2015.06.25 Wizard's Guild

The Wizard's Tower in happier times

5 Players: W, K, I, G
Game:  Woolyverse: Tower of the Wizard's Guild
Location: W
Choice: W



 

Dueling in the Bailey
I'm not sure which one best represents me but that's only because I can't tell who is losing

Round One:

G(33pts), W(32pts), K(25pts) & I(21pts) 

 

Final Tally:

G was declared this week's victor.

 

Enter the Labyrinth at your own peril

 

Notes:

• 3rd win in a row for G for this game
• Relaxing pace meat that we only had time for one game.
• Adhoc game planned for the coming Saturday at K's  

I'll let you guess which player this closely resembles.
Here's a hint: I can't grow a beard.

 

Music Features

Thunderball: Scorpio Rising (2001)

 

[Notes from AllMusic.com] On the heels of their critically acclaimed (and very appropriately titled) debut, Ambassadors of Style, Scorpio Rising is an even more seamless imaginary soundtrack. In Thunderball's world, blaxploitation funk, cinematic soul, bossa nova lounge, downtempo dub, and downtown drum'n'bass all come together to create a hipster vibe few other groups could even aspire to, let alone create. From the Curtis Mayfield tribute of the opening "Heart of the Hustler" and the airy jungle jazz of "Vai Vai" to the ambient, Indian-influenced hip-hop of "Stereo Tonic," these guys blend styles like Esquivel mixes drinks, making this the coolest album you'll hear since United Future Organization disappeared.

 

Various Artists: White Martini (2004)

 

[Notes from AllMusic.com] Subtitled "La Musique Lounge Moderne Deux," White Martini picks up where 2002's left off, serving both as a nicely selected program of contemporary lounge music and downtempo electronica and as an advertisement for Players brand flavored vodka (a recipe for the titular cocktail is included in the liner notes, as is a full-page ad for the booze). Sure, it's maybe a bit crass, but this is lounge music, folks -- a certain degree of crassness is part of its charm. By the time you're halfway through "Riviera Rendezvous," the Ursula 1000 track that opens this album, you'll no doubt be hunting through the closet for your pipe and smoking jacket, and setting up highballs for your guests. Not everything here partakes so explicitly of the esprit de lounge, however; Praful's "Sigh" is straight-up house music with a sighing hint of strings and a smooth saxophone; "Naturally," by Slow Train Soul, is laid-back acid jazz, as is Puddu Varano's gorgeous "Hide Your Ways"; Rafe Gomez contributes a funky and faintly Latin-flavored little number called "Icy." Everything is nicely chilled and goes down smooth.

 

King Tubby Meets Jacob Miller in a Tenement Yard (2006)

 

[Notes from AllMusic.com] The creative talents of two reggae titans converge on this previously ultra-rare, somewhat frustrating but ultimately fine collection. The late King Tubby is generally considered the architect of dub, the practice of stripping the vocals off of a reggae record in the studio, then slicing up the remaining instrumental tracks and pasting them back together in a spacy, stretched-out, echoey, often very trippy pattern to create a new whole that often bears little resemblance to the source material. Some of the greatest dub albums ever recorded have been the work of King Tubby, who had toyed with the music of the late Jacob Miller prior to making this album -- released in Jamaica on a small label and virtually disappearing from circulation -- circa 1976. Most notably, Tubby reworked Miller's "Baby I Love You So" as the title track for the landmark King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown, credited to Augustus Pablo but created alongside Tubby. Miller is best remembered as the lead vocalist for the underrated Jamaican vocal group Inner Circle(in its pre-"Cops" days), but he'd already logged a number of memorable singles on his own before joining that band in 1976, among them "Tenement Yard" and "Forward Jah Jah Children." His quivering, mesmerizing voice was one of the most unique in reggae, and the virtual absence of that voice in Tubby's remixes (except in the first bonus track, "Dub the Weak Heart"), gives them something of an emptiness. Granted, that is the nature of dub; it is largely an instrumental genre that exists to create atmospheres, not to convey lyrics or spotlight human vocals. And on its own terms, the project succeeds: the backing tracks played by the Fatman Riddim Section gave Tubby plenty to work with, and there are some deep grooves within (i.e., "Judgment Yard Dub," which draws on "Tenement Yard"). But although this project is consistently intoxicating overall, King Tubby produced more satisfying work in his lifetime.

 

2015.06.18 I didn't expect a Spanish Inquisition!



 

5 Players: W, K, Si, M, G
Game:  El Grande: Grand Inquisitor & the Colonies
Location: W
Choice: K



 

Round Two:

Si(86pts), M(81pts), K(80pts), W(79pts) & G(64pts) 

 

Final Tally:

Si was declared victor for this week.

 

Notes:

• Game not finished due to time.
• Game cube was used but not enforced. Time was set at 1:00.  

Music Features

Lou Reed: Rock 'n' Roll Animal (1974)

 

 

[Notes from AllMusic.com] In 1974, after the commercial disaster of his album Berlin, Lou Reed needed a hit, and Rock N Roll Animal was a rare display of commercial acumen on his part, just the right album at just the right time. Recorded in concert with Reed's crack road band at the peak of their form, Rock N Roll Animal offered a set of his most anthemic songs (most dating from his days with the Velvet Underground) in arrangements that presented his lean, effective melodies and street-level lyrics in their most user-friendly form (or at least as user friendly as an album with a song called "Heroin" can get). Early-'70s arena rock bombast is often the order of the day, but guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter use their six-string muscle to lift these songs up, not weigh them down, and with Reed's passionate but controlled vocals riding over the top, "Sweet Jane," "White Light/White Heat," and "Rock 'n' Roll" finally sound like the radio hits they always should have been. Reed would rarely sound this commercial again, but Rock N Roll Animal proves he could please a crowd when he had to.

 

Squarepusher: Hard Normal Daddy (1997)

 

[Notes from Sputnikmusic.com] Hard Normal Daddy is wicked mixture of spacey keyboards and laid-back beats. When he’s on his game Jenkinson can create the most bizarre, trippy atmospheres with fleeting synthesizer tones and bluesy guitar riffs. Countless electronic acts fail as they try to cram in several clicks and beats into one song, Jenkinson falls victim to this on a couple of tracks but makes up for it with his innovative “UFO’s flying through outer-space” type of sound.

 

 

King Megatrip: The 4th Expedition

 

[Notes from megatrip.blogspot.ca]Who is this King Megatrip? Known only as MK to his closest friends - the origin story of this enigmatic agent of chaos has yet to be told. A super-powered roofing DJ - playing records with his dog and living in his very own Fortress of Solitude at Megatrip Central. ------ What can't Megatrip do? Guided missiles, laser beams, fireball fists, jet boots, energy blades, a protective force field, the ability to change size, mad kung fu skills, etc.

 

 

 

 

 

 

2015.06.11 How do you know he's a king?

Board at end of game

5 Players: W, K, Si, M, G
Game: El Grande: Intrigue & The King
Location: W
Choice: Si



 

Round One:

K(35pts), G(33pts), W(32pts), M(24pts) & Si(21pts)

 

 

 

 

 Round Two:

G(68pts), Si(60pts), K(59pts), W(56pts) & M(55pts)

 

 

 

 

Round Three:

G(89pts), Si(83pts), M(81pts), W(79pts) &  K(76pts) 

 

 

 

 

Final Tally:

G was declared victor for this week.

 

Notes:

• W presented tonight's music
• Later start than normal thanks to fun fair lag
• Game cube is recommended for future sessions of EG 

 

Music Features

 

 

Moby: Play (1999)

[Notes from AllMusic.com] ... another leap back toward the electronica base that had passed him by during the mid-'90s. The first two tracks, "Honey" and "Find My Baby," weave short blues or gospel vocal samples around rather disinterested breakbeat techno. ... Surprisingly, many of Moby's vocal tracks are highlights; he has an unerring sense of how to frame his fragile vocals with sympathetic productions... Moby shows himself back in the groove after a long hiatus, balancing his sublime early sound with the breakbeat techno evolution of the '90s.

 

 

 

<<rinôçérôse>>: Music Kills Me (2002)

 

[Notes from SlantMagazine.com] Somewhere near the southern French metropolitan home of Daft Punk, Air, and Mirwais, a little band of academic psychologists-cum-rockers dreamt of becoming guitar gods. The band, Rinocerose, released their deep-house-meets-rock-riffs debut in 1999 and rode a wave of French techno buzz to critical acclaim. Rinocerose's Jean-Philippe likens his band's second full-length effort, Music Kills Me, to Andy Warhol's "Catastrophes"; it's a neo-disco concept album that might have sounded a bit more relevant in the decadent days of Studio 54. Yes, Music Kills Me is about "death"—or at least that's what the album's song titles will have you believe. But for all its references to suicide, funerals and paths to heaven, Music Kills Me is a rather upbeat record. The first single, "Le Summer Rock" ("Rock Is Dying"), is a synth-laden disco-funk workout with a bright, albeit lyricless, hook. The title track fuses a "Hungry Like the Wolf" guitar riff with AC/DC-inspired power chords while the sleazy house track "Dead Flowers" pays multi-layered homage to the Stones. Live flutes float above the bubbly house excursions "It's Time to Go Now!" and "Resurrection D'Une Idole Pop," which features sampled vocals by the late Steve Marriot of the Small Faces fame. The songs are scrumptious morsels but the album as a whole is quite redundant, stuffed with P-Funk-lite dressed up in showy French techno.

 

St-Germain: Tourist (2000)

 

[Notes from AllMusic.com] Since the advent of acid jazz in the mid-'80s, the many electronic-jazz hybrids to come down the pipe have steadily grown more mature, closer to a balanced fusion that borrows the spontaneity and emphasis on group interaction of classic jazz while still emphasizing the groove and elastic sound of electronic music. For his second album, French producer Ludovic Navarre expanded the possibilities of his template for jazzy house by recruiting a sextet of musicians to solo over his earthy productions. The opener "Rose Rouge" is an immediate highlight, as an understated Marlena Shaw vocal sample ("I want you to get together/put your hands together one time"), trance-state piano lines, and a ride-on-the-rhythm drum program frames solos by trumpeter Pascal Ohse and baritone Claudio de Qeiroz. For "Montego Bay Spleen," Navarre pairs an angular guitar solo by Ernest Ranglin with a deep-groove dub track, complete with phased effects and echoey percussion. "Land Of..." moves from a Hammond- and horn-led soul-jazz stomp into Caribbean territory, marked by more hints of dub and the expressive Latin percussion of Carneiro. ... if another step on the way to a perfect blend of jazz and electronic, then Tourist is an excellent one.

 

Kruder & Dorfmeister: DJ Kicks (1996)

 

[Wikipedia]

DJ-Kicks started out in 1995 as a compilation of electronic DJ club-style mixes in the techno or house genres, with the then-novel twist of being targeted to a home listening audience... As of September 2014^[update], there are 49 releases in the series, with a release rate of roughly two to three new ones each year. Some of the DJ-Kicks mixes are very popular and counted among the regular albums of the compiler, most notably the one by Kruder & Dorfmeister. The DJ-Kicks series has been called "the most important DJ-mix series ever" by Mixmag.

[Notes from AllMusic.com] Beginning with downbeat trip-hop including Herbaliser, Statik Sound System, and Thievery Corporation, Kruder & Dorfmeister flow through jazzy drum'n'bass (with Aquasky and JMJ & Flytronix) and techno (with Hardfloor and Showroom Recordings).

 

 

2015.06.04 The Empire Strikes Out

5 Players: W, K, Sc, J, G

Game: Imperial 2030
Location: K
Choice: Sc


 

Game One:

K(94pts), W(88pts), J(83pts), Sc(79pts) & G(59pts)

 

Final Tally:

K was declared victor for this week.

 

Notes:

• No Germany in this version of Imperial
• It was decided that, until proven otherwise, the USA will be considered the Germany of this version
• The version seemed to offer some improvements over the original
• W "violated" the terms of his treaty with G
• Russia was the best run country based on the final scores
• USA was the worst run country 

 Music Features

David Holmes: Let's Get Killed (1997)

 

 

 

[Notes from AllMusic.com] On David Holmes' second album, the first to be released in America, he explores with even greater depth his fascination with original soundtrack material. Recording snippets of conversation on the streets of New York with his DAT recorder, Holmes returned to England and weaved the vocal samples around his amorphous embrace of several electronic styles, including big beat techno of the type favored by the Chemical Brothers, intelligent drum'n'bass (as on the title track), and the gentler soundtrack-feel of ambient-house. The effect created is like that of a soundtrack, and even though Let's Get Killed isn't attached to a film, it flows with energy and grace.

 

The Rolling Stones: Beggar's Banquet (1968)

 

 

 

[Notes from AllMusic.com] The Stones forsook psychedelic experimentation to return to their blues roots on this celebrated album, which was immediately acclaimed as one of their landmark achievements. A strong acoustic Delta blues flavor colors much of the material, particularly "Salt of the Earth" and "No Expectations," which features some beautiful slide guitar work. Basic rock & roll was not forgotten, however: "Street Fighting Man," a reflection of the political turbulence of 1968, was one of their most innovative singles, and "Sympathy for the Devil," with its fire-dancing guitar licks, leering Jagger vocals, African rhythms, and explicitly satanic lyrics, was an image-defining epic. On "Stray Cat Blues," Jagger and crew began to explore the kind of decadent sexual sleaze that they would take to the point of self-parody by the mid-'70s. At the time, though, the approach was still fresh, and the lyrical bite of most of the material ensured Beggars Banquet's place as one of the top blues-based rock records of all time

 

Various Artists: Soulshaker Vol. 6 (2009)

 

 

[Notes from recordkicks.com] Following the success of the previous editions the Soulshaker series is back! Volume 6 is yet another collection of the best head nodding, foot stomping tunes to come out of the contemporary funk, soul and jazz scenes. Back when the first volume of this series was released, the idea of contemporary funk was a bit of a novelty -- but now, the deep funk underground is really getting some key exposure on a global level -- and a collection like this is a good reminder of why it's so great in the first place!

 

From start to finish this volume holds back no punches and immediately tells you what time it is.

As usual the new edition is full of future classics, remixes & unreleased tracks that see the light on CD and compilation for the first time, from soul sensations Baby Charles, to Mishal Moore remixed by Kenny Dope, Nicole Willis & The Soul Investigators joined for the occasion by Nicole's husband Jimi Tenor, Dojo Cuts' take on Stevie Wonders classic "Uptight", the Trio Valore turning up the heat with a cut from their debut album, sensational Laura Vane& The Vipertones with a northern soul stormer, Kokolo with legendary drummer JoJo Kuo on vocals, Bordeaux deep funkers Shaolin Temple Defenders revisited here by The Dynamics, Link Quartet's smashing version of the classic "Purple Haze", Torino all-stars band Soulful Orchestra, Ray Lugo's new side / solo project L.E.S. Express and brand new singles that are available only here by new deep funk queen Gizelle Smith, German jazz-dancers The Hi Fly Orchestra and Scottish The Privates Hammond Orchestra, a brand new combo born from the aces of legendary Boogaloo Investigators/Five Aces, and that's just to name a few of the artists behind these 18 groovy tracks!

 

Various Artists: Funky 16 Corners (2001)

 

 

[Notes from AllMusic.com] This outstanding collection of funk singles compiled by Stones Throw Records includes 16 songs recorded between 1968 and 1974 by obscure underground groups from America. One of the strongest crossover funk labels of the last decade, Stones Throw pays due respect to modern music's forgotten grandfathers on this most grooving recorded history lesson of impeccable quality. Anchored by the Highlighters' classic "The Funky 16 Corners," whereby the Indianapolis group upped the ante in 1969's craze for bands counting "corners" (read: hit me three times!) by breaking the recorded benchmark with 16, this compilation leans heavily on the James Brown sect and celebrates the lesser-known groups of the genre, who with high talent and low budget put to tape some of the most raw funk ever captured to date. Representative modernist Cut Chemist of Jurassic 5 even gets an interpretation slot with "Bunky's Pick" on one of two bonus tracks. Every track is essential to the record and every groove a lost gem.