Cliff Martinez has scored every one of Steven Soderbergh’s films, and the score for the 2001 film Solaris was one of their best collaborations. Expertly weaving the orchestral and electronic components of the mix, Martinez creates a lush, sinister, dreamy wash that doesn’t quite manage to sell us on the preposterous conceit of the film, but does create a very appealing mood in the meantime. Sort of like very accessible martian ambient gamelan music.

Martinez was a drummer for Captain Beefheart and The Red Hot Chili Peppers before he turned to film composing. Frank Zappa’s trombonist Bruce Fowler did the excellent orchestrations and also conducted, as he has done on quite a few Hollywood scores over the last fifteen years. There’s an interview with Martinez here. You can buy Solaris here.

If you hadn’t come across the genre “Asian R&B” before, you might be forgiven if the name conjured up images of a Japanese guy in a kimono singing Get on the Good Foot, but you’d be way, way off. Asian R&B comes out of the UK, the land which births micro-genres like a dog sheds hair.

Notorious J.A.T.T. sings in Hindi but also raps in English, about many of the usual subjects and some new ones, spitting rhymes like

“I’m half black half white like Newcastle United
When I step in the club the girls get excited
they dance round the prince cause they know he’s the nicest
doggy style split cheese box with preciseness”

The auto-tuned-within-an-inch-of-its-life shouting vocal style and sing-song melody to my ear recalls nothing more than Baile Funk. This comes from the recently released compilation Essential Asian R&B, which seems to be a pretty good survey of the current scene. There’s a range of stuff, some more bhangra influenced, and some sounding almost just like straight-up US “urban” radio material.

Dholaholic seems like a good place to keep tabs on the Asian R&B scene. You can find the Essential Asian R&B compilation from the UK at the Outcaste Records site here. Notorious J.A.T.T.’s record All Due Respect, which includes this song, can be found here. Oh, and don’t forget the Notorious Jatt ringtones.

Here’s some classic post-punk smart funk dub, recorded live on the late, great John Peel’s show on October 12th, 1981. The Slits were so far ahead of their time they were burned by red shift on re-entry. If they had released their infectious version of I Heard it Through the Grapevine as a single, the history of pop music could have taken a different fork in the road.

They played live on John Peel’s show three times from 1977 - 1981 and the best of all three sessions is here, so this ten-song disc also works as a history of the band’s musical development, from 15-year-olds who didn’t know how to tune their instruments (but still turned in a mean set), to global village funk shamanesses with big drums. I saw The Slits open for The Clash in 1977, and it was a complete mess, but great fun anyway. Now days my 20-month-old daughter grooves to this song, which is among here favorites, along with singer Ari Up’s later project The New Age Steppers.

Ari Up has a deep site, including audio links, here. You can buy The Slits’ Peel Sessions CD here.

Mashups are so, like, last Wednesday, but this is from my Summer Mix, in progress… I was only going to give it to Urmson for some feedback, but eh, what the hell. What’s the point of having a blog if you can’t occasionally be spontaneous. Have a listen, see what you think. I’ll post some more real music tomorrow.

David Byrne has a site here. You can buy some unadulterated Zion Y Lennox here, which includes the Reggaeton version of Yo Voy.

Here’s some classic juju, taken from the revered Womad Volume Two: An Introduction to Africa. Released in 1985 on vinyl with an accompanying large 20 page book, the record has a wide range of classic African music. It was never released on CD, and neither was the original record this track appeared on, Abiodun’s Confrontation.

Juju has always, since it’s inception in the 1930s, been a relatively “high-tech” form of African pop music. Willing to appropriate other technologies, it was one of the first African forms to incorporate electric guitars, then later synthesizers, and as heard on this track, the drum machine.

I can’t find any of Dele Abiodun’s music available in print, but there’s a little more info and a bio here.

Mashonda’s “breakout” single Back of the Club is so generic I can hardly keep my eyes open, but this is something else. Maybe I’m biased because I live in Harlem, but this just might be one of the major sounds of Summer 2005. I’m sure I’ll hear it coming in my window and driving by on the block. Anyway, it’s showing up on a lot of mix tapes, and a copy on vinyl fell into my hands the other day, so I thought I’d share.

In what I’m sure must be a first, her record company bio states she was “born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but raised in Harlem, N.Y.” She co-wrote Jay-Z’s “Girl’s Best Friend”. Mashonda’s debut solo album January Joy, featuring contributions from Kanye West and Jadakiss, is supposedly coming any day from J-Records, and she has a site here.

Much of The Necks music is resistant to blogging, by the simple fact that most individual tracks are over an hour long. Three Australian guys on piano, bass, and drums, play a very simple groove with minute variations, adding and subtracting elements in a style more like dub or techno than jazz. The end result is uniquely hypnotic. Cage’s musing on repetition applies well here:

“If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” –John Cage.

This track captures the typical mood of The Necks, but time compressed into a few minutes. It’s head-spinning in its development and speed compared to most Necks tracks. It comes from the soundtrack to a 1998 Australian film also called The Boys.

Most of The Necks’ CDs are available from their own site out of Australia, and quite a few are available in the US via Amazon among others.

Vangelis was loved and admired by a generation of fans, even as he was dismissed and reviled by a generation of critics and music snobs. Which group do you think was more influential in getting him to his present position, retired to a beautiful private Greek island villa?

This track comes from the 1994 CD release of the soundtrack to Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner. For twelve years after the film’s release, the score was mired in legal muck and unavailable, so when it finally came out in 1994 it seemed even better than it actually was. Still, it is damn good, and is one of those soundtracks which is very listenable as a record in its own right. The CD includes snippets of dialogue throughout, but tastefully woven into the fabric of the music, serving to increase the nostalgic buzz, not hanging in the breeze like some soundtracks which include dialogue.

Do you like my owl?

You can buy the Blade Runner soundtrack CD here. There is an out of control obsessive Blade Runner site here. The Greek One has a hilarious placeholder here.

More horns!

This music makes the body twitch uncontrollably and is like a three-minute crash course in the history of syncopation. When you’ve been listening to a bit too much downer Northern music for your head, put this on and it will reset everything. 23 incredible musicians going all-out, under the baton of the father of Afro-Cuban Jazz. Cubauza is the opener from Mario Bauza’s awesome 1993 outing 944 Columbus, which was the last record he recorded, at the age of 81, two months before his death.

944 Columbus is criminally out of print, but there are some compilations available.

Before M.I.A., before Talvin Singh, even ten years before Asian Dub Foundation, there was diva Sheila Chandra. An extraordinary voice, coupled with some Indian music chops and a willingness to push the envelope of tradition, gave us an artist who has made some great music over the years, who has always been somewhat underrated, and must surely be about to finally receive the recognition she deserves.

Sheila Chandra’s most known album is probably Weaving My Ancestors Voices, which came out on the Real World label in 1992. In that incarnation, Chandra was packaged as a more serious artist, with a spiritual component and deep cultural roots. That CD contained an exquisite version of this song, basically acapella with some droning synth tamburas. This is another thing altogether: delightful, fluffy, Indian pop fusion, recorded when Chandra was only 16, for the 1983 release Third Eye, by the band Monsoon, which was Chandra’s first recording project with husband/producer Steve Coe. The English language recording of this pop version of the song was a huge international hit single in 1982, even earning Shandra the dubious honor of being the first ever Asian singer to appear on the BBC show Top Of The Pops.

The CD was re-released in 1995 with a couple of additional versions of this song, and re-titled Monsoon… That version is still available. Weaving My Ancestors Voices is here. Sheila Chandra has a deep Web site here, which includes fascinating information about this release.