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About Randophonic

For now, I'm best thought of as a radio program. Sometimes it may seem I'm all the work of one person, other times many. What matters is the program.

452. streets of Laredo

John Cale being one of those artists who has never felt compelled to repeat himself. This version of the old cowboy song comes from 1981’s Honi Soit, which may not be anyone’s definition a pop item but it was his biggest seller. Which means there are likely still many copies of it floating around, which makes me feel very good somehow. Curious young minds stumbling onto Streets of Laredo gone discordantly into the ditch, dumping all the sunshine and melodrama, leaving only drama and the stink of death. I’d love to see this movie.” (Philip Random)

JohnCale-honisoit-crop

453. inmate’s lullaby

Second of two in a row from Gentle Giant’s prolific and dense and rather brilliant early 1970s phase. Inmate’s Lullaby being one of those songs that you know what it’s about, even if you don’t pay attention to the lyrics. It’s about madness, insanity, but in a nice way, like a nice day at the asylum. The inmate looks out his window and smells the flowers and hears the birds and comes to believe he’s in paradise, heaven even. Does heaven have inmates? If it does, you know they have a band, and it likely sounds a lot like Gentle Giant do here, working all manner of archaic and weird (for any kind of rock outfit) instrumentation to evocative effect.

454. knots

“I first stumbled onto Gentle Giant via late night TV, maybe 1975.  My first thought was, these guys are strange. And I’ve never wavered in that estimation. Or more to the point, the stranger the better. And they never got stranger than Knots, from the album called Octopus, and Knots is nothing if not Octopus like – at least eight separate arms all reaching for something beyond their grasp. I’m sure I’ve heard it a thousand times, yet I’m still not entirely clear how it even goes, though lyrically, it does seem very connected to the psychology of RD Laing.” (Philip Random)

gentlegiant-1972-promo

455. real life

It’s 1984 and proto-goth underlords Bauhaus have broken up, but guitar guy Daniel Ash still has some shadows to explore with bassist (and former Bauhaus roadie) Glenn Campling, an outfit they’re calling Tones on Tail. And it all comes good (if weird) with Pop, an album that goes all kinds of cool places. In the case of Real Life, that means acoustic, expansive, dynamic – the right kind of psychedelic.

reSEARCH-08 – The Whole Day

Installment #8 of what we’re calling the Research Series aired May-5-2018 on CiTR.FM.101.9

The eighth of a planned forty-nine movies, each forty-nine minutes long, featuring no particular artist, working no particular theme, pursuing no particular agenda beyond boldly going … who knows? Or as Werner Von Braun once put it, “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” And we definitely have no idea where all this will take us.

reSEARCH-08

08. The Whole Day

citywide vacuum – carbon valence
Jah Wobble – sunshine
Agitation Free – you play for us today
Flying Saucer Attack – the whole day [partial]
Daevid Allen – I am [coda]
Can – spray
Sam Prekop – north south
Everly Bros – lord of the manor
Bob Dylan – father of night father of day
Jack Nitzsche – natural magic
Big Youth – lightning fragment
Holger Czukay – Hollywood Symphony

Further installments of the Research Series will air most Sundays at approximately 1am (Pacific time) c/o CiTR.FM.101.9, with streaming and download options usually available within twenty-four hours via our Facebook page.

456. the torture never stops

Apparently, Torture Never Stops was Frank Zappa’s response to Donna Summer’s monster disco hit Love To Love You Baby. “You want an orgasm on record? Here’s a proper orgasm.” Which doesn’t exactly explain the sado-masochism of the lyrics. But what does explain a Frank Zappa lyric past about 1969? The music on the other hand is its own justification – a prolonged exploration of a strange, dimly lit zone where the pleasure and pain seem indivisible, and we’re all consenting adults, right?

FrankZappa-1976-shades