Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Italy. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Golden Disco Dreams Pt.1


Disco Dream and the Androids- "Dream Machine" (Wake Up Records) 1979

Late Friday night/early saturday morning deep into a flu-induced fever dream i began to hear a faint machine hum whirring deep inside my head. A trepenated skull kick drum emanating deep from under the floorboards beneath my bed growing ever louder like some tumescent beast logged in the bowels of cavernous depths of my subconscious. Silence. Eyes flutter awake and i'm hurtling at an ungodly speed, night driving thru babylon in a silver ferrari. The landscape is parched and barren. Buildings decayed and overgrown with dead power cables and warped by large half-burnt and ash pocked sheets of mylar wrapped across it's concrete bosom.
A flash and the hum is louder, deafening. I'm moving through a sea of people dancing. A nude Bianca Jagger, nipples painted silver passes by on a white stallion with a giant spoon stenciled on its ass. Udo Kier wearing only a tight black turtleneck and spangled gold loin cloth leers at me and leans over to whisper in my ear. I can't make out what he's saying. It's vocoded. He leans back and purrs in polyphonic bliss and I can see the tiny Korg nameplate and shiny, obsidian oval on his throat. Tiny slivers of metal shavings trickle from his lips, his hands clasp a tiny keyboard the size of keychain. The hum dissipates and the song bursts the night sky like heat lightning from zenith to horizon. The floor spins beneath my feet. I'm standing bathed in sweat and glitter. A perfect wax facsimile of Edie Sedgwick purses it lips and blows a champagne bubble toward me. I reach out to touch it but it's no longer there. She hikes up her silver lame dress to her chest and this songs dislodges itself from her thighs and I pray that this is heaven and the line at the bar is reasonable.

Thursday, January 29, 2009

Chico Buarque



Hello there folks. I'm Grisha, and I'm from Tel-Aviv, which is in Israel. Dave invited me to contribute, so here we go. I'm doing a show for an Israeli web radio called Halas, and it's called "Tropical Truth", just like Caetano Veloso's book, which I unfortunately never had a chance to check out. Naturally, the show's focused on Brazilian music, so that's what I'm gonna write about.

Well. As probably most people know, end of the sixties / beginning of the seventies weren't the easiest of times in Brazil. Dictatorship / censorship, all that shit. Caetano and Gilberto Gil were forced to leave their country and moved to London, Joao Gilberto and Carlos Lyra moved to Mexico. Chico Buarque went to Italy, because he used to live there as a kid. There he recorded two albums in Italian. First one of these is "Chico Buarque Na Italia", which is just standard Chico singing in Italian. The second one is, of course, "Per Un Pugno Di Samba", his collaboration with Ennio Morricone. The record company didn't think much of this LP's commercial potential, so it came out only in Italy, and later became a much sought-after item. The version in Portuguese, that Buarque also recorded vocals for, didn't come out until fucking 2000, when it was released on CD as "Sonho de um carnaval", in France only. WTF.

Anyway, the album is all versions of his songs from his first four albums, and Morricone's touches range from good to stunning. My favourite song on the album is the version of "Funeral de um lavrador", from "Vol. 3". To make it more interesting, I'm also posting the original, which of course is not half bad also, but the Morricone version is guaranteed to blow your brains out. Both are in Portuguese.

Chico Buarque - Funeral de um lavrador
Chico Buarque / Ennio Morricone - Funeral de um lavrador

Sunday, December 07, 2008

Since Were All About Vocoders and All...



Mr Flagio - Take a Chance (Vocal Version) from Take a Chance 12" (1983)


The 8 minute mystery that defines Italo for me. I have never found any information on this guy and I think this is all he ever put out. Fair enough I guess? I would have thrown up the whole 12" but one of the tracks is corrupt for some reason. I felt this site needed a bit of a hip hop break, yet with all the talkin through synths going on these days this track is still relevant.