FOUR
This month we are joined by Amy Cutler who presents ‘Is this love or is it just a muzzy elevator song from the future? ‘ - a guest mix to celebrate her new album out on Strategic Tape Reserve.
Full track list below, as well as words from Amy on the mix. Enjoy!
Tracklist
1. Kemper Norton - towards devils dyke
2. Synthetic Villains - Hex Marks the Spot
3. Odd Nosdam - Skateloops
4. MC YALLAH - Baliwa
5. Mariam Rezaei - 👁 (feat. yol)
Amy Cutler presents: Is this love or is it just a muzzy elevator song from the future?
6. Kassia Flux - Love
7. Cabbaggage - Never again (will I love you)
8. Eli Keszler—We sang a dirge, and you did not mourn
9. Karen Black – Headache
10. Bridget Hayden - Factory Girl
11. Pearls Before Swine—Guardian Angels (1968)
12. Nico - No One Is There (live at Reims Cathedral 1974)
13. Bredbeddle - To and Fro (extract from 27min track)
14. Karen Beth - Nothing Lasts (1969)
15. Lewis Baloue - Bringing You A Rose (1985)
16. It Changes – from Snoopy Come Home soundtrack (1972)
17. Daphne X - Day In the Slug’s Crossing
18. We Were Foolish Like the Flowers – by Eric Anderson (1968), but chopped up, rearranged and sped up for this mix
19. Delphine Dora - There is nothing but immortality
End of guest mix
20. Ivan Cunningham - Echo Is Missing
21. Isnaj Dui - Curves Towards
22. Cosa Minapolidan (excerpt) by Ethan Coen, read by John Turturro
23. Lyndhurst - Transcriptor
24. Eijra Wood - Y
25. Salford Electronics - Zero
26. Sun Curves - Midair Notre Blues
27. Perkins & Federwisch - This Is The Best Month of Your Life
28. Omnibadger - But What I Want Is Not the Most Important Thing Right Now
29. Oishi - B: a side
Amy Cutler on Is this love or is it just a muzzy elevator song from the future?
To tie in with the SISTER TIME release (Strategic Tape Reserve, May 26th) – which I’ve been thinking of as my ‘hauntology, but make it pink’ tape – I’ve thrown together a mix which is roughly half older songs and half new Bandcamp recommendations. I’m interested in the bathos of love songs, so I tend to be attracted to certain kinds of quality in a track – if it’s weedy, or toneless, or maudlin, or generally problematic in a macho or assertively sentimental way. Think of the strange off-tone of Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s ‘Kiss and Run’, the high-pitched self-pity of the entire of Robin Gibb’s Saved By the Bell double-album, the feebleness of Young’s chorus line ‘if I could hold on to you’ in CSNY’s ‘Out of Control’, or the endless decay of over-production in ‘Baby’ by the teenagers Donnie and Joe Emerson.
Included here are some canonical pieces, like the Pearls Before Swine track, which is the first song I ever encountered as a child which was deliberately made to sound like it was recorded on an older musical medium to give the song another sense of loss – which absolutely blew my mind as a concept. (This is from the 1968 album, Balaclava, which I noticed was recently criticised on a forum for the ‘deadly annoying tape rewinding effect’ after ‘Ring Thing’!). New artists include Cabbaggage, whose album on the Human Geography Recordings label shares a release date with SISTER TIME and includes excerpts of dialogue from early black and white films; a sample from Bridget Hayden’s bluesy off-cuts and sketches album Soil and Song, which consists of “partly failed” cover songs remembered from childhood; and an extract of Bredbeddle’s Steps on the Turning Year on Bezirk Tapes, which the artist Rebecca has described as a work of CD-collage rather than turntablism or DJing: “While it’s possible to play loops on a turntable, it’s harder on a CD. With my old CD player, all I can do is keep skipping back to the start of the track, but that limitation becomes an effect in itself.”
A love song can be a nasty and one-sided weapon, so I’m also interested in ways they can be sung back, or manipulated and deconstructed to the level of the truly inane. Two really influential tracks that I wish I could have included here – but which are too long for the mix – are Patty Waters’ ‘Black Is The Color of My True Love’s Hair’ (including a minutes long, harsh deconstruction of the single word ‘love’), and Neil Rolnick’s ‘Wake Up’, which does for the Everly Brothers what ‘Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space’ did for Elvis Presley, as well as playing through Ex Machina on the idea of a love song itself as a kind of ‘dreaming one’s life away’. The Lewis Baloue track included here from an unearthed lost album is a pretty weird case, though. It’s like The Caretaker’s eerie lounge-singer at the end of time, but more mysterious, because it’s near impossible to interpret its original status, with Lewis posing on the front of Romantic Times in a white suit next to his white Mercedes, but sounding like an alpha male falling apart before your very ears, or a playboy drifting away on a cloud. In fact there’s still a conspiracy theory which chooses to believe that the artist Lewis is a hoax…
Thanks for having me, MORE REALISTIC GOALS, and I hope everyone enjoys this guest mix of dissonant gallantry, harrowing co-dependence, and near comatose machines! (And also just some good stuff!)
