koven j. smith dot com

Gah. So apparently I decided to take virtually the entire summer off of kovenjsmith.com. Rest assured that I was doing great things with that time away, kids! I’ve actually got a whole run of posts lined up over the next couple of weeks, so I thought I’d get y’all in the mood with some of the music I’ve been digging these days. Those of you who visit me here at kovenjsmith.com can listen to the tunes in the sidebar there to your right; those of you who thirst for misguided wisdom via RSS feeds can check this out.

A few words on the tunes:

• Incidental Music from “The Amazing Spider Man”: So we begin with some of Stu Philips sweet music from the original 1970’s Spider Man TV movie. I just can’t resist how bad-ass the drums sound when they enter at about 00:26. I mean, just listen to them! They really do sound bad-ass. This is courtesy of the most-excellent Frayker Breaks blog, which focuses on (mostly) obscure library recordings. Many of the rekkids featured on the blog also feature bad-ass drums.
• Under Glass: In honor of the wonderful news that Dischord will be re-releasing Jawbox’s seminal 1994 recording “For Your Own Special Sweetheart,” and the even more heartening news that Jawbox will be reuniting for a one-off performance on “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” on December 8th, I offer up one of my favorit-est Jawbox tracks ever. This is from the posthumous odds-and-sods comp My Scrapbook of Fatal Accidents.
• Nam Myo Renge Kyo, Got To Have Your Lovin’, and Lady Friend: I stumbled on a few excellent psych and garage mp3 blogs that have reaped rich rewards. I’m particularly amazed by the Bill Plummer and the Cosmic Brotherhood tune, which is crazy for two reasons. One, the album was released by Impulse records, known primarily as the home of John Coltrane and his late-career brethren, and two, it’s a cover of one of my all-time-favorite-but-not-well-known Byrds songs, from the Younger Than Yesterday album.
• Marrow and Some Velvet Morning: Weirdly enough, these two tunes will forever be associated in my mind thanks to a two-and-a-half week road trip that Madelyn and I took out to the Black Hills of South Dakota and back. We went up through Canada, and managed to see St. Vincent in Montreal, and this particular song kinda blew me away. I just wasn’t ready for the tenor sax. It’s a little buried in the studio mix, but it was waaaay out front when we saw them. And Lee Hazlewood is just the best late-night driving music you’ll ever find. Also, this song is messed up.
• Day Dreaming: I don’t know why more people don’t seem to know this song; it’s long been one of my favorites. It’s got a great rhythm track (with what sounds like Bernard Purdie on drums and possibly Chuck Rainey on bass), a great arrangement, a tricky coast into 6/4 on the bridge, and a masterful performance from Aretha. Perfect.
• City Birds: Polvo have a new album out!
• The Big One: Better known on these shores as the theme to The People’s Court, this song is so hilariously over the top that it kind of makes other music unnecessary. If you do not like this song, then your opinion on all other matters will be suspect to me.
• The Ultimate Rap: Oh, man. This song. I discovered this song recently thanks to the wonderful folks at the mighty Soul Jazz Records, who closed a great comp of late-70s/early-80s NYC rappin’ with this. It starts out based on one of my all-time favorite bass lines (from Cheryl Lynn’s “Got To Be Real”), and then builds up a head of steam that doesn’t let up for nine-minute running time. I believe this song is also bad-ass.

Thanks for hanging in there while I took a long unannounced break from the blog, kids! More exciting stuff to come.

Koven playlists aretha franklin, For Your Own Special Sweetheart, Jawbox, lee hazlewood, music emporium, oscar and the majestics, playlist, polvo, st. vincent, stu philips

Image via WikipediaAwright, so my new online/virtual/cyber m(i/u)xtape o-sphere is now up, meaning that all five of you who read this can collectively exhale and begin enjoying your lives again, free of the anxiety borne out of anticipation. Koven understands your needs. Also your wants. And occasionally, your desires. I finally went ahead and moved the mixtape widget over into the right hand column over there (seriously, look to your right–it’s right there!), so that it would be permanently available. It replaces the little-loved “Favorite Tracks from Last.fm” widget, which was cool, but relied too much on Last.fm’s occasionally questionable library of tracks (most painful was listening to my own “favorite tracks” and hearing an 80’s re-recording of Sam & Dave’s classic “You Got Me Hummin’” in place of the original). Anyway, I’m still using the Last.fm recent track list, for those of you who require up-to-the-second information on what I’m listening to. So here’s a list of what we’ve got this week, along with helpful/meaningless commentary inserted at random:

1. The Frames – “In the Deep Shade”
2. The Shins – “Sea Legs”
3. King Geedorah – “The Next Level”
4. Joao Donato – “A Ra” : we might be playing this jam at next week’s Latin Hustle show at Spike Hill in Brook-a-lyn. See the “Events” page fer more info.
5. Lee Hazlewood – “Hey Cowboy” : Great tune that I discovered thanks to the excellent “Joe de Vivre” mp3 blog. Lee Hazlewood is a new thing for me, and I’m definitely digging his stuff. That trumpet intro really, really sounds like Burt Bacharach to me.
6. Fleet Foxes – “Blue Ridge Mountains” : found myself surprised at how excellent this record is, given that the band is being advertised in Starbucks.
7. Enon – “Raisin Heart”
8. Deerhoof – “My Purple Past”
9. The Four Tops – “Are You Man Enough” : Just a last tribute to the great Levi Stubbs. This is one of my fave Four Tops tracks, from the Shaft In Africa soundtrack.
10. Daedelus – “Drummery Jam” : Oh man, how do I love Daedelus. He was responsible for one of the greatest concerts I’ve ever seen, as part of the “Sound Art” concert series curated by my friend Jennifer Stock. Daedelus just blew everyone’s mind.
11. Stars of the Lid – “A Meaningful Moment Through a Meaning(less) Process”

That’s it for now, kids. I hope you’re all well.

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Koven playlists Daedelus, deerhoof, enon, Four Tops, joao donato, lee hazlewood, Levi Stubbs, mixtape, music, Sam & Dave, Shaft In Africa, Tracks

As many regular readers of this site may know, I was a huge fan of the online mixtape site Muxtape.com. It was a simple, sleek way to share what you’re listening to, and relied on your own uploads, rather than publicly available mp3s, as sites like Mixtwit and blip.fm do. Well, as with all good things music+technology related, the RIAA has, for the time being, shut the site down. In the meantime, some totally fresh dudes have put together a downloadable open-source version of virtually the same software, called “Opentape.” For the hell of it, I’ve installed it here on the wildly overqualified servers at kovenjsmith.com for your listening pleasure. If this works out, and if I finally add some real styling to it to make it fit in better with the rest of kovenjsmith.com, I’ll put up some kind of permanent link to it. For the time being, you can get to the most current playlist/mixtape here. I totally put Boz Scaggs on there. Because as I’ve told many of you, “Lowdown” is the new “Easy Lover.” Cheers, everyone!

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Koven Sound, playlists boz scaggs, mixtape, muxtape, opentape, riaa

So I’ve recently been playing with SeeqPod, which is a nice little search engine that searches for publicly available audio and video content on the Web (it’s the same engine that powers Songerize) and then allows you to compile that content into an embedded flash player. I’ve been looking for a way to post playlists (you know, in lieu of actual written content) easily without having to go through the hassle of uploading everything myself, and kids, this just might be it. So here we go with what could be the first of many thrilling playlist adventures.

This particular playlist is all about the clappin’. Some time last summer, Madelyn Burgess, the bass player from Hula and I were talking about stuff, and naturally the subject of handclaps came up, because I don’t know how to talk about anything else. I declared that handclaps are the best thing that you can ever have in music, eclipsing gutars, horns, keyboards and the other stuff that, you know, white people like. Madelyn and I both declared that we would make competing tear-your-face-off clapping mixes and vote on who’s was better. After having established clear ground rules (artificial handclaps, as in Missy Elliot’s “Pass That Dutch” were acceptable, but audience participation handclaps were not, meaning all of “Frampton Comes Alive” got axed), we went to work. However, when time came to play and vote on our respective mixes, I voted for my clapping mix and Madelyn voted for hers, leaving us with no clear victor in the contest (unfortunately Delmar, our tiebreaker vote, simply voted for “you fellers”).

I don’t know if we’ll ever know who won, but I do think my original clapping mix was pretty strong; it featured both the remixed version of Herbie Hancock’s “Doin’ It” (the one with the mighty handclaps) and the German-language version of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” This list here is kind of a distillation of that original mix, with some added stuff that’s come out in the last year or so. For whatever reason, 2007 saw an explosion in handclapping in music, which just convinced me that I was riding the crest of a wave with this whole thing. The new Spoon record has handclaps on almost every other song; ditto the recent Jens Lenkman, Menomena, Enon, etc., etc., etc. I’ve included some of those songs here, along with some classics.

I’d planned on writing more about what each song means to me, but now this post has already gone on longer than I’d planned. Suffice to say, I have done you, the listener, a favor by electing to include the remix version of N.E.R.D.’s “She Wants to Move” which sadly loses the delicious bridge, but mercifully also loses Pharell’s “her ass is a spaceship I want to ride” line. Enjoy the playlist, kids!

Koven playlists beatles, Bob and Earl, enon, glass candy, handclaps, herbie hancock, hula, N.E.R.D., playlist, rjd2, spoon, the association, the cars