Can – “The Lost Tapes” (2012)
A June 19th review by Paula Mejia from the Prefix website of Can’s new 3-CD collection of unreleased songs, outtakes and jams from their archives. As with anything concerning Can, it’s brilliant stuff…
Reviewing a Can album is like trying to describe the very first time you heard the Velvet Underground, or explaining what a truly superb pizza tastes like as it dissolves onto your tongue — attempting to verbalize it just feels straight up contrived. The sole way to understand it is to experience it for yourself.
Even more astounding about the legendary German band’s unprecedented release, The Lost Tapes, is that these pieces of music were abandoned in the recesses of the Spoon archive for decades, unearthed accidentally when the band’s studio was sold to the German Rock N Pop museum. What’s more, the three hour-long collection only represents a mere ten percent of the thirty hours of unreleased live, soundtrack and studio material discovered within the archives.
Compiled by founder Irmin Schmidt and longtime collaborator Jono Podmore, The Lost Tapes is essentially a time capsule documenting the band’s progression, collectively constructed into something altogether eerie, awe-inspiring and innovative. The inevitable influence of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen (whom Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay both studied under) seeps into the immeasurable tapestry of sounds, blending everything from Southeast Asian-influenced instrumentation to atmospheric scores of films never released. Read the rest of this entry »
Gay Telese – “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” (1966)
This famous article was taken from Esquire magazine, April 1966, by famous writer Gay Telese…
Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra’s four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.
Sinatra had been working in a film that he now disliked, could not wait to finish; he was tired of all the publicity attached to his dating the twenty-year-old Mia Farrow, who was not in sight tonight; he was angry that a CBS television documentary of his life, to be shown in two weeks, was reportedly prying into his privacy, even speculating on his possible friendship with Mafia leaders; he was worried about his starring role in an hour-long NBC show entitled Sinatra — A Man and His Music, which would require that he sing eighteen songs with a voice that at this particular moment, just a few nights before the taping was to begiin, was weak and sore and uncertain. Sinatra was ill. He was the victim of an ailment so common that most people would consider it trivial. But when it gets to Sinatra it can plunge him into a state of anguish, deep depression, panic, even rage. Frank Sinatra had a cold. Read the rest of this entry »
The Beat Patrol 