Here’s a gorgeous Mandingo pop song from Guinean singer Oumou Dioubate, which first appeared on her 1997 record also called Femmes D’Afrique. I’m taking it from the excellent Sono Afrique compilation CD. You can find out more about Oumou Dioubate here at the Leopard Man’s African Music Guide. She is quite a controversial figure in Guinea.

There’s information about the Femmes D’Afrique CD at the label here, although it’s very difficult to find a copy by now. Dioubate’s earlier CD Lancey is available here.

For an Avant-Funk outfit, mid-eighties group400 Blows weren’t very Avant, but what they lacked in challenging musical sensibility they made up for with bone-shaking grooves, stellar production, archetypal synth horns, and smooooth vocals. Is there a whole genre of dance music with a cowbell hit on the downbeat of each measure, or is that a unique idea? I’m just asking.

400 Blows sadly faded back into oblivion to the point that there’s barely a mention of them on the internets today, and all of their music is out of print. Where’s the justice in that? Perhaps they went on to have satisfying careers in some other field. I’m taking this from my old 1985 12″ single. If you really feel the need, you could track down your own used vinyl copy here.

Popol Vuh’s music for Werner Hertzog’s 1977 film Aguirre: The Wrath of God was striking for its use of an unapologetically electronic score in a 16th century setting, at a time when electronic film scores were still thought of mainly as a science fiction staple. But the otherworldy Krautrock mysticism was the perfect choice, making Klaus Kinski’s conquistador appear to be not only an invader from another continent but perhaps another planet. The score features the glorious Mellotron, the Rube Goldbergian predecessor to todays digital samplers. Popol Vuh also turned in excellent scores for Hertog’s Nosferatu and Fizcarraldo.

You can see Aguirre:The Wrath of God this Friday, September 30th, in New York at The Museum of The Moving Image. The CD of Aguirre is here. The DVD is here.

Evelyn Glennie is the world’s foremost virtuoso percussionist. She is a cultural ambassador for percussion music, a motivational speaker and teacher, and an awesome marimba player and drummer. She speaks in an outlandish Scottish brogue, and has been the recipient of over 80 international awards, including the OBE. She can create emotionally searing music with chopsticks and a tin cup. This track, written by Brazillian composer Ney Rossauro, is typical of Glennie’s astounding physical technique and hyper-precise rhythmic counterpoint, but her recorded catalog includes a wide range of different types of music, including Richard Rogers covers and collaborations with Björk.

Thomas Riedelsheimer has made an exquisite, fascinating film profiling Glennie, Touch The Sound, which is now playing in New York and is making the rounds elsewhere. I saw a special screening of the film a few weeks ago and was blown away. Much of the film centers on a live performance inside an abandoned factory with Glennie and fred Frith, but you also get to see her hammering giant Taiko drums in Japan and drumming on a Hell’s Kitchen rooftop in NYC, among other things. Rarely do you get to see an artist of Glennie’s stature this close up and intimate, and rarely do you get this kind of intelligent view into the creative process. The music in the film is perfectly chosen, and the sound design and mix are the best I have heard in ages. The film is also a profound work about hearing itself. Not to be missed!

The soundtrack from the film is not yet available in the US, but you can find more info about the CD here. Touch the Sound has an english language web site here. There’s a good overview of the film on Glennie’s site here. You can find Evelyn Glennie’s Her Greatest Hits CD here, which includes Eldorado and many other great tracks. The artist has a web site here.

Nelson Riddle’s exquisite arrangements are the perfect frame for Sinatra’s crying into his beer after Ava Gardner left him in 1955, and the combination of Riddle’s unexpected harmonic tangents with Sinatra’s new-found earnestness give the record an unprecedented emotional weight. In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning was Sinatra’s first 12″ album, and a landmark of 20th Century popular music, cited as a major influence by everyone from Tom Waits to Miles Davis. We can also credit Sinatra and Riddle here with one of the first “concept albums”, a coherent collection of music with a common mood, and a beginning, middle, and end, rather than a random collection of popular tunes or an overview of a particular composer’s catalog.

Check the woodwinds… the opening phrases here, reminiscent of Stravinsky (!), are a stellar example of Riddle’s genius.

You can find In The Wee Small Hours of The Morning here.

Wendy Carlos is probably best known for her Moog interpretations of classical music; her Switched on Bach remains one of the unlikeliest hit records of the 1960’s, and her versions of Beethoven are what most people remember as the primary musical voice of Kubrick’s 1971 film A Clockwork Orange. But her best work from that period is this original composition Timesteps, which she was inspired to write after reading Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange, before the film existed. Timesteps was edited and excerpted in several places in the released version of the film, but the complete piece was not in the film or on the original version of the soundtrack.

After being unavailable for many years, A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos’s Complete Original Score was released in 1998. The CD also includes all of the Beethoven stuff and several other previously unreleased pieces. But Timesteps itself is the highlight, an incredible work with or without the film, and is also a considerable technical achievement when one considers that it was recorded using the old Moog 3C which was monophonic and could only play one voice at a time. It also makes great use of vintage vocoding technology to create some very striking vocal textures.

You can buy A Clockwork Orange: Wendy Carlos’s Complete Original Score here. There is a treasure-trove of fascinating information about the music at Wendy Carlos’ web site.

Nortec Collective’s new CD Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3 arrived on my podium slathered in hype thicker than, uh, burned pipian sauce? But whaddya know, there are some mighty fine tunes here, including this slab of fractured dub which is now in rotation here at the Ten Thousand Things rodeo dome.

You can buy Tijuana Sessions, Vol. 3 for a measly $10.99 here. Nortec Collective have a lot going on at their Spanglish web site here, including more mp3s to download.