Sep 10, 2008

Eight-X (45)

Hello, midweek and that means Eight-X , and another mixed bag aswell..First a quote "There're enough happy assholes out there, why should I be another one in the line..." She made a career out of her nihilistic attitude, where elese as in New York where lack of pretence is deadly..Being a muse to the 'boys' set her on a path , build her a name and lunch.... Dutch industrial jazz band KIEM took the scene by storm with their unique sound around a (garbage) metal drum-kit accompanied by a squeaking saxophone sort of got you initially thinking what the f ck whats this but then it turns out it's music after all..the album Keam even contained a hit, moneyman.....finally a great band that didnt want to be happy assholes either, but when their second album failed to produce hit, and despite good reviews,their labels moneyman saidwe can't have that..go away..they did , still they left us with a rare gem..."Song" ...

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Lydia Lunch - Queen Of Siam (80 ^ 77mb)

After arriving in New York City at the age of 16, Lydia Lunch (born Lydia Koch) moved into a large communal household of artists and musicians in NYC, including Kitty Bruce, daughter of Lenny Bruce. Soon after she earned the surname "Lunch" by regularly stealing lunches for her (often starving) artist friends. After befriending the 'godfathers of punk' Suicide at Max's Kansas City, she founded the short-lived but influential No Wave band Teenage Jesus & the Jerks in 1976 with her artistic partner, No Wave punk-funk-jazz musician James Chance. Both appeared on the seminal No Wave compilation No New York. Lunch later appeared on two songs on Chance's album Off White (credited to James White and the Blacks; Lunch used the pseudonym "Stella Rico") in 1978.

She appeared in two films directed by the husband and wife film-making team of Scott B and Beth B; In the short film Black Box (1978) she played an unnamed torturer, and in the feature length, neo-noir thriller Vortex (1983) she played a private detective named "Angel Powers". During this time, she also appeared in a number of films by Vivienne Dick, including She Had her Gun All Ready (1978) and Beauty Becomes The Beast (1979), co starring with Pat Place. In the mid-'80s she formed her own recording and publishing company called "Widowspeak" on which she continues to release a slew of her own material from songs to spoken word.

Her attitude of confrontational nihilism expressed in both her sound and her often violent and/or sexually oriented subject matter. After leaving Teenage Jesus, Lunch first formed Beirut Slump, but departed after one single. Her solo debut, 1980's Queen of Siam, proved to be one of her most acclaimed efforts, as was her next band, the funk-inflected 8 Eyed Spy. However, that band broke up due to the death of bassist George Scott, and Lunch went back out on her own. After 1982's 13.13, which featured former members of the Weirdos, Lunch began a rash of collaborations. Such as J. G. Thirlwell, Kim Gordon, Thurston Moore, Nick Cave, Marc Almond, Billy Ver Plank, Steven Severin, Robert Quine, Sadie Mae, Rowland S. Howard, Michael Gira, The Birthday Party, Einstürzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth, Die Haut, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez, Black Sun Productions and french band Sibyl Vane who put one of her spoken words into music..

Aside from an EP with ex-Birthday Party guitarist Rowland S. Howard in 1991, Shotgun Wedding, plus her acting career in underground films, Lunch has concentrated on the spoken word arena into the '90s; a three-CD retrospective of this aspect of her career, Crimes Against Nature, was issued in 1993, and Lunch has continued her activities throughout the decade. She also acted in, wrote, and directed underground films, sometimes collaborating with underground filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern (including several films such as Fingered in which she performed unsimulated sex acts), and more recently has recorded and performed as a spoken word artist, as well as authoring both traditional books and comix (with award-winning graphic novel artist Ted McKeever). In 1997 she released Paradoxia, a loosely-based autobiography, in which she candidly documented her bisexual dalliances, substance abuse and flirtation with insanity.

"I would be humiliated if I found out that anything I did actually became a commercial success."



01 - Mechanical Flattery (2:46)
02 - Gloomy Sunday (2:57)
03 - Tied And Twist (2:55)
04 - Spooky (2:40)
05 - Los Banditos (3:10)

06 - Atomic Bongos (2:17)
07 - Lady Scarface (3:12)
08 - A Cruise To The Moon (3:54)
09 - Carnival Fat Man (2:11)
10 - Knives In The Drain (4:00)
11 - Blood Of Tin (1:09)

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Kiem - Keam ( 85 ^ 89mb)

Formed 1982 (Rotterdam, The Netherlands), initially as "Pleasant Time Trio" to the occasion of raising the curtain for a performance of jazz artist "George Adams And The Don Pullen Quartet". It inspired them to further the collaboration and start a regular band. "K.I.E.M." is an abbreviation of "Klank Improvisatie Elektronische Muziek" (Sound Improvisation Electronic Music). Their immediate success led to performances on jazz, rock and experimental stages and festivals (Tegentonen, North Sea Jazz, Pandora's Music Box) and modest dance-hits in the Netherlands.

Most remarkable about Kiem is Cees Meurs' metal drum-kit consisting of oil-drums, garbage bin, anvil, anchor-chains and other remains from the wrecked tow-boat "Corrie". This drum-kit –played like normal drums– accompanied by a squeaking saxophone (Ger Van Voorden), a synthetic keyboard and proclaiming vocals (Huub Kentie) result a sound that might be type-casted as industrial, but also has jazz and experimental charactarisics.

Ger Van Voorden leaves the band in 1986 to play with poet/drummer Jules Deelder. He is replaced by Jos Valster.
Growing into a more popular sound, bigger succes followed in Southern Europe (The Moneyman, 1987). After releasing their third album , the slightly poppier "You Should Try" Interest and true appreciation in the Netherlands remained modest, resulting disbandment in 1987.



01 - Moneyman (6:15)
02 - The Real It (5:37)
03 - Bahami (1:36)
04 - Short Memories (5:12)

05 - Clear It Up (4:28)
06 - Pili Pili (Sauce) (5:59)
07 - Just A Song (4:39)
08 - Oej Joej (3:24)

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It's Immaterial - Song (90 ^ 90mb)

It's Immaterial were formed by three former members of Yachts - John Campbell, vocals, Martin Dempsey, guitar, and Henry Priestman, keyboards - in addition to Paul Barlow, drums. By 1984, the band had been reduced to a duo - Campbell and Jarvis Whitehead, guitar and keyboards, who joined in 1982.

It's Immaterial has qualities that can't be discerned from one listen, Musically, their first album, Life's Hard And Then You Die , is all over the place -- new wave, country, blues, folk, and synth pop. Somehow the smorgasbord of styles works, because the bandmembers aren't being eclectic just for the sake of it; they simply have a wide canvas, keeping the album fresh from beginning to end. When Campbell talks, it isn't because he can't sing; the man has a lovely voice, especially during the transcendent chorus of "Space. It's Immaterial manages to stay focused, never allowing its genre-bending to veer out of control, it grows on the listener.

Video for "New Brighton", the first track on "Song"



Well if you liked the 1st album, likely you would enjoy "Song" too. Same wit, fine heart, human touch. But then "Song" is not as diverse, not as pop-oriented as "Life is...". "Song" is dark, brooding, atmospheric, a collection of ten "stories" that take place in the North of England, ten stories of isolation and polite despair: "Song" was to be engineered by Calum Malcolm who, the year before, had produced the surprise million-seller album "Hats" for Scottish indie cult heroes The Blue Nile.. "Song" was released in late August 1990 and commercially, it was a dismal failure, selling less than 7,000 copies in the UK. Why? The reviews were more than positive but Joe Public was startled, there was no hit single in sight and the real point was: who was going to buy that album? Campbell and Whitehead were seen as too old for teenyboppers, too clean for the indie rock scene, too smart for Blue Nile fans, too gloomy for Northerners, etc... Campbell and Whitehead disappeared and were never to be seen in the music business again. Rumour says that at the time Virgin told them to take a walk, they had just completed another album, the 3rd one, that has remained unreleased to this day....



01 - New Brighton (5:51)
02 - Endless Holiday (5:35)
03 - An Ordinary Life (5:04)
04 - Heaven Knows (4:29)
05 - In The Neighborhood (5:20)
06 - Missing (5:20)
07 - Homecoming (4:36)
08 - Summer Winds (4:40)
09 - Luife On The Hill (6:12)
10 - Your Voice (5:18)


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All downloads are in * ogg-7 (224k) or ^ ogg-9(320k), artwork is included , if in need get the nifty ogg encoder/decoder here !

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I LOVE Queen Of Siam...

'Hey, don't laugh at him just because he's fat!'

Her version of Spooky is my favourite too.

Lydia, despite some of her more controversial material, is a great artiste.

You don't have a link to 13.13 anywhere, do you? It was up somewhere but appears to be dead.

Rho, I applaud the breadth and depth of your posts. Brilliant.