Mixtape 272 • Version Control 4
The fourth aggregation of musical replicas and facsimiles!
The fourth aggregation of musical replicas and facsimiles!
The carefully curated collection of artists performing tracks made famous by other artists continues, in the third annual Version Control. Some of these could be so obscure as to ask “is it a cover if I never heard the original” but we can leave the answering of that to the armchair philosophers. I’ll go on the record saying a good song is a good song no matter who performs it. Also, to the listener and fellow cassette afficionado that complained about Maxell and Memorex being mentioned in the same breath: my point is that neither one of them is TDK.
Exploding out of upstate New York, The Bobby Lees have returned with a their third outing, titled Bellevue, and it delivers more of that biting, can’t-you-see-I’m-in-the-middle-of-an-episode post-rock blues energy. Tonight’s Mixtape closes out with Escape Mechanism’s “Being,” sampling William S. Burrough’s unmistakable reedy voice into an existential mantra.
It takes a certain mindset to take on a King Crimson song, and clearly black midi is of that mindset. Is it a bugle call for all prog rockers everywhere to take up their Moogs and sparkly jumpsuits and join the New Prog Revolution? I can support that.
I’ve done a couple dozen all-covers shows already, usually during fundraising, but for some reason have never come up with a name for them. It must have been because the painfully obvious Version Control hadn’t occurred to me yet, a real embarrassing confession given my day job in the realm of code. At any rate, it is here, and we are going to be versioning them semantically starting now.
I just recently noticed the Morbysphere, the term I had to come up with just now for all the interesting music swirling about Kevin Morby, his solo work and that with Woods and Babies, and now the work of his frequent musical collaborator Justin Sullivan as Night Shop, which vibrates in roughly the same product-of-two-primes harmonic frequency. Also tonight, I will be breaking my personal record for longest track played on the air with the full length of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s “The Dripping Tap”.