Unsomnambulist
Staff member
Mugstar - Graft (2020)
What are you listening to? November 2024
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Nickyboy
Staff member
Noted. Going to put my magnifying glass away now and listen to this later.Michael Mayer ~ The Floor is Lava (2024)
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Recommended if your moniker is: @Nickyboy
Michael Mayer albums don’t come round too often, which is one of many reasons why his fourth collection, The Floor Is Lava, is a genuine event. It’s been eight years since his last one, the collaborative & released on !K7; its predecessors, Mantasy (2012) and Touch (2004), took their sweet time, too. It’s no real surprise, given the many hats Mayer wears – globetrotting DJ, revered remixer, inveterate collaborator, and boss of both Kompakt and Imara – that his solo productions are relatively sparing. But this also speaks to their quality: Mayer’s name on a record sleeve is a sign of quality, of music that’s both looking to the future and calling back to the past, that balances the imperatives of the dancefloor and the loungeroom, that’s as exploratory as it is functional.
On The Floor Is Lava, Mayer seems to be taking the temperature of both the music that surrounds him (past and present), and the ides of the industry he works within. There’s that iconic album title, for a start. “The album’s mindset,” he says, reflecting on those four words together. For Mayer, it’s partly a critique of the way the industry boxes in both producer and listener, focuses them on genre, on market, on the next new thing: “Being a free minded spirit that transcends genres has become an uphill battle.” A battle worth fighting, though, and with The Floor Is Lava, the result is an album that’s varied, quixotic, idiosyncratic, charming, and deeply, addictively listenable.
Throughout, Mayer finds thrills in exploration and juxtaposition, allowing unexpected things to blossom and giving them their life, their platform, throwing the listener exciting curveballs: “It’s a DJ album by a DJ that’s easily bored.” Either easily bored, or endlessly curious, The Floor Is Lava is rich with ideas. It opens with “The Problem”, which looks back to look forward, embracing the rickety way early house productions threw samples together with gleeful abandon. Mayer mentions Pal Joey, and the scene around Rockers Hi-Fi and their Different Drummer imprint, as reference points, and you can hear that freewheeling spirit throughout.
It’s followed by “Vagus”, a slinky, sensual minimal house number that Mayer describes as his “musical catnip”. The flow of these two opening cuts defines the dynamic of The Floor Is Lava, defining the dialectical drive at its core: thesis and antithesis leads to synthesis, but with a welcome prickliness that means you’re always excited, always engaged. It’s also productive in the way it derives energy from rubbing genres and sounds against each other, in unexpected ways, for maximum musical frisson. There’s psychedelic techno on “Feuerstuhl”, more minimal techno with “Ardor” (Mayer mentions ‘Immer 1’ era 90s minimal as inspiration), slippery, Shepard-tone breakbeat through “Sycophant”, a lovely, lush vocal turn on the poppy “The Solution”.
The album closes with the melancholy “Süßer Schlaf”, where Mayer sets a poem by Goethe to one of his most haunted, moving pieces of music yet, in abstract tribute to a lost friend. It’s one of the most affecting moments on The Floor Is Lava. There’s also an update on 2020’s wild Brainwave Technology EP, with the surrealist glitter-stomp of “Brainwave 2.0” (check out those handclaps!), where Mayer’s thinking about the socio-political precipice of the now: “I’m reading with great interest about this whole complex of how humanity is about to cross so many lines and the implications that the resulting financial and educational inequality will bring.”
That’s The Floor Is Lava: then and now, brainwaves and nerve structures, problems and solutions, genres on fire; the real, the unreal, and the surreal. An album for the easily bored and the endlessly curious. Mayer has the last word, telling us all you need to know about the album’s spirit: “Burning for the cause, being zealous, being addicted to the heat of the night, the exuberant powers of music.”
axolotl
Nunquam non paratus
I say, my good man. Don't you use a monocle?
Unsomnambulist
Staff member
Black Helium - Um (2023)
Unsomnambulist
Staff member
The Sonic Dawn - Phantom (2024)
Unsomnambulist
Staff member
Kim Deal - Nobody Loves You More (2024)
Nickyboy
Staff member
Unsomnambulist
Staff member
Mekong - Danse Danse (2024)
Unsomnambulist
Staff member
The Sonic Dawn - Into The Long Night (2017)
Ojai Sam
Staff member
Rahsaan Roland Kirk & Al Hibbler - A Meeting Of The Times (1972)
Charlie Spivak - Charlie Spivak And His Orchestra 1981/Stardreams 1986 (1987)
Quite by chance, these two records came up together through the listening stack this morning. Both were disappointing examples of fading artists who made an album too many.
Al Hibbler was 57 when he went into the studio with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, 20 years his junior in age and light years more adventurous in style. Perhaps Atlantic was hoping to recapture the magic of John Coltrane's pairing with Johnny Hartmann. If so, they didn't succeed. Coltrane was comfortable playing beside and behind the velvet-voiced Hartmann where Hibbler tried way too hard to sound aggressively jazzy. Kirk wisely remained in the shadows for Al's five vocals and then reemerges with a decent if not memorable set of tunes with an Ellingtonian slant.
Trumpeter Charlie Spivak had been a sideman with the likes of the Dorsey Brothers, Bob Crosby and Glenn Miller when, with Miller's support, he launched his own band. "Cheery, Chubby Charlie" soldiered on for decades in the second tier of big band leaders, managing to outlive most of his peers. His wife, Irene Daye, was the band's singer until her death in 1971. Charlie then found Wilma "Dubby" Hayes to fill the empty vocalist chair and darned if he didn't marry her too. This CD holds two full albums, one recorded a year before Charlie's death. The other came five years later and featured a ghost band led by Dubby herself when she wasn't busy with her women's clothing factory in Alabama. Both of the Spivak family records are cut from the same cloth: tepid big band jazz fronted by Dubby's nondescript, loungeworthy vocals.
Dubby Spivak
Charlie Spivak - Charlie Spivak And His Orchestra 1981/Stardreams 1986 (1987)
Quite by chance, these two records came up together through the listening stack this morning. Both were disappointing examples of fading artists who made an album too many.
Al Hibbler was 57 when he went into the studio with Rahsaan Roland Kirk, 20 years his junior in age and light years more adventurous in style. Perhaps Atlantic was hoping to recapture the magic of John Coltrane's pairing with Johnny Hartmann. If so, they didn't succeed. Coltrane was comfortable playing beside and behind the velvet-voiced Hartmann where Hibbler tried way too hard to sound aggressively jazzy. Kirk wisely remained in the shadows for Al's five vocals and then reemerges with a decent if not memorable set of tunes with an Ellingtonian slant.
Trumpeter Charlie Spivak had been a sideman with the likes of the Dorsey Brothers, Bob Crosby and Glenn Miller when, with Miller's support, he launched his own band. "Cheery, Chubby Charlie" soldiered on for decades in the second tier of big band leaders, managing to outlive most of his peers. His wife, Irene Daye, was the band's singer until her death in 1971. Charlie then found Wilma "Dubby" Hayes to fill the empty vocalist chair and darned if he didn't marry her too. This CD holds two full albums, one recorded a year before Charlie's death. The other came five years later and featured a ghost band led by Dubby herself when she wasn't busy with her women's clothing factory in Alabama. Both of the Spivak family records are cut from the same cloth: tepid big band jazz fronted by Dubby's nondescript, loungeworthy vocals.
Dubby Spivak
Ojai Sam
Staff member
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Nikolaus Harnoncourt, cond.) - New Year's Concert 2003 (2003)
If it's not too early for Christmas music, it certainly is a good time to visit Vienna on New Year's Day 2003. Nik and the gang bring us a rousing program of 20 selections, all but 3 of which are by men named Strauss. Waltz on!
If it's not too early for Christmas music, it certainly is a good time to visit Vienna on New Year's Day 2003. Nik and the gang bring us a rousing program of 20 selections, all but 3 of which are by men named Strauss. Waltz on!
axolotl
Nunquam non paratus
Nik is just that kind of guy.
"The Strauss, the Strauss, the Strauss is in the house."
Ojai Sam
Staff member
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Valery Gergiev, cond.) - Moussorgsky: Pictures At An Exhibition (2002)
The Vienna Philharmonic returns to the playlist today under a very different baton. Although these two recording were made less than a year apart, the results are startlingly divergent. Gone are the joyous enthusiasm and bubbling dance rhythms of a new year, replaced with martial drive and forceful energy. Listening to "The Great Gate of Kiev" makes me appreciate just how strongly the Russians embrace(d) the totality of their empire/union/bloc.
The Vienna Philharmonic returns to the playlist today under a very different baton. Although these two recording were made less than a year apart, the results are startlingly divergent. Gone are the joyous enthusiasm and bubbling dance rhythms of a new year, replaced with martial drive and forceful energy. Listening to "The Great Gate of Kiev" makes me appreciate just how strongly the Russians embrace(d) the totality of their empire/union/bloc.
Unsomnambulist
Staff member
That looks very modest.Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Valery Gergiev, cond.) - Moussorgsky: Pictures At An Exhibition (2002)
The Vienna Philharmonic returns to the playlist today under a very different baton. Although these two recording were made less than a year apart, the results are startlingly divergent. Gone are the joyous enthusiasm and bubbling dance rhythms of a new year, replaced with martial drive and forceful energy. Listening to "The Great Gate of Kiev" makes me appreciate just how strongly the Russians embrace(d) the totality of their empire/union/bloc.
axolotl
Nunquam non paratus
Bill Haley & His Comets - Twistin' Knights At The Roundtable (1962)
Unsomnambulist
Staff member
Tom Waits - Bone Machine (1992)
axolotl
Nunquam non paratus
Peppino D'Agostino ~ Connexion (2020)
"Peppino writes wonderful guitar pieces. He’s one of my favorite composers for this cranky instrument. Plus, he’s a tone player. I love his sound…he gets the resin and the wood.” ~ Leo Kottke
"Peppino writes wonderful guitar pieces. He’s one of my favorite composers for this cranky instrument. Plus, he’s a tone player. I love his sound…he gets the resin and the wood.” ~ Leo Kottke
Unsomnambulist
Staff member
Modest Mouse - This Is A Long Title For Somebody To Have To Type Out (1996)
axolotl
Nunquam non paratus
Modest Mouse - This Is A Long Title For Somebody To Have To Type Out (1996)
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