20 Great RecordingsOr 20 Recordings That Reveal Something New Every Time You Listen To Them.Or Recommended listening for people interested in sound and recording.If you are a sound designer, you owe it to steep yourself in these waxings. In chronological order:
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The album that started it all in terms of using technology as a creative tool. The amazing thing about this recording is that besides being the textbook for multitrack recording techniques, the performances and arrangements are all terrific and charming.
Really, this is all producer Joe Meek's show. Meek was a sonically innovative record producer who is starting to get due recognition. This album is everything his pop single productions were to the Nth degree. Listen and discover from whence the Residents were spawned.
The music concrete masterwork. Produced after-hours in the UPA film studio Dockstadter was cutting film for, this is probably the best tape piece ever constructed. Terrifying and beautiful.
So much has been made of this that it's easy to start thinking that it must be overrated. It's not. Essential to the student of this sonic opus are Mark Lewison's studio diary, detailing the recording and mixing process, along with the PEPPERLAND bootleg, which contains the mono mix of the album plus different takes along the way.
Three radio soundscapes produced in the late 1960's/early 1970's; they are a dense web of music, text and field recordings that may be the best thing Gould ever did.
There is nothing that could have prepared anyone for this recording, and thirty-five years later it's still true. Totally unique, odd, difficult, funny, brilliant.
The influence of this album (and this band) is incalculable. You may not have heard of them but from 1971 to 1974, they released four albums that are still making waves and influencing both musicians and sound artists. The recent stuff following their 1999 reforming isn't nearly as critical, though some of it has great moments. If the Velvet Underground hadn't been so serious and had lived on a farm/commune in Germany, they might have aspired to this.
The first side is all about muscular guitar riffs and vocal power, the second about atmosphere and electronics. The combination of 70's Berlin , Brian Eno, producer Tony Visconti and Bowie produced an album that captures raw emotion in a clinical yet gorgeous recording.
The first of two and one-half official releases has more interesting ideas than any 20 albums made over those three years. The studio as compositional instrument. Direct successors of Faust with the added bonus of RIO and punk attitudes. Just reissued in a pristine remastered version.
The final album of the first era of Wire's twenty-five year career, this 1979 recording is as dense as a dwarf star nebula. Full of texture and muscle, tough and beautiful, it manages to reveal something new with each listen. Among it's spawn are My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, and Red House Painters.
A lot of Eno's work is worth a listen or ten; he's a sonic craftsman with an unusual ear for timbre. I flip flop over which is the most critical of his many releases but this is the one I come back to most often. While not the first artists to use "found vocals" in their work, this is a seminal work of rhythm, texture and mood. Recently reissued with a few bonus tracks, they removed a key song, "Qu'ran" , which incorporated readings from the Koran, due to the current Middle East political climate. Look for the original release.
Burma was an amazing quartet: a drum/bass/guitar trio and a sound man. Martin Swope takes the sound as it comes off the wires, masticates and then regurgitates out God's own amount of weirdness. Wire colliding with This Heat? The one-two punch of "Mica" and "Weatherbox" still stuns. Roger Miller says he didn't use any guitar effects other than distortion - it's all Swope processing live and on the fly. Whoa.
Big drums and John Lydon careening over the top like a possessed Muezzin. Only drums, noise and singing. A finger-flip at bass player Jah Wobble, who had just been fired? A requiem for Sid Vicious? Did I mention the drums? A starker rock record doesn't exist.
This first work of Andrew McKenzie (and Chris Watson and maybe others? vague information as to who is participating is a key aspect of their game plan) is part of a huge body of mysterious and fascinating sonic work - collage, music concrete, audio montage.
Psychedelic punk master work. The Buttholes Surfers have never been as consistently brilliant since this recording. The CD bonus is the nearly-as-great CREAM CORN FROM THE SOCKET OF DAVIS, home of the Butthole's most unhinged moment: "Movin' to Florida".
Certainly recognized as a landmark rap album for its militant political stance and controversial commentary, this is also one of the greatest collaged albums of all time. Courtesy of The Bomb Squad -- Hank Shocklee, Eric Sadler, Keith Shocklee, Carl Ryder (aka Chuck D) -- the score under the rapping is a dense web of collage, cut and paste and sampled mayhem that is pretty much unmatched in the history of pop music. Hundreds of tiny snippets and loops are manipulated into aggressive musical constructs that assault the ear while at the same time seducing it with funky rhythms and infectious "melodies". The famous PE siren is a James Brown horn sample and that about says it all. Brilliant and completely essential. Special props for b-side "The Enemy Assault Vehicle Mixx", which cuts, samples and pastes from their own work into a mega-Bomb Squad remix.
Not for the faint of heart, the entire catalog of Steven Stapleton aka Nurse With Wound is unmatched for sonic originality. His releases come like a thief in the night and go out of print almost a quickly. R&R STATION is probably his most "rock song" oriented, making it a bit odd in his oeuvre, but for me the song structures make his brilliant aural chemistry all the more evident. Rereleased in 1998 as SECOND PIRATE STATION, which has all of the original plus a second disc of excellent tracks recorded at the same time but left off the disc.
If there is a better and more interesting vocalist around I'd love to know who it is. This is Patton at his best: a sick, twisted collection of sonic Molotov cocktails, all created entirely by his voice multi-tracked on a cassette 4-track machine in hotels while on tour with Faith No More and Mr. Bungle. Jaw dropping virtuosity and mind-blowingly inventive. Kills small animals on contact, so listen with care.
I can't say much about this recording that hasn't already been said. A masterpiece of pop music and sonic experimentation. The successor to SGT. PEPPER. Their followup, KID A, is nearly as brilliant and even tweakier sounding.
Sonic alchemists of the highest order. This may be their masterpiece in terms of consistency, quality and almost touchable sound. It creeps into your ears and goes directly to the brain, screwing with your synapses like alien LSD. Are you shivering? Jhon, rest in peace.
If I had to choose one CD to take to a desert island, this would be it (actually it is a double disc collection). A fantastic overview of Oswald's work, concentrating on the obscure, banned and hard-to-find releases. Most of PLUDERPHONIC (1989) is here, ELECTRAVOX aka RUYBIYAT (1990), lots of never collected commission work, and a few bits from the more readily available PLEXURE (1993), DISCOSPHERE (1991), and GRAYFOLDED (1996). The original, banned-and-destroyed PLUNDERPHONIC CD is THE masterpiece of appropriation and reconstruction and if you've read this far, you owe it to yourself to hear it.