Has it been a week already? Indeed.

In this second installment of Quickly, I went ahead picked some tracks that have, just about, no correlation with last week’s theme. Whereas the last one was all sappy and pretty, this one is…not: concrete, crabgrass, rusted steel. More or less fuck you music which has always been my music genre of choice. The last track tidies everything up with a recitation of the landlord’s note to the Minutemen about a shower. Man, those guys are great.

It runs 21:29

• U2 (dedicated to M. Goard)
• NIN (to tie up with last week)
• This Heat
• Fugazi
• Converge
• Helmet
• Minutemen

Hello my internet friend. How have you been?

Maybe I should start a weekly series of mixes. Maybe that way you’ll have a reason to come back to this thing. Maybe I’ll also get more practice figuring out Traktor. And also, maybe have a reason to find more music that isn’t the Deftones (AWESOME!!) or Aphex Twin (GENIUS!!) to put in my mixes…

Well, why the hell not? Here’s the first installment:

• U.N.P.O.C
• Guided By Voices
• Iron & Wine
• Robert Johnson
• Band Of Horses
• Peter Bjorn & John
• Neil Young
• Meat Puppets
• NIN

“Alright boys, let’s get way out there….”
It runs 27:34 glorious minutes.

It’s romantic, acoustic and lazy. I’m guessing it’ll make for a good make-out session soundtrack given that you are surrounded by wild grass and late afternoon sunshine…Maybe an old diesel Ford pick-up to boot. Hmm… that probably has nothing in common with the music. Just something I’d like to be in the middle of at the moment.

I love you, beer.

1. Telefon Tel Aviv
2. New Order
3. Siouxsie & the Banshees
4. Bananarama
5. Fugazi
6. Prince
7. Slick Rick
8. DJ Shadow
9. Latyrx
10. D’Angelo
11. Aphex Twin
12. Clinic
13. Deftones
14. PJ Harvey
15. The Twilight Singers
16. Soul Position

I, Kenny Liu, do solemnly swear to try as hard as humanly possible to stop adding the Deftones and Aphex Twin to all my goddamn playlists…

So then today, I was happy enough to revisit these elements through our favoritist death metal quartet: Slayer. Yay!

On a Rives-tip we can riff from pop culture to crimes against humanity to human endeavor. So here we go:

Pop Culture:

I picked up Pitchfork’s top-500-popular-culture-songs-ever-recorded book a couple weeks back. Read through it slowly, bookmarking choice segments and so forth. I came across this passage, and it was about Slayer:

Slayer: “Angel of Death” 1986

Southern California thrash band Slayer came to be defined by Dave Lombardo’s fast double-bass drumming, Kerry King and Jeff Hanneman’s hyper-buzzing guitars, the shouts of bassist/vocalist Tom Araya, their dark, horror-tinged subject matter (serial killers, Satanism, Nazism), and live shows and artwork involving pentagrams, fake blood, and inverted crosses. Like Metallica, their inspiration came from both British heavy metal and punk-they’d go on to cover Minor Threat and TSOL, among others. The quartet’s third album, 1986’s Reign In Blood, was their major-label debut, recorded and produced by Rick Rubin for his (and Russell Simmons’s) Def Jam-It was the label’s first metal release. Rubin gave the band a cleaner sound, stripping their attack to its barest essentials and infusing it with an almost NYC-hardcore intesity. (At Rubin’s suggestion, King played the famous guitar solo on the Beastie Boy’s “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”)

Reign In Blood’s most controversial track, opener “Angel of Death” is also its longest. Written by Hannerman, it details the atrocities of war criminal Dr. Josef Mengele, the physical and psychological human experiments he performed during World War II-gassing, performing surgery without anesthesia, hacking limbs, water burial, burning skin-and the “mutants” he created. This extreme subject material delayed Reign In Blood’s release when Def Jam distributor Columbia Records balked at the lyrics, along with the album’s Satan-friendly graphic artwork. Geffen ended up distributing it without officially listing it on a release schedule.

-Pitchfork Media via Brandon Stosuy

Here’s the song they refer to:

Funny thing is that, although I’ve listened to Slayer quite a bit now, I’ve never paid attention to the lyrics: I’ve always dug their music for the sheer noise and aggression: Shrrred!!

crimes against humanity:

And so I looked up the lyrics after reading the passage. After all, it is one of the 500 greatest songs since 1977-as deemed by Pitchfork. Here’s a link. …THEY’RE ENTIRELY HORRIFYING!! It’s like watching Faces of Death for the first time in high school. Ugh.

But it’s not so much, some long-hair rattling off on the most insidious acts that one could inflict on another. Mr. Mengele actually did those things! I looked it up on wikipedia, and read the article all the way through. (The ending sucked.)

It provides perspective, really. The nature of horror can be fun and funny: Halloween, zombies, unexpected pregnancy, etc. It’s only real horror when they’re an actual reality. The “Angel of Death” was a reality. (My roommate had to talk to talk me down a little after I went through this internet course.)

human endeavor:

It was a couple days later I came across a youtube video. I was looking up Mike Patton or something, and came across a “Drum Clinic” session featuring Slayer’s drummer Dave Lombardo. (Vince Lombardi is another thing altogether.)

It was brilliant. He was asked to perform a technically difficult music piece on the drums and he chose ‘Raining Blood’ (it would be a lot more convenient if he had chosen Angel of Death but, ah well.) Anyways, it’s always a real pleasure for me to witness people showcase their renowned proficiency-whatever that may be. And here, Mr. Lombardo does it…He just do.

At first he plays along with the program, does the drummer boy thing. You can tell that he is very good at the drum-drum-drumming. But then after, say, 1:10, he just gets bored, turns off the boombox he’s supposed to play to and tells his students

“Ya know what. This is just slow. [laughter] No, serious. When we play it live, it’s a lot faster….”

At this point he proceeds to become entirely natural, rest onto his own element. The dexterity, the stamina, the rigor are obvious and entirely pure. And you’re watching this thing, going ‘that’s nuts’. And then after some shuffling, some this and that, at around 3:35 he, like, double times everything he did before! It’s stoopid.

But he does it. And his every move is controlled and intentional. It is totally inspiring. Like watching Pistol Pete play basketball (more on that later, I guess.) It is an expression of talent.

So maybe, in the end, what I mean to say is: folly is folly, what horrible things people can do to others they can and have. But when you want to try something and its success isn’t guaranteed, someone’s probably already done it. And in spades.

Dave Lombardo is the example if you wanted to be a drummer.

I wanna be Dave Lombardo.

1. movie quote
2. Ben Allison
3. Digable Planets
4. Gang Starr with Inspectah Deck
5. 2Pac
6. Ghostface Killah
7. Portishead
8. Aphex Twin
9. Glenn Gould
10. Nine Inch Nails
11. Cocteau Twins via Deftones
12. The Smiths
13. movie quote
14. The Cimarons
15. Mable John
16. Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
17. Aaron Neville
18. Cymande
19. movie quote
20. Talk Talk
21. Ernesto Lecouna

Listening back to this, I have to cringe when I hear the transitions. Recording live mixes are way harder than I imagined. I can’t imagine actually PERFORMING the songs. Yikes. Anyways, I drunkenly put the list together last night at, like 3 in the morning. And then mixed it earlier today. It’s mostly quiet, laid back, all-over-the-board in terms of genres. Best played after the sun has set. Ya feel me? Damn straight.

The video briefly explores the collaboration of Eric Clapton and Duane Allman, and shows Mr. Dowd doing what he do.

If, for some godforsaken reason you haven’t(?) heard the song Layla before, you should stick a finger in your eyeball, and then play the track below the video.

Tom Dowd’s wizardry comes in at around 1:53

Hah! Tom Dowd also worked on the Manhattan Project?!?

1. pantera (segment)
2. beastie boys + bob marley (segment)
3. Beggin’ by Frankie Valli (pilooski edit)
4. Canto De Ossanha by Elis Regina
5. Yekermo Sew by Mulatu Astatke
6. As Above So Below by Klaxons (Justice Remix)
7. Luchini by Camp Lo
8. Push by Pharoahe Monch
9. La La La by Lil’ Wayne
10. Life’s So Hard by Tupac
11. Spoonful by Willie Dixon
12. A Sunday Kind Of Love by Etta James
13. Nude by Radiohead
14. Ever Since WWI by Team Sleep
15. Sleeping The Terror Code by Q And Not U