Dustin LindenSmith

ulisten.net podcast #7 (listen in MP3 or M4A (iTunes) format)

My wife and I are in the middle of a firestorm of activity right now. She's 2 weeks back to work full-time after a 4-month maternity leave, I'm at home full-time with our baby son, and our 4-year-old daughter goes to daycare part-time. We're just a few weeks away from completion on building a new house. There's also the small matter of packing up our current house, moving out, and cleaning up for the new owners. All that, and it's tax time too.

Being the sharp-minded and insightful individual that I am, I thought it might make sense for me to take a short break from producing these podcasts. At least until we're moved into the new house and unpacked.

Expect to see Podcast #8 on June 4th. Listen to today's podcast to hear from the shortlist of Cannonball Adderley, Wilson Pickett, Danger Doom, and Cut Chemist. That's vintage funk in the form of late 60s electric jazz, plus some good old hard-ass funk and kickin-out-the-bass hip-hop. Sure to be worth the wait.

You can now keep up with the ulisten.net podcasts on LJ at ulisten.


ulisten.net podcast #5 (download MP3)

The most serious hip-hop heads out there may already know the backstory of this track, but I remember being pretty excited about it when I learned about it in this great NY Times interview by Chuck Klosterman with Brian Burton and Thomas Calloway (a.k.a Danger Mouse and Cee-Lo). In that interview, Danger Mouse said how surprised he was by what a hit his tune Crazy was, because it was almost a direct rip-off of an Ennio Morricone song. With considerable further research on my part, I discovered that the tune he referred to was called Nel Cimitero de Tucson, and it came from the soundtrack for the 1968 spaghetti western called Preparati La Bara!.

Now, this information in and of itself is not terribly significant -- until you hear the source track upon which Danger Mouse based his hit Crazy, that is. Move the pitch of the original track up by only 1 whole step and you're suddenly hearing almost exactly the same backing track to Crazy. To the note! It's all laid out for you on today's podcast.

Also of note on this track are the lyrics. They really struck me on my first listening of the tune, and now that I've thoroughly digested them after more than several dozen hearings, I think there's a lot of wisdom in there. Wisdom about not taking yourself too seriously, about the fallacy of our apparent control over the moment, and about seeing ourselves for who we really are.

(Credit to this post on stereogum.com for what was probably one of the first breaks of this news. I wish I'd found that post when I first started researching this piece, because I only found out the details through much more circuitous means. Additional trivia: someone built a MySpace page for Gianfranco Reverberi that's focused on this track. Reverberi appears to be the actual composer of the source track, and more info on his credits can be found on his IMDB page, along with that of his brother Gianpiero.)

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Artist Name: Gnarls Barkley
Album Title: St. Elsewhere
Release Date: 2006
Producer: Danger Mouse (birth name Brian Burton)
Vocalist: Cee-Lo (birth name Thomas Calloway)
Websites: Crazy video on YouTube | Gnarls Barkley | Danger Mouse on Wikipedia | Cee-Lo on Wikipedia

Buy the recording at: cd universe | amazon.com | amazon.ca | itunes | froogle | google

I've just installed my second podcast on ulisten.net. The audio blog entry is here, and the actual podcast itself is here. Text of the entry is below.

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ulisten.net podcast #2 (download MP3)

Today's podcast features a very little-known version of one of James Brown's biggest hits: I Got You. This version is notable for its smoother, more easygoing groove than the hit record, and it also features the baritone sax and the organ more prominently than the popular version. It comes from the great 4-CD retrospective box set of James Brown's music called Star Time, which was originally released in 1991. Containing almost no bad tracks, this box set is absolutely worth owning if you're even a lukewarm James Brown fan.

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Artist Name: James Brown
Album Title: Star Time (4-CD box set)

You can buy the recording at: cd universe | amazon.ca | amazon.com | itunes store | itunes website (search for "james brown star time")

Well, that was relatively painless. WordPress was easy to install, and changing themes is as simple and uploading an unzipped directory of files to your web server and then selecting the theme from your control panel. I chose a minimalist, simple one to get things underway, but really, this was pretty easy to set up.

http://ulisten.net

I'll start posting actual music content next week and see what the initial shape of the site morphs into. Currently I'm visualizing a weekly podcast of underground funk and hip-hop music. A short weekly radio show or mixtape, I suppose.