Negativland - Escape From Noise (1987)

The Godfathers of Plunderphonics. Ah men, do we really have to find a superlative for every single artist. No, we don't need to. At least I don't need to. But because these anti-heroes, these meta-musicians, deserve a superlative, I have granted them one. We have here a collective of tape geniuses, copy-pasters, who crafted a well-built manifesto for their own musical genre. To be compared with The Residents from the 70s and The Avalanches from the 90s, Negativland (named after a NEU! song), reached their creative peak in the 80s.

Also to be remembered for a radio-show called Over the Edge. They released 9 records full of material from this show. Escape From Noise offers you a collection of the most far-out, demented, meta-music available. Shockingly hilarious!

michael jackson
320kbps

Nara Leão - Dez Anos Depois (1971)

Here we have one of the pillars of MPB, the popular music of Brazil. MPB is, in my opinion, one of the most sympathetic musical genres, and also one of the more out-there musical genres that come from the mainstream. Caetano Veloso, as we know, didn't only craft hits, he also pushed the boundaries of pop music. This record, a more safe affair, is one of the longest records. A double album, clocking in at precisely an hour, with 24 songs to offer, it's still an ambitious outing.

Hinting more at bossa nova, this is a beautifully crafted, tasty, baroque album from the peek of Brazilian pop music. Enjoy this album, and hope for the sun!

fotografia
192kbps

Fred Lane - From the One That Cut You (1983)

Welcome to the wonderful world of Shimmy-Disc, a label that released some of the most out-there music available. This is the first release of Shimmy-Disc and it took the label three years after this release to release something new again. Maybe set back by the reactions this record evoked, I don't know.

This is a big-band record. Crazy stuff. Ill subject matter, with song titles like I Talk to My Haircut and Danger Is My Beer. This is my sort of humor, packing very sick subject matter in 'catchy' big-band songs. Bringing the sick stuff to you with a smile. Gotta love it. Mind you though that the music itself is also very great, at times catchy, at times as free as we expect from experimental big bands.

fun in the fundus
192kbps

Charlie Haden - Liberation Musical Orchestra (1970)

Without a doubt I can say that everything is here on this record. Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, Carla Bley, Dewey Redman, Roswell Rudd, Andrew Cyrille, Michael Mantler, Gato Barbieri, and many more. So half of the BYG crew is here, and some crazy people from the Europe jazz field. This is free jazz, in a big band, very chaotic at times, with hints of melody, even fragments of old Spanish folk songs. An Ornette Coleman track is here, a song for Ché Guevara.

Haden got inspiration for this album from songs he heard from the Spanish Civil War. This album is one big aural free jazz party, although definitely not as harsh and challenging as you are used from me, the BYG stuff, etc. (I warn you though that BYG/tough free-jazz is still on its way, many records waiting!) Have fun with this record! Have a great afternoon, evening, or morning! I'm so glad I'm back. :D

drinking music
192kbps

Dreamies - Auralgraphic Entertainment (1974)

And we start again with a blast: HERE WE ARE AGAIN! I checked my Mediafire-account yesterday for the first time in a year to discover that Life As A Rehearsal has had over 400.000 downloads, which amazed me, just like it will amaze you. I know that a lot of albums have been taken offline and that a lot of people will have forgotten about me and my blog, but I'm sharing some albums once again. I'm still a student from Amsterdam, and in three months time a start my new study: Philosophy. I have been reading in the meantime, many novels and other works of literature, so it would be more logical to start a literature blog right now. But as Life As A Rehearsal is my old love, and music is still something I like a lot, I am trying it again. I still search for the music with the heart, the soul, the sounds.

Here we have Bill Holt, a simple state employee from Wilmington, Delaware, who quit his job in 1972 to buy some instruments, learn how to play them, and recorded this album in the next two years. It is a raw sound collage, one of the first in fact. We have Beatles-snippets here, weird R. Stevie Moore proto-moogery, some hints of library music, and the like. (On a little technical note: the artist is called Dreamies, the monniker of Bill Holt, but I have tagged this as Bill Holt, because that's how Last.fm scrobbles it. Oh well.) Enjoy this people, I love you for all your support, downloads and admiration for reggae, free jazz, and every other weird genre that I feed you. Love from me to you!

dreamies
320kbps

Auburn Lull - Alone I Admire (1999)

When I die, I'd like something apocalyptic to be the last music I hear. Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, Stravinsky, Beethoven's 9th, recollections of these musical miracles spring to mind when I think about me taking my last breath. To hear Don Van Vliet grate my eardrums, and Pachuco Cadaver and the whole circus of the Magic Band, would be a beautiful last experience. Well, normal people would probably be satisfied with the ethereal tunes of the criminally unknown Auburn Lull.

Auburn Lull qualifies as dream-pop, ambient-pop, something like that. It's beautiful, just listen.

stockard drive
192kbps

Dog Faced Hermans - Those Deep Buds (1994)

I am not entirely sure at the moment if I have once told you all how much I love the Dutch band called The Ex. Anyway, they are a highly influential band who have made everything ranging from hardcore punk to African tribal music over the span of 30 years. This band, Dog Faced Hermans, is a band from Edinburgh, Scotland, who moved to Amsterdam and are closely related to The Ex. Andy Moor, formerly an Ex-member, has been in the band from 1990 until the disbandment in 1995.

Their music is just us powerful, underrated and unusual as the music of The Ex. This is their last album, because they disbanded a year later. Great band, hear this!

human spark
192kbps

Lee Scratch Perry - Arkology (1997)

I'm about to do something quite special, although I hope that everything that I post is in some way special. It's special because it is a unique document about Lee Scratch Perry. Lee Perry used to have a recording studio called The Black Ark, established in 1973, where he founded dub. Bob Marley and a shitload of other reggae artists recorded some of their music over there, but Perry was at its best when he was reworking these pieces, and that's what dub is about. In 1979, after a tough time for Perry, he took a magic marker, scribbled the walls full of unreadable doodlings, and burned The Black Ark down to the ground. All the Upsetters records were made there, Junior Byles' stuff, you name it.

On this 3-CD collection, all the best stuff that was created inside The Black Ark, a place that didn't have the best equipment available, but that still created some of the most sonically daring and innovative sounds in electronic music. Have a shitload of fun with this! It's all tagged the way it should be by the way, so just throw it into iTunes and listen away.

arkology part 1
arkology part 2
arkology part 3
320kbps

This Heat - This Heat (1979)

I posted the post-punk masterpiece Deceit a few months ago, and that album is one of those album that everyone just has to love. Marquee Moon is another example out of the post-punk field. Deceit is fantastic. It is haunting, it is tribal, and it's downright scary at times. I'm giving you a great quality version of their first album, called This Heat now. This Heat, the album, is not as magnificent as Deceit is, but it still is a very fresh studio document on how great this band was functioning around this time.

I recommend the John Peel sessions they recorded as well, and they did a very nice EP and an album called Repeat with three 20-minute songs on it. A band that has not a large oeuvre, but that still has made so much different music.

horizontal hold
320kbps

Gong - Flying Teapot (1973)

I posted the second album of the Radio Gnome Invisible trilogy a few months back, and I have to say that I like this album, the first in the trilogy, even more. I just think that Gong is, though part of the Canterbury scene, so much a band on their own, that is hardly a matter of being a prog-fan or not to appreciate this band. On the Flying Teapot there is so much going on, and I see the same going with bands like Magma and the Soft Machine, who's image is suffering, just because they are called prog.

Let Daevid Allen and his Gong do his stuff for you, and you'll see that you will automatically start to like them sometime.

the pot head pixies
VBR