BEATSVILLERADIO

  KASHMERE STAGE BAND - TEXAS THUNDER SOUL 1968 - 1974 It is unbelievable to think that deep in the heart of Texas in the early '70s a high school band was making hard funk and winning high school competitions with it. While most bands were lumbering through odes to the changing of seasons or traditional arrangements, the Kashmere Stage Band were mastering a contemporary sound and laying down some of the best and unappreciated deep Texas funk. The teenagers in the Kashmere Stage Band produced a sound equal to that of the contemporary funk bands The J.B.'s and the Bar-Kays. Although lost for decades, since 2003 the KSB recordings have been released, some for the first time, on both vinyl record and CD and have become prized by hip-hop artists and DJs for their inimitable sound.            LISTEN HERE: https://kashmerestageband.bandcamp.com JAGATH - SVAPNA Jagath create their music at abandoned industrial locations - the bottom of a moist underground sew...

  I cannot think of anything else that conjures up so powerfully the atmosphere of a nation turned insane -  Sunday Telegraph All Sanna Moder wants is to get across town. She needs to start preparing for her roommate Liska's party, but she and her friend Gerti are being detained by, of all things, the Fuhrer's visit to the city. All the roads are blocked off, and the SS is not letting anyone through. This is Frankfurt, Germany, in the mid-1930s, but Sanna is not thinking much about the police state her homeland is turning into. After all, she promised she'd find a blacklisted journalist who Liska is head over heels in love with and put in a good word for her. Sanna may be oblivious to the changing times, but it's not like those paying attention in Irmgard Keun's recently reissued After Midnight are having a better time of it. Sanna's brother's novels have been banned, due to their contrarian political views. He's thinking about writing a fawning epic poe...

    When Music Maker Foundation took the latest version of our Music Maker Blues Revue to the Telluride Blues & Brews Festival in Colorado, the band included a guitar player and singer from Atlanta named Hermon Hitson. He was brand new to the Music Maker family, but he had a musical track record of more than 50 years, playing with the likes of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and many others. When Hermon first met the Gospel Comforters — another band we brought to the fest — they all looked at his shoes. “Where did you get those James Brown boots?” a member asked. “They don’t make those anymore. Only James had those made.” You, dear reader, have probably never heard of a guitar player named Hermon Hitson, but there he stood, in Colorado, wearing a pair of custom-made boots that no one but James Brown himself and those who played with him could ever put on their feet. Like those boots, Hermon Hitson himself is unique in the truest sense of the word. No one else is like him. No oth...

   RAJA KIRIK - RAMPOKAN From a Ugandan label we are graced with Rampokan:  Compositions rooted  in the sound of shamanic trance dances, specifically the Jaranan, or Jathilan, a Hindu-Buddhist-era dance from the 11th Century symbolizing the ways common people could overcome their rulers using evasion and agility.  It's a mind-bending fusion of traditional Indonesian percussion, digital noise and over-driven Dutch hard-style. The work roots itself in the stage of Jaranan performance where the players become possessed, connecting to their subconscious mind and the body's collective memory and trauma.   This is effectuated by dousing evocative microtonal clanks from an arsenal of home-made instruments in expertly designed digital noise, and stringing the disparate elements together with the oppressive pneumatic pressure of high-BPM, warehouse-ready kick drums. Like the trance dances that inspired this, these tracks evolve and cycle from misery to ecstasy, spin...

   OLD TOWER - TALES OF THE MAD MOON Tales Of A Mad Moon is a compilation of the early work of Dutch dark ambient artist Old Tower. The LP includes the trilogy of EPs released as Grim Alchemy, the cassette-only EP Plague Harvest, Ruination, a New Dawn Cometh’ Part One and Two along with bonus tracks. If you like your ambient music dark, then this prime gloom really is for you.  Or as Old Tower would have it:  A dream into the present without a future, a future without a past . . . exploration of different aspects of dark music in short gasps . . . ambient and field recording statements of decay . . . the Dark Ages as raison d'être to the lost spirit . . . a death mask laughing at humans from the mountains of madness . . . ROBERT PETE WILLIAMS - LOUISIANA BLUES Over fifty years since his discovery by ethnomusicologists Dr. Harry Oster and Richard Allen in the prison farm of Angola, Louisiana, one still must ask in near astonishment:  Just what is it tha...

  TOAST OF LONDON Where are you,  American viewer,  likely to have met the stentorian English comic actor Matt Berry, whose “Toast of London” recently finished its year-long run on NETFLIX? Currently, Berry plays an English vampire on Staten Island in the FX vampire mockumentary series What We Do in the Shadows, developed by Jemaine Clement from his film of the same name, and is the voice of Prince Merkimer, man and pig, in Matt Groening’s Netflix animated fantasy Disenchantment. Longer ago, there was The IT Crowd, with Chris O’Dowd and Richard Ayoade; the ’80s horror pastiche Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and a few episodes of The Mighty Boosh, all of which have managed airings this side of the Atlantic. And every year around this time, I post a link to AD/BC, a pitch-perfect pastiche 1970s-style rock opera written by Berry and Ayoade that tells the story of the Nativity from the point of view of the innkeeper. Created by Berry and Arthur Mathews (Father Ted), Toast of Lond...

      This cd is a compilation of the "best" bits from two rather obscure lps from the late 1950s. The cover you see is a part of the original Warner Brothers "The Cool Scene- 12 New Ways To Fly" lp which was mainly instrumental 50s jazz. The other lp featured is truly weird. It is called "Greenwich Village's Cafe Bizarre Presents Assorted Madness,Beaterotica & Unbeat Beat Poetry". A few tracks (e.g. George Shearing's "Sorry, Wrong Rhumba") were on neither LP...So we have some truly bizarre poetry readings from assorted weirdos intermingled with music by Charlie Parker, George Shearing, Chico Hamilton, etc. The overall result is sheer heaven for the Maynard G. Krebbs in all of us. Grab it before it disappears.

  Horror movies come with a lot of baggage for women, and the slasher subgenre in particular tends to abide by a formula that consists of sexual(ized) violence and voyeurism as much as it does masked killers wielding oxidized knives. Still, even in such compromised forms, stories of women who endure terror, pain, and bodily harm often resonate with women spectators, as we find catharsis in exaggerated, externalized depictions of the abuse that so many of us endure. Because their relationship to women and marginalized people in general is so often fraught, slasher movies are constantly being reread, reclaimed, and reconsidered, examined for potential nuggets of feminist insight or empowerment. The beauty of Bob Clarke’s 1974 Black Christmas, unlike so many other unseemly genre movies of its day, is that it doesn’t need to be reinterpreted, because what it offers at face value remains so bone-chillingly accurate: a look at the all-too-real rage of men who desire to control women’s bo...

  MOHAMMAD MOSTAFA HEYDARIAN - SONGS OF HORAMAN Mohammad Mostafa Heydarian is a young Kurdish tanbur player from Kermanshah, a city in the mountainous western Iranian region of Horaman (هه‌ورامان). The son of a local instrument builder, he grew up surrounded by the local traditional music styles, studying with a number of well-known master musicians before recently entering university to study Persian classical music. Radio Khiyaban is very proud to be able to present "Songs of Horaman," Heydarian's first record, as a testament to the artist's wonderful talents.  Recorded in the city of Karaj with the percussive assistance of family friend and long-time collaborator Behzad Varesteh, Heydarian's debut includes a mixture of traditional tasnifs and maqams - thrilling and gorgeous tanbur pieces centered in the two musicians' talent for extended improvisation and feeling.  INGAR ZACH & MICHELE RABBIA - MUSIQUE POUR DEUX CORPS In which we bring together the duo ...

    In 1964, the Xerox Corporation agreed to underwrite a series of made-for-television films designed to promote the positive humanitarian activities of the United Nations.  Xerox, which prided itself as a leader in corporate social responsibility, agreed to spend $4 million on this endeavor, no small sum back in '64.  A nonprofit organization called the Telsun Foundation was formed to produce these films (Telsun being an acronym for Television Series for the United Nations.) The first production in this project was an updated version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol.”  Rather than revisiting the Victorian England of Ebenezer Scrooge, this production would offer an isolationist U.S. industrialist gaining a belated appreciation of the spirit of United Nations-style diplomacy. In keeping with the ghostly elements of the Dickens source, Telsun brought in Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling to write an original script.  To direct the project, two-time...

    S o we thought we'd do something a little different this year.  Instead of a list of the 2021 releases that caught our eyes and ears apres January 1st, we decided it would be better to give you a handy-dandy register of  any  work coming to our attention during 2021.  Oh sure, most of the following was released in the last twelve months; but as we are not  omniscient- although we try to be - we thought it would be exceedingly hip to alert you to some of the stuff we missed in 2020 or that has been floating around in the soundcloud, or whatever the hell you call it, that we deemed essential for your education.  Read on, therefore, dear reader, what follows, in no particular order of preference, is some transcendent listening . . . GROUPE RTD - THE DANCING DEVILS OF DJIBOUTI A stunning collision of Indian Bollywood, Jamaican dub and reggae, sleek horns inspired by Harlem’s jazz era, Somali funk, and the haunting and joyous synthesizer melodies o...