Mixtape 283 • The Ballad Of The Natural Lines
Call it what you will, Matt Pond PA makes music outside the natural lines.
Call it what you will, Matt Pond PA makes music outside the natural lines.
For whatever reason, listening to The Go! Team makes me think of the kindergarten rave scene, something which doesn’t actually exist but that would heavily feature this music if it did. Elsewhere tonight, we trial a new more organized format for conveying the Lacking Information, such as this website and the Mixtapes produced by the org, into the radio play-by-play.
It’s time for the return of Version Control, the occasional gathering of music as interpreted by someone other than the artists that wrote the song or made it famous. You know, covers. After the notorious Cover Drought of 2023, we have a full episode of covers ranging from the obscure to the revolutionary.
The Psychedelic Porn Crumpets would like to welcome you aboard and advise you to buckle in tight.
Tonight’s show kicks off with a long overdue hour of Version Control 10 — our special blend of songs that you might call “covers”. About a year ago, I filled three hours with covers, which leads me to believe something is messing with the covers ecosystem, and I have my theories. The middle hour was a regular Mixtape (if such a thing can be allowed), and the Final Hour was its usual rocketride mindtrip, a big thank you to all that came aboard.
I was not properly prepared to discuss Cat Power’s tribute to Bob Dylan’s 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert, and specifically where it was recorded, but now I can reveal the facts: the Cat Power recording was made at RAH. However, Dylan’s original recording was NOT made at RAH, despite the famous bootleg’s common name, instead having taken place in Manchester, a good ways away.
Mimi Parker, vocalist and drummer and half of the Minnesota band Low, passed away a couple of weeks ago while I was traveling. It’s a shocking loss and an abrupt end to a musical career that was still unfolding; the band’s last two albums, coming at the tail end of a discography that spans decades, showed a blossoming new direction for an act that was famed for their quiet and glacial approach. We open the show with Low’s rendition of a Bee Gees classic in tribute.
If you got The Nude Party to perform at your next get-together, it would be the kind of shindig that produces two marriages, three break-ups, and gossip for years to come.
The best place to hide seemed to be, ironically, right behind the ballot box. The numerologist and the baker had been underway on a wholly distinct mission, having already secured the deflated knifeboats inside a conveniently placed culvert. They now seemed to be caught in the crossfire of two opposing factions, each intent on some inscrutable and erratically violent purpose that seemed to be nothing but foiling the other side’s efforts. The roving skirmishes had drawn away participants and created a fairly event-free circle of balance where the pair could hunker down and plan their next move. It was going to be a long night.
The parade stretched through the downtown area, its colorful participants a completely normal distribution of small-town denizens. The statistician knew otherwise. They stood waving from the platform of the float, their flysuits carefully integrated with the diorama to give the appearance of animated mechanical humans. All they needed to do was get within twenty feet of The Mayor, and the technology built into the platform would do the rest. The imagineer adjusted the EQ on the float’s sound system, giving the Estonian techno which poured from the speakers more high-end sparkle. The crowd reacted favorably, some of them breaking out into dance.