see if I imagined them, or if they actually existed. Turns out I wasn't crazy! Here's a commercial from the American market that launched the line.
But in their native Japan, Micronauts were called "Microman". And guess what? Their commercials were way, way better...
In the above clip, shortly after the guy shouts "STRONG BREAK!!! ROBOTO-MAN!!!!", the music starts. My eyes got all big. What the hell is this? It sounds like a Mini-Moog and a drummer who uses cocaine as non-dairy creamer. Fuck yeah. This is prog rock and no mistake. It's also the perfect weirdo music for a freaky line of space toys like Microman. At the end of each commercial in this clip, it ends with the logo and and a gravely-voice guy singing "Mee-koh-ru-MANNN!" Bad. Ass.
So what's the logo at the end of the commercial? I can't read Japanese, but it probably says Microman.
 |
| Image found at... http://www.microforever.com/25threscuem25x.htm |
Each syllable in Katakana consists of a consonant sound followed by a vowel sound (ko, ru, me, etc.) To pronounce a consonant without a vowel after it is generally not how their language works. There is, however, a syllable for the lone letter "N", fortunately. Realizing this, it explains why, when a Japanese person tries to pronounce "ice cream", it comes out as "ai-su-ku-re-mu". Any time an English word ends with a naked consonant, force of habit makes a Japanese speaker tack on a vowel. Listening to the different takes of the "Mi-koh-ru-man" singer, you can hear him trying to sing "man" pronouncing it a little different sometimes.
So, let's verify the that the Microman logo actually says "Microman", using the available Katakana syllables. The page I got the logo from (http://www.microforever.com/25threscuem25x.htm) names the graphic as "microman rescuelogo".
Anyway... the music. Early 70's prog rock. Love it. The first thing I thought of when I heard the music in that commercial was Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Compare the Microman music to Eruption, side 1, track 1 from ELP's 1971 album, Tarkus. I'm not calling it a ripoff, but rather, they're cool and fun in the same way. You can't go wrong with some analog synth.
And look at the Tarkus album cover. That's practically an action figure right there. Part armadillo, part tank. When I was a kid, I would have played with a toy like that for sure.
A friend of mine said the Microman music sounds like Gentle Giant, another prog band form the early 70s. Their song, Alucard, sounds kind of Micromaney...
As one commenter on the FaceTube Microman video says...
So, after all this, maybe you've decided you're enough of a weirdo to want a Microman shirt? I sure am. So, we've made two. You can pick the shirt type and color, as always. And, don't forget to adjust the size and placement of the graphic if you want.
This one is the much-analyzed Microman rescue Team shirt. Nobody will know what the hell your shirt is. Cool.
https://shop.spreadshirt.com/PhilAreGo/microman+(micronaut)+rescue+team?q=I1015262946
This one is just a neat picture from the package of Death Mark, presumably an evil Microman enemy (or an Acroyear, in Microman parlance) whose part robot, part airplane, all weird. We vectorized him in Adobe Illustrator from these box images (see below), and yeah, that took frikkin' forever. Sheesh.
https://shop.spreadshirt.com/PhilAreGo/microman+death+marck?q=I1015308511
 |
| Image found at... http://www.microforever.com/deathmarck.htm |
3/6/18
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