I haven’t been very communicative lately and I apologize. Instead of continuing my rude fit of silence I’ll just let the music speak. Herewith, I announce a new series of blog entries entitled “Mixed Messages” all about narratives through mixtapes. From the trenches of my record collection I present the first in the series entitled “Girls in Boystown Take Over the World.” Girls get the rhythm, because we haven’t got long!
Download : Mixed Messages I - Girls in Boystown Take Over the World Unknown Gender - Girls Have Rhythm
Y Pants - That’s the Way Boys are
Inflatable BoyClams - Boystown
New Haven Women’s Liberation Rock Band - Shotgun
Ivor Cutler and Linda Hirst - Women of the World
The Free Music Archive is a on-line database of pre-cleared music available for legal download and distribution. The project is directed by WFMU radio station in Jersey City, New Jersey - one of the foremost independent radio stations in the United States. Further curators and contributors include other stateside radio stations such as KEXP, dublab, KBOO, ISSUE Project Room, and CASH Music. The project is in its infancy and growing everyday but there is already enough content to warrant regular visits and contributons.
Here are some of the few treasures I uncovered on one recent stroll through the archive. The rest I’ll let you discover by yourself. Happy digging!
Cheap beats entertain me for a night, clever songwriting carries me for a few weeks, while a strong singular voice lingers a bit longer. Then there are certain songs and albums that I keep returning to over the years - Dadamah’s This is not a Dream LP has been sitting quietly and solidly in my collection since 1995 and every time I put it on it fully envelopes and amaze me.
Dadamah - a foursome consiting of Kim Pieters, Peter Stapleton, Roy Montgomery, and Janine Stagg - formed and disbanded within a few years in the early 90s in their hometown of Dunedin, New Zealand. They only ever made three live apperances and recorded just about a dozen tracks but their legacy of layered spacey drone sound lives on.
HTRK are three people - Jonnine Standish (vocals, percussion), Sean Stewart (bass, programming) and Nigel Yang (guitar, synthesizer, programming). Founded in 2003 in Melbourne, Australia they have since relocated to Berlin to explore the full potential of their sexy gritty midnight sound. This is the music to slip into after the twilight songs of The Organ and before the painful break-of-dawn with Come.
They have released only a few albums to date, the Nostalgia EP, a 12″ featuring Ha b/w Panties and the latest release, the LP Marry Me Tonight, out now on Blast First (Petite). Catch them this spring opening for Yeah Yeah Yeahs across Europe. Preview the track “Shoot You Up” below.
I met up with Jonnine, one night in the Kreuzberg (of my mind) and she told me some things…
JW: What is one of your favorite sounds and what does it mean to you? JS: One of my favourite sounds is a cat purring in my ear, it’s the best sound I can imagine. It makes me go fuzzy.
JW: Tell me about one of your most cherished records and why it is so important to you.
JS: An album I cherish is Teenage Snuff Film by Rowland S Howard. It reminds me of fast times and hot nights in Melbourne.
JW: Who is a woman that has inspired you in your life, musically or otherwise?
JS: Grace Jones as a kid and more recently Sasha Grey.
The new mayor in Zurich, Switzerland is Corine Mauch, the first female and first openly gay person to be elected to the esteemed office. She has strong ties to the small but dedicated local women’s punk/pop/rock music scene which stretches over the decades from LiLiPUT to SheZoo. Mauch has played bass in two female rock bands in her native Aarau (Trugschluss and The Hoovers) and her partner, Juliana Müller shaped and directed Zürich’s office of sponsorship and support for rock/pop/jazz. Could this powerfrau duo herald a new renaissance for women in music in the city? A precedence has been set in any case, looking back to the high point of the Zürich music scene in the late 70s when bands like Mother’s Ruin stormed the town. Formed in early 1978, by Markus Engelberger, Reto Ressegatti, Marcel Dubach, Freddy Stäheli and Silvia de Janeiro (né Holenstein) played their first concert in the summer of that year. They released their first single “Danny Hot Dog / No More Superstars” in January 1979 and “Godzilla” later that year. Two LPs followed in 1981 “Want More” and “Basta!” in 1983 before the band broke up indefinitely. The band reformed in 2007 surrounding the reunion/revival of the Swiss punk scene lead by the publication of Lurker Grand’s compendium book “Hot Love: Swiss Punk & Wave 1976-1980.”
Here’s a look back at some Mother’s Ruin early songs and videos.
Download: Mother’s Ruin - Danny Hot Dog
Download: Mother’s Ruin - Can’t Wait Download: Mother’s Ruin - Plastic
Download:Mother’s Ruin - Godzilla
GB Jones is a musician, filmmaker and artist based in Toronto, Canada and active in the queer/underground scene there since the early 80s. Her many projects over the years have included co-editing the seminal queer zine J.D.s with Bruce LaBruce and later Double Bill with friends and bandmates from her all-girl band Fifth Column. She has also appropriated Tom of Finland art into her own series of Tom Girls drawings. Over the years she has also produced a handful of low-budget, high-drama, super fun Super 8 films including The Troublemakers, The Yo-Yo Gang and her most recent (yet not so recent) film The Lollipop Generation.
I first met GB in 1993 as a cheeky teenager living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania putting out a photocopied zine called Beri-Beri. I started a postal correspondence with GB Jones culminating in her inviting me around to her place for tea, conversation and a mixtape during a chance visit to Canada. She put together a compilation of girl punk sounds that would guide me for years to come and indirectly lead to the work I do now. We returned to our transcontinental written dialouge as I asked her a few questions recently about The Lollipop Generation, a film project started in 1995 and completed in 2008…
JW: What was the intention of Lollipop Generation when you began filming and how has the project changed over the years?
GBJ: I first started filming when I was on tour with Fifth Column and it wasn’t for any particular movie, it was just to be able to remember all the places we were going. So, when I say it took 13 years to make the movie, it includes this early period before I even knew I was making it!
It was after I got home and looked at all the footage that I got the idea for a story about a girl, played by Jena von Brücker, who has to leave home and hitchhike across the country to a big city and live on the street, where her and her friends are preyed upon by an evil pornographer. Then I started filming for real, with producers and everything, until the producers backed out and one of the lead actors left. At that point, more than half the movie had been shot and the story had to be totally re-written around what was already done.
I didn’t have any money so I had to keep saving up to get each roll of film and get it developed. That’s when Jane Danger joined the cast and saved the movie! She was so great. She was always ready to dye her hair bright pink and come up to Toronto to film, so I kept writing more and more scenes for her. It was in the 2000’s that I started filming all the people from Toronto, like Joel Gibb and Scott Treleaven and Paul P. and Andrew Cecil and all the people who came to visit, like Anonymous Boy and Gary Fembot. The story would change each time someone came to visit, so I could put them in the film. But the intention always stayed the same.
I always wanted to make a movie about kids who live on the street because when I was really young I had met all these kids downtown who were living on the street and they became my friends. Most of the things that happen in the film are things that really did happen to them.
At the same time, I really wanted to document all the amazing artists and actors and musicians and filmmakers I know in all the different scenes they are a part of, so I put them all in the film. And in some ways, it was fortuitous that the film took so long to make because it gave me a chance to really capture a whole era on film.
JW: Has it taken on more or less significance (to yourself, those involved, the gay scene) during that time?
The Lollipop Generation has significance for me because it’s really like home movies of all the places I traveled to, and all the people I met, people who I had wrote to and visited and traded zines with. I like that it captures so many of the people from zines and bands and movies from that whole period of time.
I don’t think “The Lollipop Generation” has any signicance to the gay scene. No one involved was part of that scene and I don’t think they’re really interested in all our zines and bands and art and movies.
JW: How important is the medium of super 8 film to your work? What is your relationship with digital interactive, instantaneous on-line media such as YouTube and blogging?
GBJ: I like Super 8 because it’s so easy to use. You can’t really make a mistake with it, and if you do it’s even better. In “The Lollipop Generation” I put in all my mistakes. Everything that people think are mistakes are good. That’s my message.
I have a You Tube channel so obviously I do have a relationship with it, but it’s love/hate. It’s great that people finally have the chance to see ‘underground’ film and videos, but these sites are often highly censored and rigidly formatted. It’s a shame that some people feel they must create work that’s designed to fit the format of these sites. If you can be subversive about it, though, you can get your message across to a lot of people. With blogging it’s probably easier. People just really have to remember to go to their “search preferences” and click the ‘Safe Search’ filter off!
The Lollipop Generation premiered in Toronto in Spring 2008 and is currently screening at cinemas and festivals around the world, including the London premiere at the Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in April 2009.
