Cabeza de Vaca lives

Yes we are still here, just busy and crazy as ever...but...

The time has come: ladies and gentleman, due to restructuring and general behind the scenes movement at Scanner FM Cabeza de Vaca will draw to a temporary close at the end of July 2014. There will be no new shows in August and in September there is a chance we may not be able to return! The management will take a break and look at the best way to continue the station. Therefore, it is time to show support to Scanner FM and Cabeza deVaca. Send comments and mails to the station and tell them what you want to hear. We would love to be out there with you an playing your favourite music so let them know what you think. To all the artists and labels we played over the last two years, it would be great to hear from you too. Scanner FM and CdV is a labour of love so shout it out loud. Go to:

Scanner FM

Cabeza de Vaca

 or email cabezadevaca[at]scannerfm.com for more info.

The last couple of shows before the break will feature Abdulla Rashim, Martyn, drum n bass and dubstep.

Meanwhile, for anyone who missed it:

P057: Cabeza de Vaca – Stellar OM Source

Someone calculated that only two of the last 50 or so covers of the Wire had been devoted to women artists and in one case the main feature on Meredith Monk had note even received a cover image. Subsequently the last two issues have been female artsists, African American jazz artist Matana Roberts

The second was Laurel Halo who will appear on the show next week as the second part of our all female electronic music artists special. The first special is though on Stellar OM Source the French-born artist Christelle Gualdi on this week’s show on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM.  In this sense we go from zero specials on female artsists to two in about 60, at least the same as the Wire, but still it could be better. That said we at Cabeza de Vaca have always tried to promote female artists where possible and almost always go out of the way to look.

Christelle Gualdi’s biography makes her seem more like an international citizen rather than defined by any particular country. Although French born, she moved at age 16 to Germany where she played double bass in the Konigin Katharina Stift Schulorchester. She also studied piano, violin, saxophone and more at a conservatory and has lived in several countries from the US to the Netherlands and has learned first-hand with very many important musicians. In addition to a strong musical background, she also has training in architecture.

Her interest in electronic music and improvisation lead her to self-release three albums “Ocean woman”, “Alliance” and “Crusader” which were ultimately collected on the Olde English Spelling Bee compilation “Trilogy Select”. The sound was in many ways typical of the wave of synth lead experimental works at the time, particularly Daniel Lopatin aka Oneohtrix Point Never who collaborated on the track “Rites of fusion”. In return, Gualdi designed the cover for OPN’s album “Zone’s without people”.

Her change in direction from beatless synth work-outs to rhythm comes by chance. Someone inadvertently sold her a mint-condition Roland TB-303 for €25. Over several years she adapted her sound to the machine, maintaining a live imporovised approach to composition eventually premiering her new direction with a 12” on Rush Hour’s No Label sublabel called “Image over image”.

The album “Joy One Mile” which followed was incubated during the same period, but before its final release it was turned over to Kassem Mosse for some final touches. Its ultimate reception has been exceptional. The tracks are free-flowing and dynamic, liberated from a feeling of programming and matrices, wheres Gualdi’s classical and somewhat outsider gives her sound a novel edge that dance music insiders often do not have once they are caught in the mind sert of producing strictly for the dance floor, particular set designs or even clubs.

Mosse’s work is pleasantly understated, audible but not suffocating; it is not his album after all. But his contribution was not only just behind the scenes, but extended to providing a remix of the first single.

As the album was allegedly recorded some time ago it could be reasonable to expect some more material in the near future and hopefully a few more festival appearances.

For more biographical information, here is a short interview from the Eco festival  in Madrid (in English, but subtitled).

It is also worth a quick word about Valerie Maryino aka Unicorn Hard-on. The review of her album “Weird universe” at Resident Advisor received quite an interesting discussion about her looks.

The reviewer Justin Farrar wrote: “Like a high school glamour girl who also happens to be the class bully, the New Englander cuts a figure that is both alluring and imposing. Hunched over a heap of tangled electronics, with Desperately Seeking Susan-style locks swinging across her face, she unleashes basement-party tracks that conflate electro and acid confection with harsh-noise belligerence. The result is an experience that is fabulous and sassy, yet utterly pulverizing.”

In this senses he was referring to her image rather than her beauty per se and also her live presence:

There was quite a marked response suggesting that her likes had nothing to do with a recorded record, to which Farrar responded:

“Martino's persona (looks + fashion + attitude) are inextricable from her amazing music. All of it emerges from a singular sense of style, and it's a sense of style that balances glamour and toughness. This really comes out in her live show and how she carries herself as an artist. In my opinion, it's central to understanding her aesthetic.”

In this sense his response is somewhat valid: it helps to know how Prince is an looks like to understand his music. If it was made by Cliff Richard, or vice versa, there would be a serious incongruity that would affect the music somehow, making it ironic or perhaps even sinister. David Bowie should also be mentioned as an artist who changed his look to change the music, and vice versa. The process is inseparable. Looks are a costume for a theatre after all. But clearly the issue here is when is it okay to mention how a woman (or man) looks? Clearly he is not saying anything misogynist to suggest “I like her music because she is hot” but at the same time is there or is there not a need to mention looks to understand her album? Do reviews of male music ever consider looks? Ben Klock is more handsome than Marcel Dettmann so his music must be better?

One of the other artists on the show, Rebekah Teasdale from the Midlands in the UK has previously worked in glamour model shoots  and the photos are on her main website. Is her beauty and modelling past a positive impact on her career? Are the erotic connotations negative? Sasha Grey of course is another artist to come from a similar background in pornography that is not always socially accepted and has potential to over shadow artistic ambitions.

A recent viral video perhaps explains why such issues are still important and why they are so thorny.

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Clara Moto	How we live in each other	Infiné	2013
2	Stellar OM Source	Magnetic depths	Not on label	2009
3	Stellar OM Source	Universal export	Not on label	2009
4	Stellar OM Source	The sky pilot	Black Dirt Records	2009
5	Unicorn Hard-on	Night diamond	Spectrum Spools	2013
6	Virginia	Pulse	Ostgut ton	2013
7	Stellar OM Source	Elite excel	Rvng Intl.	2013
8	Mary Velo	Manhattan Project	Frozen Border	2013
9	Rebekah	Equilibrium	CLR	2013
10	Helena Hauff	Actio Reactio	Werk Discs	2013

Cabeza de Vaca Facebook

Scanner FM

P055: Cabeza de Vaca – The Mole

It wouldn’t be surprising to find the Colin de la Plante aka The Mole in Japan one day. His musical road trip has taken him steadly eastwards from Vancouver to Montreal and now to Berlin where we find him for this weeks special on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM. Te focus on the show is his new material, but we have a bit more space and time here to chart in detail is journey.

Colin de la Plante started off recording with Danuel Tate, Mathew Jonson and Tyger Dhulathe, three individuals who would go on to form Cobblestone Jazz. But as a quartet the group made a single EP called “Babyfoot” for Canadian label Wagon Repair who would later be home to some de la Plante’s solo material as The Mole.

Legend has it that all four migrated to Montreal when it was the centre of the electronic music universe, the city kicking off Mutek and also stimulating the legendary “Montreal Smoked Meat” compilation on Force Inc back in 2002.

But Cobblestone Jazz eventually returned to British Columbia and The Mole stayed put, launching his solo career with a number of 12”s on labels like Philpot, Arbutus and Kompakt Extra. His Canadian links were always strong and he not only collaborated further with Mathew Jonson

But released a lot of material on Canadian labels like New Kanada, Musique Risquée and the aforementioned Wagon Repair who would publish his seminal debut “As high a the sky”. Clearly the standout track was “Baby you’re the one" which we use this week to close the show. The album and single versions differ a little, with the former being shorter and sequenced into the albums continuous flow.

Such success that the album received made it inevitable that The Mole would eventually move to Berlin and the company of electronic music’s elite. The highlight of his post-album singles was featuring a track on the split “Panorama 04” release of exclusive tracks on Ostgut Ton.

However, much like Deadbeat who formed his own BLKRTZ label to control his own releases once in the German capital, de la Plante too started up Maybe Tomorrow with Jon Berry, the marketing manager of Kompakt. The inspiration behind the label comes from The Littlest Hobo, a Canadian TV show about a homeless dog wandering around and helping people. The theme song is called "Maybe Tomorrow".

Sadly this type of export made it as far afield as Australia as did the Degrassi High school series

As did the completely random The Beachcombers whose theme song is forever stuck in brain where it will stay forever without permission. Ohh, Canada…

Indeed, one of the criticisms of The Mole’s recent material is that maybe he stepped too far from Canada, forsaking his disco, funk and soul records and incorporating perhaps too much of Berlin’s techno soul without quite producing bangers either. However his recent album “The Caregiver” works well because of its collage feel and its indifference to the dancefloor. Here it seems more an option than an obligation; The Mole is easy going enough to let you decide.

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Fred P	Reach	A Harmless Deed	2013
2	The Mole	History of dates	Perlon	2013
3	The Mole	(When) Monkey punches Dog	Maybe Tomorrow	2013
4	The Mole	Special invitation	Maybe Tomorrow	2013
5	Gerry Read	Crave	Forth Wave	2013
6	Anthony Collins, Distant Phase	Come down	Natural History	2013
7	Marcello Giordani	Comin' down	Endless Flight	2013
8	The Mole	Baby your'e the one	Wagon Repair	2008

Cabeza de Vaca Facebook

Scanner FM

P050: Cabeza de Vaca – Japanese house

Not so many notes necessary to accompany this weeks Japanese house special on Cabeza de Vaca and Scanner FM .

Firstly a quick aplogy as this week I was very tired doing the show after a couple of 12 hour days and then a late night midweek to see Alfonso (Monkey Bar), Svreca (Semantica) and Eduardo de la Calle (Analog Solutions) at Razzmatazz. They also made me learn Ableton Live in the last minutes before starting to record so I was a bit unfocussed this week. For this reason I forgot to congratulate Tokyo on winning the Olympic Games bid. Congratulations!

おめでとう！

One thing I didn’t mention either in the show is the recent crackdowns that have been reported against some of Japan’s clubs and dancers which at one stage seemed like it would threaten the potential of the club scene as a whole in Japan at a moment when it seems to be reaching a critical juncture, with wider exposure for festivals like Labyrinth, with Sonar and RA translating and translocating themselves into Japan/ese and a lot of exceptional artists steadily coming to the fore. It is not clear how much of a problem this is today, but it is clearly an important cultural issue that will need to addressed.

Resident Advisor

Time Out

The Guardian

Perhaps the biggest news is that we look like going up to four shows on Japanese electronica instead of three. The reason for this is a late influx of tracks following a couple of emails so now I can rearrange the surplus tracks with the new ones and build up to four. So next week will be all techno and the final show will be more experimental and IDM sounds.

Susumu Yokota opens the show with a track from one of his earliest albums which was one of my introductions to his work just as he began to peak with ambient and experimental works like “Image”, “Magic thread” and the legendary “Sakura”. The later certainly broke in to the public consciousness in a big way and got glowing reviews everywhere and anywhere just as it deserved. Since then it has been a bit more mixed in the public eye for him though. Certainly with 27 albums the quality cannot always be high, but his last albums “Dreamer” (2012) and “Kaleidoscope” (2010) were very diverse and satisfying, mixing dub techno, house and ambient and experimental interludes. It would be nice to see Yokota-san back in the limelight a bit more, but since is getting up towards two years since his last album, we might see something more from him soon?

There are a couple more veterans on the show, but without the same level of oeuvre as Yokota. Hiroshi Watanabe is a strong contender, but perhaps by spreading his work between his own name and his better known Kaito alias he has down played his influence slightly. As well, his Kompkat discography is impressive, but somewhat diluted down with the beatless versions of the albums. “Special life” subsequently came out as “Special love” whereas “A hundred million light years” also came out as the beatless “A hundred million love years”. This is not to take away from his productions. “Everlasting” is still one of the best Kompakt tracks ever released and still gives me shivers every time I play it. We wait with baited breath for the new album “Until the end of time”  due in October.

On the other hand the discography of Takuya Yamashita has been harder to verify. Discogs says “Japanese Techno DJ and producer, born in 1969 in Kobe” Which makes him a couple of years older than even me, but with almost no release information. Souncloud reveals an upcoming 12” on Cadenza

Beatport gives a bit more information about what he has been up to, but the details of the releases by his other aliases are hidden somewhere on the internet! We shall keep our eyes peeled for new information nonetheless. I am also intrigued to see a 40 year old man opening his account as a techno producer suggesting that there is no limit where there is will.

As for the younger producers, a couple of them coincidentally have some new release out.

Ryo Murakami has the album “Depth of decay” (see a previous post for details about the other Ryo Murakami ) with design by Stereociti!

Kez YM also has the “Late night blue sound” EP on City Fly

And a recent mix for them as well:

Not to be outdonce, Stereociti also posted a nice mix from the start of the year too:

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Susumu Yokota	Mushroom girl	Sublime Records	1998
2	Kez YM	Garda	Ragrange Records	2012
3	Rondenion	Assemblage	Plug Research	2013
4	Ryo Murakami	Late fall	Argumento Music Group	2012
5	Stereociti	Dialogue	Mojuba	2012
6	Takuya Yamashita	Rigel	Outpost Recordings	2013
7	Kaito	Behind my life	Kompakt	2013
8	Kuniyuki Takahashi	Get up with you (featuring Fumio Itabashi)	Mule Musiq	2013

Cabeza de Vaca Facebook

Scanner FM

P045: Cabeza de Vaca – Anthony Naples special.

Brooklyn-based producer and DJ Anthony Naples has had the dream career start, as Jordan Rothlein points out in his Breaking through feature for Resident Advisor from November last year. After one 12” he already had the ear of Four Tet enough to be asked for a remix for the track “128 Harps”. From there it was label contact and plenty of positive praise. And yet he has still only released four 12”s, so few that we can actually feature one track from each on this weeks Cabeza de Vaca show over at Scanner FM.

But there will plenty more to come from him you imagine, with a rumoured album for Trilogy Tapes in the pipe. He is also working on his DJing and has contributed this recent warm-up set over at the Fader which is also available for free download.

There are also a lot of other new comers on the show this week, such as Ex-Pylon who open the show with a long psychedelic jam track, the type of which we love on Cabeza de Vaca. One curiosity of this track, and several others we played recently, is the heavy use of EQing. It seems almost becoming a stylistic trend of a lot of modern house. We have seen a lot of it in the work of Torn Hawk on LIES, with Mr. Tophat and Art Alfie on Karlovak  and Dense and Pika on Hotflush  to name but a few. I have even seen a little discussion in comments pages about it and its relation to modern digital DJing as on one level, bringing the track in and out so much is one of the DJs jobs, and now with digital beat matching and so on, it is more and more possible to have an automated feel.

I mention as well the “other” group Pylon who were contemporaries of early REM in Athens, Georgia in the early 1980s. Legend has it that Pylon’ second album “Chomp” came out around the same time as REMs debut EP “Chronic Town” and REM were despairing that Pylon were so much better. Pylon are hardly forgotten, but there is a certain irony in thinking of these petty jealousies given the immortal status that REM went on to achieve and where Pylon ended up.

Watching this video from 1981 it is also hard to accept or remember that even REM was considered a “dance band” before the release of “Murmur” in 1983. Almost the only gigs available in the quiet university town of Athens and the surrounding area where student parties, which meant beer and dancing. This is why so much of the music from this area and era adds more funk to the post punk edginess, including Pylon, The B52s and early REM. In fact, there is a certain amount of music to be reclaimed here and recontextualised in club culture. There is always such a hidden wealth of guitar-pop-funk waiting to be championed again and re-used in a party/dancing context, from REM to INXS and beyond. This will be half the theme at least of next week’s show, but in the modern context.

REM of course covered the Pylon song “Crazy” as a B-side that ended up as the opening track on the collection “Dead Letter Office”.

Number	Artist	Track	Label	Year
1	Ex-Pylon	Shakes	Studio Barnhus	2013
2	Youandewan	You tired	Simple Records	2013
3	Anthony Naples	Moscato A1	Mister Saturday Night Records	2013
4	Anthony Naples	La Cuarta	Trilogy Tapes	2013
5	Anthony Naples	Mad disrespect	Mister Saturday Night Records	2012
6	Anthony Naples	I don’t see them	Rubadub	2013
7	Steven Tang	Potential Light	Smallville	2013
8	Dopeus	Don't I need you	Third Ear Recordings	2013

Cabeza de Vaca Facebook

Scanner FM