End of the year!

This is it for this year. Hope you guys/girls had a good year.

It has been a slow and not very productive year for Flying Teapot. This is mostly because I'm on my third year in college so I have to do a lot of work there. It's not exactly easy to study that damn electricity. Fucking diodes and transistors. :D But I'm not really in a position to whine since everybody has their own shit to shovel away as well.

Hopefully next year will bear fruit to many more posts and many more interesting things.

Thanks for reading and see you next year. Dreaaammmm~

Gridlock - Formless

I always like album covers that partially tell you how the album sounds.

Formless is a fine example of well crafted and organized sounds that form this formless mass. ;D

Don't really know what to type. It's great, get it  if you like electronic music. Perfect for late night rides in the bus.

Download.

Preview on youtube.

Sai Yoshiko - タクラマカン

Speaking of folky things from Japan here's another artist that's hovering somewhere in the obscurity. Perhaps most well known for collaborating with Jojo Hiroshige but she also put out several of her own albums.

Genre wise this album is a bitch to define. It flies all over the place but it's not a hit and miss type of flying. All of the songs are very well arranged and fit nicely with Sai's voice. Her voice sounds very mature and deep so thank the heavens she doesn't squeak while she sings (I hate that so much sometimes ;P especially in newer pop). A nice ballad here and and there, some psych rock, some jazz and some weirdness. Everything you could want is here.

Download.

Georges Schwizgebel - L'homme sans ombre (The Man with No Shadow)

A man one day decides his life is boring and unsatisfying. He leaves his home and lurks the streets looking for someone. He eventually reaches to a prestigious garden where a man in a red suit awaits. He offers to our protagonist riches and happiness at the cost of his shadow. He accepts and gets his riches but how will others react to his lack of shadow? Discrimination, alienation? How much will he miss this one simple thing?

That's how the story starts in this short 10~ minute animated movie from a Swiss director Georges Schwizgebel and it is one of the better animated movies I saw this year (that wasn't made in this year). The plotline is seemingly stereotypical with all too known story where a man sells his soul (or shadow in this case) to the devil but it is not that quite generic. In fact it's rather interesting because it has another view on the whole situation. First of all this is just a shadow, it's not something you will not be able to enter heaven nor you will be forsaken in hell. It shows how much people discriminate and judge different people who lack something that "everyone has". But it also show how we take little things for granted every day until we lose them irreversibly. Unlike a lot of stories of this type where characters in the end repent for what they did, burn in hell or trick the devil this takes on a more interesting and more survivalist way to develop and end.

The overall look of the movie is completely amazing and exceptionally impressionistic. It looks like it was mostly done with oil and coal(?). Something like a moving painting on canvas. Since shadows are the main drive force for the story there's a lot of play on shapes and lights/shadows. Constantly the camera spins and changes angles so that it emphasizes on shapes and moving shades. One scene starts with a box with camera revolving around it and then it constructs itself into a bigger box, then into a building, then it multiplies and forms a city and so on. Fascinating and fairly original approach but sometimes way to energetic and disorienting. Perhaps that was intended?

In any case; not to be missed.

Download.

Morita Doji (森田童子) discography

Morita Doji (or Douji?) was an (acid) folk singer during the 70s and early 80s in Japan. I don't know why they call her acid folk. I'm not sure what's that supposed to even mean. Her music is not psychedelic at all. She wasn't exactly popular at the time so the media didn't pay much attention to her but from what I read on the internets she was popular among college students. She didn't have fame but she did have a very distinctive sound and her music is something that I will always gladly listen.

All of her albums are heavily melancholic and calm so there are very few upbeat songs or anything that sounds remotely happy. I can remember just one actually now that I think about it. Her voice is finely tuned in with the music, it's very subtle and soft. A perfect fit for a melancholic sound. Through the 70s she maintained a non electronic sound with very little experimentation in sound. It's straightforward folk music until the 80s where she began implementing more electronic sound. This is apparent at most in her last album where it's mainly electronic driven. I have to admit though that her older albums are much more appealing to me because of their pure acoustic sound but her later stuff is alright as well.

Where to start? Well I started with "A Boy" (which is also my favorite album) and then got Mother Sky and then Good Bye. Her most popular album was Good Bye mostly because that's the only album that gave her some exposure (a song from that album was the only hit song she had and later on it was used in a 90s soap opera as an opening theme).

This should be all of her albums. There's also a live album but I think it's a bootleg see comments for download link (turns out it's an official live album).

Albums included:

1975 - Good Bye
1976 - Mother Sky
1977 - A Boy
1978 - Tokyo Cathedral Sei Maria Daiseidou Rokuonban (live album)
1980 - Last Waltz
1982 - Nocturne
1983 - Wolf Boy

Link: 1, 2, 3 and 4

I tagged everything in Japanese letters but the song titles on the actual files are in latin letters (Engrishly translated by someone else).

Some Vindsval's side/solo bands-projects

Vindsval is the front man of a popular black metal band called Blut Aus Nord. What I have here is a bunch of side stuff he did before and during early stages of his main band. It mostly sounds like proto-Blut Aus Nord but it should be pretty interesting to hear for someone who enjoys Blut Aus Nord.

If you're not exactly looking for just lo-fi demos I suggest you only download The Eye since that's a full length with good production. All demos-albums are synth driven black metal. I'm missing some stuff (a demo or so) but the core stuff is all here. Enjoy!

The Eye

Children of Mäani
Vlad


Links no longer available.

Lee Morgan - Cornbread

Here's one of my all time favorite jazz albums mainly because it has some really great tight rhythms and an exceptional crew. Herbie Hancock is on the piano, Jackie McLean is on alto saxophone, Hank Mobley on tenor saxophone and of course Lee Morgan on trumpet. All of these guys at the time of this album gained critical acclaim and they proved very well on this record that it's not just because they're pretty. Released by Blue Note in 1965.

I think this a great album to spark someones interest in jazz. It's very melodic and swift. Not a lot of long minute jerk-offs and screeching trumpets. Very pleasant to listen and relax.

Download.

Personal favorite track on the album.

PsyOpus - Our Puzzling Encounters Considered

Psyopus is one of those bands that most people either love it or hate it. Rarely there's someone in the middle ground. I'm one of those who love it. Actually I consider this one to be their best that they put out so far. It was the second (and last) album of the first Psyopus line up so all the band members had previous experience in Psyopus arrangements and they knew what they were doing so I think that's why this album sounds so good. Odd Sense which came out last year had a complete new line up except for Chris Arp who formed the band in the first place (and who melts nuclear reactors with his playing technique) so because of that I think it sounds inferior to this one. I have high hopes that the next installment will butcher all previous works.

People hate this band mostly because it's highly dissonant. There's very little guitar picking here, it's mostly tapping, shredding and all that jazz. This of course results in highly, seemingly, out of place melodies and unorganized song structures. I'm not exactly a high skilled guitar player so I can't really say if what they're playing is organized or if it follows measures and all that music theory crap (that I refuse to learn). All I can say is that this style of playing gives it unique ferocity and strength. To me it sounds far more extreme than some tremolo based grindcore band. So yeah, I guess you could say this band sounds rather unique. The lyrics aren't that bad either and the vocalist can really deliver some really good high pitched screams.

All in all this is a great record. If you're into "extreme music" I highly recommend you check this one out if you haven't already.

Download.

Sun Ra - Fate in a Pleasant Mood & When Sun Comes Out

A double album by Sun Ra from 1966.

Fate in a Pleasant Mood is just that. Pleasant mood. One would say this album is perfect while consuming weed but I wouldn't know since I don't do drugs. Unlike the albums I posted before by Sun Ra this one has a decent amount of atonal pieces and dissonant trumpet wankery which actually blends very good in the overall atmosphere of the album. Speaking of improvisation When Sun Comes Out is the side that has most of it.

Don't know what to say else. It's Sun Ra and it's great.

Download.

Shohei Manabe - Dead End

Somewhere in Japan there's a man who isn't very happy with his life. He has a poor job, lives in a small apartment and has only thugs for friends. Life is boring according to him. One day while strolling around through the streets a woman falls from the sky. Yeah, she falls from the sky. For a moment there I went "Aw fuck, here we go again!" thinking that this would be something along the line of Kannagi and similar "mystery woman meets a nihilistic boy" type of crap that Japanese authors really love to write. Alas I was mistaken! Dead End starts slowly in the first volume and it really seems like it's just another slice of life manga. Lucky for me (and you) the story is anything but slice of life/harem shit. The story is populated with some rather interesting and colorful characters who aren't exactly the avatars of all that's good and worthy. The plot isn't exactly something new or groundbreaking but it is very interesting. I always wondered where it would lead next and how will the characters overcome their next obstacle. The ending "explanation of everything" somewhat disappointed me but not that much so that it would make me dislike the whole thing.

The art I guess could be best explained as a mixture of Niheis and perhaps Asanos styles which is always good in my book. The characters are drawn well and are quite different from each other so you won't be wondering who is who (unlike in some other mangas I could mention) and the urban scenery (which is where Niheis influence is present at most)  is drawn beautifully. The author also does not hide any violence or gore so there are plenty of action scenes here. You'll see a lot of limbs being cut off (yay!) and other various unpleasant deaths.

Check this one out, it's certainly worth a read if you're into a bit more bleak and violent mangas.

Download.

Kenny Dorham - Afro-Cuban

Kenny Dorham was a very active jazz trumpeter during his life in a perhaps most productive time period for jazz. What's sad about him is that he always played somewhere in the back. He was in the big bands led by Dizzy Gillespie, Lionel Hampton but he also played in smaller arrangements like in a quintet led by Charlie Parker and so the list goes on. The man really knew his craft and he played for a number of big shots in jazz but for some reason (I'm guessing the absence of ass kissing and ambition) he never really made it big on his own. Some critic called him a synonymous for an underrated artist. Despite that he did put out some good stand alone albums with Afro-Cuban being one of his best.

As the name suggests the album is inspired by an afro-cuban sound. So what you get here is a very precise, rhythmic jazz mixed with African drumming and Latin-music melodies. The most apparent sound in the mix are the drums of course. It's rich with congas and similar small drum instruments that I have no idea of what they're called. So pour yourself some faggot cocktail and enjoy the rumba of this great jazz album.

Download.

Youtube preview?