Currently up at NPR is a great mini-set of 70s Iranian funk, collected by Egon of Stones Throw Records. It’s part of their ongoing Funk Archaeology series, and features tracks by some folks I’ve never heard (like the sitar-and-Afrobeat-infused Mehr Pooya and beach-psych-y Kourosh Yagmhei) as well as my old favorite, Googoosh (or Googoush, or گوگوش, all of which apparently mean “Swanhawk,” which is extra cool).

Though she’s possibly the biggest Iranian popstar of all time, I first discovered her through the genius video clip for Nime Gomshode, and was immediately smitten by her sultry voice, avant dance moves, and seriously visionary style (I’ve been trying to rock the loose vest/white Keds thing ever since).

Enjoy the acid-disco classic here:

Also a clip from the 1974 movie Hamsafar, where GG takes a romantic B&W motorcycle ride through the mountains:

Update: More Persian funk/psych links here:
Radiodiffusion Blog Iran Posts

Reviews of Persian Progressive & Crossover Music items

V.A. : Waking Up Scheherazade

Psych Funk 101 Compilation – looks kind of basic but features some tracks

Title: “Kitsch Cat is the Cat’s Meow”
Publication: Theme Magazine
Date: Fall 2009
Article Link
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Take a quick spin through Siam Square or Chatuchak Market and it’s clear: Bangkok’s youth culture knows how to do retro. From deadstock sunglasses to modernist furniture, the past is not only present, but lovingly curated and feverishly consumed. The cool kids behind the Kitsch Cat project, however, are taking an obsession with a previous decade (namely the ’80s) to a whole new level.

Kitsch Cat was born a year ago when Thai electro-pop fixture Cesar B. De Guzman (aka Cyndi Seui) and graphic designer/musician Peera Suk-a-Suk (aka Yuri’s Nominee) began brainstorming on a music collaboration—something personal and separate from their day-jobs at indie label Smallroom Records. Soon their friend Jaree Thanapura (aka Gramaphone Children) joined in, and over weekly dinners at a Thonglor ramen joint, the concept evolved: a mini-label to push the electronic music envelope, through compilations, T-shirt design, a blog, and any other means necessary.

“We didn’t expect it to come out so ’80s,” Thanapura explains, “but it ended up that everyone was doing something relating to ’80s music, and it just snapped into place… kinda like velcro.” Velcro is cited as an influence in the liner notes of the first CD compilation, alongside “8-bit video games, vinyl toys, Rubik’s cubes, calculator watches, and spandex.”

The six artists on the compilation remix their reference points into something fresh. Juicy synths and shiny horns are chopped almost beyond recognition in D.J.S.C.P’s dense composition, while Gramaphone Children’s “One Pink Saturday” is a tweaked John Hughes film theme song. The King of Pop is alive and well in Cyndi Seui’s tracks, cross-shuffled and sped up for an impatient age.

After the CD’s release last fall, Kitsch Cat won admirers in France, Japan, and beyond (swamping De Guzman with lots of remix work for electro acts like Astrolabe and Freaku). Ironically, the local scene is discovering them from the outside-in, through international music blogs. Meanwhile the Cats are working on upcoming live shows, the next CD compilation and corresponding T-shirt, and perhaps even a custom-designed “Kitsch Cat” effects filter. Their grand plans to “create electro madness on the dance floor” are well under way.

Oh well – still nice to support an actual music shop, and made an additional purchase of some Cui Zi’en (崔子恩) DVDs I haven’t seen around before. A few years ago at HKIFF, Thai director Pen-ek Ratanaruang described to me his first exposure to Cui’s films as something like this: “I put on the tape, and was watching it until I felt I had to turn it off, but then I couldn’t turn it off… it’s so bad that it’s fascinating, and then it becomes interesting.” Intense paraphrasing going on there, but it sticks in my mind as fairly apt. The weird, self-conscious crappiness in the aesthetic and tone of “Withered in the Blooming Season” is kind of amazing.

The Hedgehog and Ourself Beside Me albums are available for streaming and download below. (Legally! Though the concept of something that is both “digital” and “legal” in China is still confusing to me.) I’m still making my way through them…

Ourself Beside Me “Ourself Beside Me”
(Loving the Rundgren/Barrett-by-way-of-Lisa-Frank cover art; also I’m amazed that they actually did use ‘Ourself Beside Me’ as the official name on it – they had barely decided it while my THEME article on them was going to press)

Hedgehog “Blue Day Dreaming”
(I wish time machines existed just so that Hedgehog could travel back to 1993 to appear on 120 Minutes, and we could now watch it on grainy Youtube VHS capture…)

Profile: Ourself Beside Me, Theme Magazine, Issue 17, Nov/Dec/Jan 2008/2009 Eureka!

Theme: Dreamchaser, Theme Magazine, Issue 17, Nov/Dec/Jan 2008/2009 Eureka!

Title: “Ourselves Beside Me” (note: as of publication time, the band was still using the name ‘Ourself Beside Me’)
Publication: Theme Magazine
Date: Dec/Jan 2008/2009
Article Link
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Sweet Factory is a tiny recording studio unexpectedly tucked into a nondescript apartment complex outside Beijing’s 3rd Ring Road.

Inside, three girls in jeans and vintage shirts—known as Ourself Beside Me—are lounging on the couch and shag carpet, one idly toying with a tambourine as the engineer and producer set up to record their debut album. It hardly looks like Beijing rock history in the making, but sometimes evolution is a pretty subtle thing.

The retro trio has quickly become one of Beijing’s buzziest acts. Guitarist and singer Yang Fan is hardly new to hype—while still a teenager she founded Hang On The Box, the iconic all-girl punk band that helped define the Chinese underground in the nineties. After HOTB disbanded last year, Yang (now 27) turned in her studded collar and formed Ourself Beside Me with friends Xie Han (21, bass, film student) and Emi Namihira (27, drums, a Japanese student who studied Chinese for a year and never went back). Befitting a new, more expansive era of Beijing music, they began forging an electrifying new sound—that is, an older one.

“Syd Barrett!” Yang Fan and Xie Han both exclaim, when asked about influences; Yang Fan discovered rock’n’roll in middle school via Pink Floyd’s The Wall—it was cheaper than the other cassettes and had better cover art. This psychedelic affinity permeates their songs, but filtered through tight, mannered melody lines and a rhythmic, garage-y thump, all underlying Yang Fan’s trademark whisper/shout of oblique English lyrics. The interweaving of guitar and bass bears traces of Talking Heads, The Fall, Television, and the Velvet Underground, with an insistent twist.

Producer Yang Haisong (founder of veteran rock band PK 14) has his work cut out for him trying to get OBM’s debut disc right; the band’s paradoxically meandering but tight live presence isn’t easy to capture. But what kind of sound are they looking for, Xie Han considers. “Hmm…More like ourself.” She shouldn’t worry too much. Smack in the midst of Beijing’s ever-mutating scene, there’s no one else who sounds quite like Ourself anyhow.

Exhibited at the first edition of “Let’s Bolt,” curated by Metro Color Collision with Lumi Tan
August 2007, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center, New York

More information here.

Title: “Going Kiiiiiii-razy!”
Publication: Tomorrow Unlimited (now-defunct web magazine by founders of Res and Tribeca Film Festival)
Date: Jul 2007
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Up until this week, Tokyo’s Kiiiiiii was probably one of the most beloved cult bands never to have released a single album. For the past five years, the antics of neon-scrunchied two-girl duo U.T. and Lakin’ have garnered fans across the land of the rising sun and beyond, due to their insane live shows and feverish blog coverage. But aside from a handful of mp3s and a free-wheeling DVD (Gold & Silver), their unique sound hadn’t been captured in any lasting form. Luckily their nineteen-track debut, Al&Bum, dropped in record shops across Japan, finally putting to an end the long, agonizing wait of Japanese freak-pop fans.

Kiiiiiii (just how many “i”s are there? Usually seven, but it varies) was born when childhood friends and artists U.T. and Lakin’ were asked to do a performance for experimental theatre group Tetsuwari Crack Iron Albatrossket, but couldn’t find time to make the paper puppets
they had planned. Instead, Lakin’ took up drum duty, U.T. vocals, and together they created the fizzy beats and catchy weirdness of songs like “(The world according to) Carp & Sheep” and “Brown Girl in the Ring.” Of course, other Japanese girl bands have done cute (Cibo
Matto, Shonen Knife), and crazy (Afrirampo, OOiOO) before, but Kiiiiiii combines the two in a fashion all their own. Romper-room melodies are overlaid with U.T.’s chirpy MCing about things like Full House and funny animals (the older song “Four Little Joeys” might be about either, or both), and there’s a driving thump beneath it all that makes a body want to bounce along with them. The message is simple, and in fact, is one of the song titles on the new record: “Kiiiiiii for any occasion… or just for fun!”

Kiiiiiii is considering an American tour in October, but until then, you can preview the album on their site, or try to mail-order from Amazon Japan.

Though the sakura of springtime are long gone, summer sees a sweet crop of equally light and airy blossoms (this time musical) coming into bloom. First off the stem is the restrained new album Totemo Aimasho by Tokyo’s folk-pop favorites Tenniscoats. The married duo of Saya and Takashi Ueno has been making music since 2000 and have been mostly known for warm and ethereal live shows. Totemo Aimasho, which translates roughly to “Let’s Meet Very Much”, is their first studio album in three years, and finds the two exploring subtly-different territory (geographic as well as thematic). Recorded in Australia, Japan, and the UK by producer Lawrence English, tracks like “Jitsurei” have an almost Joe Meek-inflected oddness, while “Kimininaritai” keeps to the tried-and-true formula of Saya’s searing harmonies over rustic instruments (a squeaky horn and single drum). Some ambient tracks (“Aurora Curtains”, “Hakka”) sound exactly like every other ambient track you’ve ever heard, but they’re more than balanced out by the simple acoustic strumming and whistling of campfire-side charmer like “To Do First”.
Tenniscoats just finished a long tour of Australia, but lucky Danes can catch them at the legendary Roskilde Festival this July – in the midnight sun!

http://www.myspace.com/tenniscoats

As night fell on the first Friday of the 2007 Venice Biennale, it was time to party. Wild rumors flew about how to get into elite fêtes like those thrown by Gucci and Y-3 (Yohji Yamamoto for Adidas), and slightly edgier events like the “Luanda Pop” DJ Spooky gig at the African Pavilion, and the Scissor Sisters show at the German party. But those who were without the coveted invitations were mostly out of luck—unless they decided to simply storm the gates.

Somehow, many managed to slip through while the brawny bouncers were preoccupied with bruising egos—“This man is a very important Spanish curator!” a drunk British woman screamed while gesticulating at a drag queen beside her. The artist Christian Jankowski, already inside the gates and dressed in what looked creepily like a boy scout uniform (Germans? Uniforms?), simply looked on and shrugged. Inside, that familiar retro-disco emanated from the mouth of a gigantic hangar, where hundreds were already dancing away their art-pilgrimage leg cramps. Between songs, Scissor Sistors frontman Jake Shears grabbed the mic to give shout-outs to the band’s German sponsors and call “You go, girl!” to the artist Isa Genzken, whose much-hyped “Oil” installation was causing a perpetual hour-long queue at the German pavilion. “Be nice to the poor artists!” Ana Matronic called out, ostensibly to the wealthier members of the audience—while the sweaty masses swarmed the bar, only to find that a thimble-sized beer cost five euros.

The Sisters rocked standards like “Filthy/Gorgeous” and the Pink Floyd cover “Comfortably Numb,” until most of the audience was one or the other. Out on the semi-tarmac, the scent of grass (both kinds) rose into the night air while a few couples decided to take a plunge in
the big, lit-up fountain. This finally brought out the no-nonsense Italian police, who didn’t seem to give a damn that gorgeous filth is what the Venice Biennale is all about.