Disclaimer:As of July 2005, all MP3s posted
on the My Mean Magpie site, are posted with every attempt to respect the
wishes of the individual artist. If you wish an mp3 to be removed for
any reason it will be taken down.
I haven't had much to post about lately, but recently a (mis-titled/attributed) remix posted to the excellent Palms Out Sounds' long-running "Remix Sunday" got me thinking about the older remixes and samples, and I thought I'd share it here....
The song the remixer selected (or Palms Out thinks they did) was pretty big twenty years ago, and after downloading the "remix" (find it at PO's Remix Sunday 109), I was a bit sad to find it had only one think in common with the original track: the "title" sample... which was lifted from elsewhere.
Back in the 80's, early hip hop and dance records, didn't clear their samples. So, a song could be built from the ground up using almost nothing but other people records. I knew this, of course, because I tried to look up the samples from our mystery song about ten years back. Of course, in 1997 or so, it was just a list of songs and artists I hadn't heard of; no file sharing software existed (Napster launched in 1999) to track down missing songs, mp3s were relatively new, and with Amazon.ca still a few years away, getting music meant dealing with customs charges and most of this music wasn't in print.
Anyway, looking it up over the past week has been far more fruitful. Not only did I track down the old list of samples, but I managed to buy a few of the songs (some I already had!), and track down most that I was missing. Then I started trying to match them up to the original song and remixes, and the US released-post-court-injunction-mixes. (I am getting outside, don't worry about me...)
Some of the original list was straightforward, some near-impossible to spot, some disputable, and some (in my opinion) outright wrong. I'll list them all in the extended post, but if you're feeling a bit more adventurous, download a few of the tracks below and see how many it takes before you figure out the song...
Song #1 (.m4a) — difficulty : 10. A highly distorted seven second sample was used, and the reason the sample-heavy remix was re-edited for its release in the US. Song #2 (.m4a) — difficulty : 6. A rather distinct sample was used from this song. In combination with the next sample it formed "the break". Song #3 (.m4a) — difficulty : 8. The sample was slightly distorted and sped up, but rather long (over ten seconds). Song #4 (.m4a) — difficulty : 6. This sample was only used in the UK 12" remix (which was the version that went to #1); a re-created version with different lyrics was used in the US remixes. Song #5 (.m4a) — difficulty : 1. The acapella version of this song contained the main sample and the title of the song we're looking for.
I was pleasantly surprised to see that it still sits highly on their charts with around 13,000 downloads and an overall position of 8 (I think it went as high as 3). This is after two years! Perhaps it has something to do with them being free....
So, thanks to those of you who've shown support and/or downloaded a recording.
I highly recommend: Jonas Crenshaw's Colossal Failure (a sarcastic and sweet country-tinged album)
The Linger Effect's Charmer (a Factory records inspired new wave masterpiece)
and Lake Holiday's American Summer EP (an orchestral indie-pop glimpse at summer days).
I finally did it. In a few days I'll start the move from working on a PC at home to working on a Mac. It's not like I've been posting often here, but I've still got a few half-complete My Mean Magpie recordings sitting on my hard drive that I've yet to deal with. So over the past few nights I finished off one of them:
Originally called "I Soul My Soul for a Quarter and Now I Want It Back", the Project was a labour of lumbago for Georgia' members Patti Kim and Five Seventeen. The idea was to take others half-finished 4-track songs, add a few tracks of our own, mix it and package it up. Posting messages to message boards, and including small flyers with our mail, the first submission (from Caught in Fluz 'zinester Mike Applestein) rolled in somewhere in January of 1998 and the rest slowly trickled in.
From singular riffs recorded on boomboxes to demo recordings by full bands, we worked with them all. Running them backwards and forwards, accidentally erasing entire tracks, and adding layers of fuzz (though this may just have been what they sounded like) we managed to pull out 16 "songs."
Back in 1998, this release was a bonefide cassette hit, selling out its 200 copies in a matter of months.
The full recording is available through Archive.org in FLAC, mp3, and oog formats. And if you've an iPod you can download a zip file with m4a files. As always, jewel case artwork is also available for download.
Bonus Tracks
To the best of my knowledge, only "Yorkville, IL" went on to be re-recorded for Oval-Teen's debut CD A Million Shades of Oval-Teen as "When March Rolls Around."
For the initial 25¢ release, the 4-track recording got screwed up big time. I ended up accidentally recording over the beginning section of the music when trying to bump tracks, and were forced to use the a capella approach which set the tone for the rest of the mix. It didn't help that in the process of trying to save the song things got out of sync. When Oval-Teen re-recorded the song it was the centre piece of the album. Unfortunately the consensus was that '[the album] only real disappointment is the really long boring organ interlude in "When March Rolls Around."' (source)
Thanks to my trusty friend, the internet, I was able to sit down and watch the conclusion of the series (2nd season) of Life on Mars
Named after the David Bowie song, the series follows detective Sam Tyler, who after being hit by a car in 2006 wakes up in 1973 Manchester: "Am I mad, in a coma or back in time?"
Unlike other shows that have overstayed their welcome, Life on Mars creators recognized that though the premise was interesting it wouldn't last long without questions being answered. Matthew Graham a writer and co-creator told the BBC: "We decided that Sam's journey should have a finite life span and a clear-cut ending and we feel that we have now reached that point after two series."
And a fine two series it was.
It's currently broadcasting (?) on BBC Canada/America, and on Showcase Canada on this side of the water, but I had to find other means of tracking it down. There's no word if a DVD is in the works, but it'll likely be a couple years away... which means having to avoid or embrace the American version currently in the works by David E. Kelley (Ally McBeal).
Worth waiting for will be the sequel to the series, Ashes to Ashes (after another Bowie song) which moves the series forward to 1981 in London following DCI Gene Hunt Phillip Glenister, who's arrogant, bigoted, and an all-round bastard.
What's the deal with the song?
Simply, it was playing on Sam's iPod when he got hit by the car and, when he wakes up in 1973 it's on an 8-track. There are a few lines which have some relevance ("take a look at the lawman, beating up the wrong guy..." But really? It's just a good song.
"What's a cluckin' chicken? What's a cluckin' chicken need?"
After 15 years, The Happy Mondays announce that a new album (with the unconfirmed title, "Freaky Funky Fish & Chips") has found a home on Sanctuary Records (read the article).
Note: the pic on the left is from the album Bummed, and the title from the song "Angel"
The Happy Mondays are probably best remembered as one of the principal subjects of the Michael Winterbottom film 24 Hour Party People. Though the Anthony Wilson quote of the band being the best poet since Yeats, is a bit over the top for a man whose lyrics read more like a drug-addled Edward Lear on a bad day, Shaun Ryder can sell a lyric.
The album is mixed by Howie B (Björk, U2) and Sunny Levine, and will feature the cover artwork of Central Station Design (who did all the previous albums). It will also be without Shaun's brother, bassist Paul Ryder.
The Mondays had a rocky career, but also put out some fantastic albums. When the band parted ways Shaun managed to pull himself together and put out some great work as Black Grape.
Past efforts to revive the band have failed with weak singles. However, this album is being very carefully guarded, so there's hope it might be worth the 15 year wait.
Eight songs from 2006 you've never heard (or forgot you had)...
I've put off posting my favourite albums from 2006, because chances are someone else has said it better, or I'd be echoing the sentiments of a million others who all liked (insert favourite 2006 album) as much as I did.
So I thought I'd write about some of the free, limited or digital music that continues to impress me as much now as it did when I first heard it.
Aaron Booth & Kate Warren "Cut Dead" (J&MC cover)
Back in 2005 I had grand plans to create an album reproducing a song-for-song tribute of The Jesus & Mary Chain's Psychocandy. I let the project slip into incompletion, but not before Aaron submitted this beautiful rendition of "Cut Dead" made with Toronto musician Kate Warren. Available through his website for most of the 2006 it quietly slipped beneath the radar.
Petra Haden "God Only Knows" (Beach Boys cover)
At the end of January 2006, Petra Haden posted the first follow-up to her brilliant acapella rendition of The Who Sell Out. Tackling The Beach Boy's "God Only Knows" seems like asking for trouble, but she pulled it off with more grace then any other rendition I've ever heard. (Later in the year she tackled Michael Jackson's "Thriller" with equal ease and brilliance.)
Jim Guthrie "Hands in My Pocket"
Early in February Jim Guthrie made a full length version of a super-catchy song he'd written for Capital One Bank available on his website. Those in the US - and those without a television - were spared the ad itself, but Jim also gotr a nod from Rick Mercer who parodied the ad and song. Read more over at Angels Twenty.
His Name is Alive "Ghosts"
On March 13th His Name is Alive issued versions of songs from their debut 1990 album Livonia" re-recorded in 2001 while under contract with 4AD and re-recorded again (?) sometime prior to 2004. 2005 was clearly a comeback year for the band. They released Detrola, the best album of their career and gave us a wonderful look back through this limited CD (100 copies). Earlier this week they released an instrumental version of Detrola (along with extra tracks) as an iTunes exclusive which is not to be missed.
Her cover of "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" is like a great calm sea of sadness, and I could listen to it for hours on end and never get tired of hearing her sing it, all plaintive and hesitant and half-hopeful. (So far my record for listening to this particular track non-stop is an hour and fifteen minutes. It was awesome.)
My favourite version is from her performance at Daniel Street (December 28th, 2005) available througharchive.org.
The Mountain Goats "No Children (Audience Version)"
On June 13, 2006, John Darnielle had a sore throat and the audience helped him out by singing the song in it's entirety. What's most impressive (at noty at all a surprise) is that the entire audience knew all the words. Grab the whole show from archive.org.
Of Montreal "How Lester Lost His Wife (Pocket remix)"
On August 26th Polyvinyl released Satanic Twins featuring remixes from Satanic Panic in the Attic and The Sunlandic Twins. Impressed by the amazing Joanna Newsom remix done the year before by Pocket, I took a chance on a band I'd given up on years before only to have my interest renewed.
Final Fantasy "No Cars Go (Live)" (Arcade Fire cover)
I'm not sure where this track comes from... I know that it's a live recording from Bristol in October of 2006, and that it's a cover of an Arcade Fire track from their debut EP. Owen Pallett, by now, needs no further introduction. (However, He Poos Clouds sounds an awful lot like a soundtrack to a Broadway show. A good one, but still... I can imagine Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters duetting on a few tracks.)
The post reignited my interest in the band, and I returned to some of the demos and a few of the live tracks.
I was asked about a year ago if I had a recording of a couple of songs of there's that weren't recorded in the studio which were meant to be included on a third and final album for Rough Trade. I had recorded two shows for broadcast on CKLN, and they gave me a CD of demos for the Ten; Ten compilation I put together. I didn't have the song they wanted ("Horses"), but I did have live versions of a few other unreleased tracks.
I went looking to see if I had any more shows that I hadn't transfered and realized that I only had a single copy of the shows and no backups whatsoever. Thus, I've decided that the best course of action is to post it here.
Royal City: Live at Ted's Wrecking Yard, Toronto
Recorded Friday March 16th 2001.
"I Called But You Were..." — A unused track from the At Rush Hour sessions. There are at least two versions of this track.
Some unrelated self-promotion
A long time ago I was in a band called Georgia. Though most of the tracks are available through this site, I put up a newish mix of one of our oldest songs (10 years ago!) on a MySpace page. Take a look...
Probably one of my favourite songs has to be A Certain Ratio's "Shack Up." So, following a renewed interest in all the early Factory bands thanks to a whole bunch of soundalikes, and a recent cover from Nouvelle Vague (not on the domestic version). I wanted to track down a few more versions of the song.
I knew that ACR had a few remixes that existed alongside the original, but everything else beyond that I had no idea...
A Certain Ratio released "Shack up" on Factory records subsidiary, Factory Benelux (in Belgium) in July of 1980. In 1991, the song was also released on Factory's Palatine box set. And in 1994, the band issued the single again, along with remixes on Creation Records. Creation was busy reissuing the bands discography on CD. Finally, in 2002, Soul Jazz began releasing remastered reissues of the bands entire discography the same year as the release of the film 24 Hour Party People in which the band was featured pretty heavily.
What I didn't know was that the song was a cover.
The song was written and recorded first in 1975/6 by a UK group called Banbarra and released as a single. Since then the song (mostly a fantastic drum break at 1m44s) has been sampled several times by everyone from Prince to Public Enemy to Aaron Carter.
Though the song was theirs, A Certain Ratio - or perhaps the Factory Records names - managed to put the song at 52 in Billboard's chart. Their version wasn't much different: the vocals were sung with an understated apathy/boredom (similar to Joy Division's Ian Curtis) and everything sounded only a touch more aggressive. It was enough.
The song hasn't been covered as much as it's been sampled, but there are two notable versions... both of which stem from A Certain Ratio's version.
The first was Bis's version off their 2002 12" only release, Fact 2002, a tribute to the music of Factory Records. I'm sure they didn't know at the time the song predated factory, but it was an excellent choice and the world is better for having another version.
The most recent is Nouvelle Vague's 2006 version which strips the song of it's souls and tries to make it sexy. I'm still trying to figure out why the label thought it necessary to release three different versions of the album into the world. The only reason I can think of that doesn't annoy me is the licensing of the music. All I know is that my version didn't have this song. Do the liner notes point it out as an A Certain Ratio Cover?
A few days after we were robbed, Claire and I decided to stick with the tour and pick up where we left off.
We walked the Inca Trail (in four days) and I found out that I hiccup at elevations above 3800 meters. During the trip we had the loan of the tour companies camera, so we were still able to take photos. I was pretty impressed with myself for walking the trail, and I'm happy to report that my first proper night of camping (in my life, mind you) took place under Peruvian stars.
Upon our return, the tour company told us that one of the men who held up our tour van had been captured and that he had a camera on him. We would have to drop our plans and travel 5 hours to Pocartambo to identify the camera.
To make long story short - otherwise I'll never write it down in a non-fictional form - after a full day in the police station we managed to buy back the camera (using official channels) thanks to some careful maneuvering and about $150.00.
The rest of our trip was the standard and non-eventful touristy stuff: a trip into the jungle to see birds, monkeys, and a margay; A trip down the coast to the desert to see a guano covered island full of penguins, and wonderful little bits in between.
From a letter to my mom dated, December 23rd 2005.
Hi Mom,
Just a quick note to check in from Peru. Claire and I have had an eventful past few days in Cusco which upset our plans (though they are now back on track). I thought it best that I let you know, and also that there´s nothing to worry about...
On the 16th we set out at 5:30 a.m. from Cusco on a private tour to the Manu Biosphere Reserve (an 8 hour drive) for a day of birdwatching with a guide and a driver. The reserve at Manu held a promise of seeing up to 640 more (my bird list numbers only 101 right now - even after the New Zealand trip), so we were looking forward to reaching it. Along the road - a one lane dirt path along the mountains with 2-way traffic - we stopped occasionally to observe several birding locations. We saw about 20 birds we'd never seen before, including wild Andean parakeets and some rare ibis. At around 4:30 we stepped out of the car to look at hummingbirds and a toucan, before getting back in the car and passing through one of only two tunnels on the road. About halfway through the tunnel we heard a large bang. As we looked up we saw three masked men with guns approaching the car. It was terrifying. We were held for almost 6 hours - after disappointing them with our small amount of cash - and Claire lost her camera and binoculars. At the end we were forced to take them to a village a 2 hour drive beyond the reserve, before we were able to return to the lodge where we were staying. Thankfully, no one was hurt.
When we got to the reserve, we discovered that they had no phone, and the nearest place we could file a police report (back in the direction of Cusco) was 3 hours away.
So, we headed back to Cusco at 3:30 a.m. the next morning after a mostly sleepless night, and got to deal with the Peruvian police (itself an
interesting ordeal)... However we were told that this was only the 2nd reported incident of this kind. The last time it happened was in October and the thieves made off with almost $10,000 US. We ended up losing about $275.
Anyway, we´ve rescheduled the rest of our trip today with the tour company who are refunding most of our money and scheduling the rest of our trip at cost. We won´t get to see Arequipa, but we are managing to get back to the jungle (a different part entirely), and will get to see most of what we want to see, while managing to be extra, extra careful. We almost came straight home, but after a day or two (dealing with the policia), we decided to stay on. It is our honeymoon after all....
Now on to some good news. We found some great Peruvian food (I'll be figuring out how to make picarones and vegan lomo saltado when I get home), and the streets are FILLED with dogs. Today we counted over 34 dogs in 10 minutes. We haven't been affected by altitude sickness very much (sometimes we get a bit of a headache), and have been sampling the various products made with coca leaves - not to be confused with cocaine. It´s awful, but seems to have fended off most of the altitude symptoms.
We'll be in and out of touch, but we´re both fine... though still a little nervous.
After 15 years, 
Sister Vanilla | 
= Don't waste
your time