BYFOR&WITH CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

On Wednesday, November 22, Bodega Pop Live on WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio celebrated Christian Marclay with three hours of Solo recordings, experimental / altered records, compositions, collaborations, homages, and live performances by the artist / turntablist, his friends, and fellow travelers

Listen to the show now in the archives

Little Fujiko | White Peach Jellyfish (1996)

Dare you eat a peach? [Reupped b/c you simply can't live w/out it.]

The radiant prayer of steel bursts between your ears. There it is, outside of sorrow. Inferior to the click beetle. 

Things that have poured, of light. That were born in soft legs and the rain that no longer rains. Into the arc lamp above, the "crazed moon." When it arrives and wraps.

Wraps the ocean? The shape of a poem. And horses, larvae. The dung peacefully eating its surroundings. 

The water of mayhem wrapped in the palm of your hand, twisting itself. FOR THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF THE WALNUT. Nipped by the air creatures everywhere, bewildered, nut-cracking. Able to melt this cloud like a ringing ear.

The quick leaps have a fire!

You would like to stand yourself up, as humans did, long ago. Without gazing and is not here. To think poems are always thunderclouds with our blind eyes and folded branches. Fog descending stairs? 

Wonder what kind of deranged scratch marks resist dyed "Chinese" signs, food displays,  the right to read in any order? Shy twitch where the leaf mulch spreads.

Poetry continues to differ from what people believe the bar tilts, a cheerful hustle, the spirit torn apart by the swirl it's just lived through.

Little Fujiko | Little Fujiko (1998)

Freshly reupped here.

Just then I noticed the thin edge of words thinly glowing of wood. They stumble around with fingers rooted in the ducts of these creatures everywhere, hanging between branches of mistakes. Little Fujiko, little bolt of lightening, lease this illusory space closing in on you.

You believe you really saw this, these vacant bolts randomly passing you by, these blocks of cloud hanging from shoulder. We are all unexploded shells, wrapped around an inner field of nettles. You can't even listen as much as has been sung. You can't even sing as much as has been heard.

They pass it now from their lips to yours.

Zuoxiao Zuzhou | You Know Where The East Is

There is no equivalent to Zuoxiao Zuzhou in any culture I can think of. In addition to having launched one of China's most notorious rock bands of the 90s, No, Zuoxiao Zuzhou is a successful visual artist, poet, novelist, and film score composer. (His CDs, which are often self-released, typically include his own artwork on the cover--those are his pigs, to the right.)

If the U.S. were a bit less culturally provincial he'd be nearly as well-known here as Ai Weiwei; as it is, he's probably best known in the States, if at all, for having contributed vocals to the Cowboy Junkies' "A Walk in the Park."

His music is all over the place, as is his voice, which at times seems to evoke Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen or even Tom Waits, and at other times--especially on this album--Pere Ubu's David Thomas. His music defies description, having a foot in traditional Chinese music as well as the more experimental strains of American and British post-punk.

You Know Where The East Is is considered by more than a few critics in China to be one of the--perhaps even the one--greatest rock album(s) to have ever been recorded in the People's Republic. It's not something I'm inclined to argue with.

Check out 方法论 from this album:

This ("Money Song") is worth watching as well, though it's from a different album (which I'll upload soon):

Reupped double CD album here.

La Merde Chaude! | 19 Hot French Trax

Listen to "Quai No 3"



Listen to "Le P'tit Clown De Ton Coeur"



Listen to "Sex Accordeon Et Alcool"



Listen to "Le Travail"



Listen to "Au Revoir"


Get the 19-song mix here.


Despite New York's reputation as one of the most expensive cities on earth, there is not a single day of the year that you can't find at least one totally free event to partake in--everything from live performances to gallery openings to street fairs. Today, of course, was Bastille Day on 60th Street in Manhattan, which is held annually on the Sunday following the actual Bastille Day. For several long blocks along 60th Street, just below Central Park, you can listen to free live music as you wander by stalls offering French eats, groceries, knick-knacks, books and--you guessed it--music. 

Last year, I picked up three French hip-hop records for $1 each, one of which I posted here. At today's fair, the Alliance Francaise Library was offering French CDs withdrawn from their library for 25 cents apiece. I happened to be at their stall the moment they opened. Fifteen seconds after they opened, I walked away with all 16 CDs they had out for sale. I knew it was a gamble; after all, these were rejects, la merde de la merde. I stuffed them all in my backpack and promptly forgot about them as I wandered around, taking in the sights and smells and sounds. Hours later, when I returned home, I plopped the first CD into my computer to have a quick listen (Arthur H's first album, Arthur H--that's an image of him from the back of the CD at the top of this post).

The opening track, "Quai No 3" (listen to sample above), had me sitting up and taking notice. I created a new playlist in iTunes, titled it "Merde," and dragged the song into it. Not that I thought every album was going to be a winner, or even have single listenable track. But I thought it would be fun--and appropriately French--to perform a kind of oulipian experiment using the Alliance Francaise Library's withdrawn CDs I had picked up this year and last.

When the second CD (Johnny Hallyday's Les Grands Success De Johnny Hallyday--second sample above) turned out to be as great as the first, I figured I'd just gotten lucky. When the third, fourth and fifth CDs all proved to each be as fabulous as the last, I almost started to cry. Really? I'd spent four lousy bucks on this merde. And all of it was kicking my ass.

In creating tonight's mix-tape I gave myself a couple of rules: (1) I could only include one track per CD and (2) I had to use EVERY CD I'd gotten at the fair, both this year and last. I admit that I broke the second rule--while I found a couple of tracks on Florent Pagny's Re:Creation that didn't make me want to do violence to myself, I also remembered how OuLiPo creators had embraced the "clinamen"--or "unpredictable swerve." In layman's terms, it means the Oulipians allowed themselves one opportunity to cheat. So I took mine.

That said, this is an effing supremely fabulous mix, especially considering the fact that I only passed on one of the CDs I picked up in the last two years at a street fair. Do note, however, that while I did stay true to the first rule of only including one song per CD, I wound up getting two CDs each by two artists Java and Dominique A, which is just as well, as they're both incredible. Also, JL Murat's Lilith is a two-CD set; I picked a song from each disc.

Obviously, this is not a representative sample of contemporary French pop. It seems skewed toward the experimental (Franck Vigroux's collaboration with Elliott Sharp!) and the music dates from as far back as the 60s to the present, with quite a bit of 90s action.

If there's anything you find yourself particularly thrilled by, let me know and I'll perhaps post a few entire CDs of the creme de la merde.

Drew Gardner & Various Artists | Flarf Orchestra

Listen to K. Silem Mohammad reading "Utah!" and other pieces.


Listen to Sharon Mesmer reading "A Unicorn Boner for Humanity"

Buy a copy of this crazy-ass CD here.

Most readers of this blog probably don't know this, given that most of you are in Europe or Asia and probably don't read much American poetry, but back in late 2000 I began writing a bunch of crazy, somewhat offensive poems that I began to call "flarf." In the spring of 2001, a half-dozen friends and I launched the Flarf email list, which ultimately grew to about 30-40 participants.

You can read a short history of the movement here and an article about us that appeared on the front page of the Wall Street Journal here.

Over the course of a decade or so, my friends and I put on a number of performances--in New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Maryland, Minnesota, Washington DC, and elsewhere--and at a few of these performances, flarf poet and jazz musician Drew Gardner put together impromptu Flarf Orchestras, made up of both local professional and completely amateur (or altogether non-) musicians, who provided music for some of the readings.

This CD, just released by DC flarf poet Rod Smith's Edge Books, features 10 of those live performances. For those curious about this blog author's "other life," I should warn you that I'm not one of the featured readers, though I do play a plastic blow-into-it sort of "keyboard" on one of the tracks. That said, the music is solid, often fabulous and, as is the case with the sample tracks above, offers an occasionally transcendent mix of language and music, the likes of which I'm guessing you've probably never heard.

Various Artists | 21st Century Japan

Listen to the first song from this set

Hear song number 5

Listen to the 21st song

Get all 30 songs here.

A nice shout out about Bodega Pop from WFMU's "Beware of the Blog" reminds me that, in fact, my initial plan was not to do a blog at all, but a CD label. Talking with conceptual poet and WFMU DJ Kenneth Goldsmith, who encouraged me to consider doing a blog instead, ultimately led me (and now you) here.

Kenny was right, of course; I've probably posted more music to this blog in the first year than I'd have been able to publish in CD form, even if I lived to be 100. But a boy can still dream, can't he?

Were I to seriously consider a label, I think the very first project would be to compile a couple dozen of the most thrilling contemporary tracks from Japan, focusing on indy rock and some of the more accessible experimental stuff--from noodles and Seagull Screaming Kiss Her Kiss Her to Melt Banana and OOIOO.

And that is, more or less, what I've done here. Some of this was found in Japan, but most of it was discovered online, a good portion of it at Rebel Japan Music, one of my all-time favorite music blogs.

If you like what you hear, I encourage you to seek out other music by the bands that intrigue you; many of whom, again, can be found on Rebel Japan.

And don't be too harsh on my imaginary CD cover--it's the first I've ever "designed."