Playlist for
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
February 1, 2008

Hosted by Greg Lyon on FRIDAYS at 2-4 pm
on WPVM Asheville (103.5 FM and www.wpvm.org)

This show is available for listening as an archive for one week after its airing at WPVM’s Archive Page (click on the STREAM button for this show–under the letter ‘G’)

Notes:

– DJ-in-training Shaina brought in a slew of UK late-70s/early 80s punk and post-punk goodies, including The Flying Lizards, a record I’ve passed up so many times in used record bins that I’m now ashamed that I’d never listened to it. Next time I find it…

– Because of an ice storm in the Asheville area and subsequent power outages, the FM transmitter was down during this broadcast, so it was internet only. Thus, I set aside most everything I had planned for the show for next week. Everything except the best Fall live album, recorded May 6, 1983, at the Austurbæjarbíó club in Reykjavík, Iceland. Why the best, you ask? Because it’s the rawest, most pounding line-up in the Fall’s history–that’s why. Guitarist Marc Riley had just been sacked, and Brix had yet to join the band. It was just Craig Scanlon on guitar, and the focus was more on rhythm–rhythm guitar and a rhythm section of the ever-stupendous Steve Hanley on bass and TWO–that’s right, TWO–drummers: Karl Burns (a serially hired and fired member of The Fall who had also played with PIL) and Steve’s brother, Paul Hanley. This line-up only recorded two singles for Rough Trade, "The Man Whose Head Expanded" and "Kicker Conspiracy", and here they were working up a slew of songs for the next LP, Perverted by Language.

– Despite the beautifully brutal rendition of "Eat Y’self Fitter" by The Fall, the standout for me this week was the background music, a collection of compositions and recordings of the seminal electronic music composer, Gottfried Michael Koenig. All you laptop musicians out there take heed: you will never be as cool as Koenig. Although his earliest works are from the mid-50s, it’s in the late 60s that Koenig really got rolling. Some of his work at the Instituut voor Sonologie in Utrecht, Netherlands, was recorded for Deutsche Grammophon and released in their Avant-Garde composers series. But now all that stuff has been released on two collections, the one by BVHaast, which I played today, and the other on Edition RZ. There’s no overlap. Click on the album cover to go to Koenig’s website.

– The Blue Sky Boys, Earl and Bill Bolick, originally of Hickory, NC, were one of the greatest brother duets in the history of country music, and if you like the Louvin Brothers and the Monroe Brothers, you simply must get ahold of a bunch of the Blue Sky Boys recordings from the 1930s. They excel at the murder ballad, always a staple of brother duets, but we heard another form of warped love ballad today. They got their start on the radio here in Asheville, NC–I presume at WWNC, which also saw the debut of Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys in 1939. It’s very sad that the station went from a country format to conservative talk in 2002. Booooo hisssss!

Background Music: Gottfried Michael Koenig - Acousmatrix-History of Electronic Music I-II (BVHaast, 2005)

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