*LIVE STREAM* OF MICHAEL ALAN'S LIVING INSTALLATION PERFORMANCE "WE ARE ALL LIVING INSTALLATIONS" LIVE NOW inc MUSIC FROM HIS COLLAB WITH VDO & OTHERS

Watch live streaming video from kgtg at livestream.com

TAKAMI-夢ノ崖 (CLIFF OF DREAM), LP, 1985, JAPAN

The second of two collaborations between Japanese chanteuse Takemi and kosmiche synth maven Pneuma, these highly evocative and oh-so-Japanese electronic environments brim with a very specific sorta tension that's also found in other Japanese electronic relics from this era that I've shared in the past, like Dada's Castle Wall, with the way that it frontages passages of stately Japanese formalism against soaring outbursts of space rock, though in the case of Cliff Of Dream, that outburst is left for the finale. En route, you'll find passages as fussy as a royal court garden while other bits lap up against twinklingly psychoactive shores in the mode of the Hideki Matsutake/Chojuri Kondoj/Masushi Kamutsubara-Edo album that I've previously shared.

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LUTZ RAHN-SOLO TRIP, LP, 1978, GERMANY

Keyboard meister Rahn's main gig back in the day was promulgating the syrupy rich sympho formalism of cult prog rockers Novalis, but he certainly managed to cough up a delightfully unexpected hairball with this one and only solo venture of his. Rahn's sound on Solo Trip is obviously indebted to Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra and shares much with others that have flown this sorta suave yet candied and distinctly library-like banner ala Alex Cima, Christian Von Eschersheim, Angel Rada and Happy The Man keyboardist Kit Watkins' work circa his first solo outing but Rahn's work here also captures something of that very French continuum of spacily thematic synthy library sounds that extends from Alain Gorageur's soundtrack to La Planete Sauvage and on to Bernard Fevre and Claude Peraudin.

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BALLS-WE WILL GROW ON YOU, ONE-SIDED LP, 1990, USA

Featuring one member from the Gamelan new music repertory ensemble Gamelan Son Of Lion, one future member of Caroliner/Faxed-Head/Sunburned Hand Of The Man as well as the future front man for (ahem) 90's pop punk artistes The Presidents Of The United States Of America, who you'd never suspect of having this sorta thing in his background, what to speak of having performed on the street with the Caroliner cat at a point prior to this. This one-sided treasure was pretty much exclusively hawked back in the early-mid 90's from Forced Exposure and Twisted Village (which should give you a good sense of the context here), the instrumentation involved (three basses, one drummer) suggest a sludge fest, but this is anything but, with one bass recorded straight and occasionally accompanied by a pair of flapping lips, one fed through pedals and one of 'em detuned and with future Caroliner and Sunburned Hand Phil Franklin banging the tubs. What results from this unprepared jam is remarkably inspired for something spontaneously enacted, bordering on spectacular with a sound that holds a perfect mid-ground between the highly musical but origami folded and distinctly SST affiliated L.A. post punk sound of Slovenly merged with the sort of post krautrock motion latterly proposed by Cul De Sac. This is going to delight many.

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ALTERED STATES-MOSAIC, CD, 1995, JAPAN

Brilliantly breakneck Japanese avant prog conniptions from the mid-late 90's peak of that particular upsurge, courtesy of three members of the equally brain burning Ground Zero; guitarist Kazuhisa Uchihashi, bassist Nasuno Mitsuro and drummer Yasuhiro Yoshigaki, along with a rotating roster of equally impressive guests from one-time Tokyo Kid Brothers vocalist Koichi Makigami to Semantics sax master Ned Rothenberg, all of 'em effortlessly eliding juddering prog juggernauts akin to their contemporaries in Happy Family and P.O.N. with the sorta scrambled bouts of jazz fusion motion formulated by Boredoms guitarist Seiichi Yamamoto with his Live Under The Sky unit during the same era.

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ABLUTION-S.T., LP, 1974, SWEDEN

Funky, thundering, and twisty turning on a prog rock dime, this is some seriously sexy and strutting work and another great fusionoid entry from a country that was swimming in the best of the stuff back in the day, with Ablution's attack here being akin to the most frenzied passages of flute-y fusion expounded by Bjorn J:son Lindh on his early albums, though modulated by other bits that relate to the most juicily high flying moments of Michel Urbaniak's Fusion and The Chris Hinze Combination.

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LIVE STREAM OF MICHAEL ALAN'S LIVING INSTALLATION INC HIS MUSIC W/ VAS DEFERENS ORGANIZATION ON MUTANT THIS SAT. 7PM + ERIC BEGINS WRITING FOR AD HOC

With the kind permission of Gasser Grunert Gallery and in conjunction with its simultaneous live streaming at the VIP Art Fair, Mutant Sounds is proud to host a live stream of Michael Alan's Living Installation performance "We Are All Living Installations". Curated by Emily Colucci, this six hour extravaganza will be taking place this Saturday at the Dumbo Arts Center and beginning at 7:00 PM, though as this is a live art action unfolding over a long stretch of real time, normal modes of viewership don't entirely apply here, so expect momentum to build as the performance progresses over the hours. This show will feature new musical material from Michael's forthcoming LP collaboration with the band that I'm in, Vas Deferens Organization for our Puer Gravy label, as well as other musicians that Michael has recently collaborated with, like Renaldo from Renaldo & The Loaf, Geneva Jacuzzi, Jeff & Jane Hudson and Jello Biafra. New album posts will be up on Saturday night to accompany this live stream.

I'm also very happy to announce that I've been brought on board as a contributing writer to Ad Hoc, the follow-up venture from the folks once responsible for Pitchfork's Altered Zones site. My first post for them should be appearing on their site in a day or so.

THE SECOND ADVANCE SINGLE FROM MICHAEL ALAN ALIEN & VAS DEFERENS ORGANIZATION'S FORTHCOMING LP

"Scrumpie Baby's Monkey Scabies", the latest audio hallucination to emerge from the combined energies of NY visual art dynamo Michael Alan Alien and Vas Deferens Organization (en route to our soon-to-be release of this material on Puer Gravy) is now at hand for your predilection, once again in full .wav format: here

Michael discusses our collaboration in the excellent new profile of him in Crudo: here

More information about this collaboration, including a video of Michael Alan in action and a link to his site can be found on my original post here

METAL & CA-SUPERAVIT, CD, 1996 (RECORDED:1980-1984), SPAIN

Paragons of the Spanish synth pop scene alongside Aviador Dro and Los Iniciados, Metal & Ca are bound to put a sizable contingent of you folks out there directly into a minimal synth-y swoon with such a painfully pitch perfect iteration of this idiom as theirs. Compiling material issued over the three singles they released during their lifetime along with previously unreleased material and alternate versions of tracks, there's lots here going on beyond the undeniable similarity to both of their previously noted contemporaries present in the sound here. Liberally laced with both stately, minor key sax moodiness and vividly present and liquidly percolating electropop structures, their sound at times suggests a more pensive variant of Holland's Kiem, though other bits are anything but overcast, some getting their candy stripes directly from the Zuckerzeit factory, others picking up enough zippy melodicism and reverb soaked atmosphere to suggest both BEF and OMD circa Dazzle Ships.

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BETWEEN MEALS-OH NO I JUST KNOCKED OVER A CUP OF COFFEE, 12" EP, 1984, USA

Half Japanese founder and longterm subcultural fixture Jad Fair and his patented nasal naif savant stance is one that's cut both ways for me in the past, but over time it's become one that has systematically worn down my defenses and grown on me like some friendly fungus to the point where his so-wrong-it's-right histrionics now just seem like a friendly old tattered sweater to me. This curious (though not at all out of character) one-off agglomeration pits Fair against a decidedly curious consortium of left field cultural agents of the day, some of them not really known for their music making, like Duplex Planet publisher David Greenberger, some of them truly legendary for theirs, like Mo Tucker of The Velvet Underground; both of 'em working up a good head of garrulous goofiness and shambolic swagger here alongside famous producer Andy Paley (earlier a member of Modern Lovers/Sidewinders), Pep Lester associate Chuck Bell and Erik Lindgren of Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic and The Space Negros and all of it fronted (way out fronted, in some instances) by the twitching raw nerve of nerd hysteria that is Jad in the midst of an unfettered lip flap.

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MAHJUN-HAPPY FRENCH BAND, LP, 1977, FRANCE

Yup, truth in advertising, these French proggers (a later iteration of the band whose 1971 recording under the name Maajun I shared long ago) sure as hell have their happy pants on and that's no banana in their pocket either, but however jolly this whole shebang gets, there's a core of powerhouse jazz rock/hard rock smarts in Mahjun's particular prog rock admixture that perfectly contextualizes these impish (and potentially wayward) shenanigans by framing them against irrefutable finesse. With four years on from their prior outing, the mystically shimmering sympho treacle production gambits that put that previous (and eponymous) 1974 outing closer in tone to Peter Gabriel in a fox head give way here to something closer to Komintern on a unicycle with bike horns tooting or Didler Malherbe doing a capering little alto sax dance around the perimeter of Planet Gong, though absent the latter's drug lacquer and hitched to a chassis with a strange leftward torque to it; one that filters their jazz rock impulses through as much chanson as hard rock, which sounds like about as chalk and cheese a combo as can be imagined, but somehow they manage to keep these simultaneous balls in the air without looking ungainly; a feat in itself. A goodie, if your affections for French prog hew to the quirk as much as the swoon.

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RICHTER BAND-S/T, CD, 1991, CZECHOSLOVAKIA

Really rich and spectral guitar explorations that just keeps delving into deeper psychic recesses as they unfurl. Lots of signifiers are drifting past here on this long-forgotten disc, with bits of mid 70's Terje Rypdal and late 70's Alain Markusfeld bobbing through the moire-patterned and sun dappled surfaces in these near-continuous tides of sound though so to are both Manuel Gotsching circa his Private Tapes set and the delicately skewed British duo Woo; the pulse here eventually picking up enough of a head of steam out of the coalescing strands of atmospherics to emerge as a steamrolling and psychically noogie-ing krautrock guitar figure straight out of the Gunter Schickert playbook before receding into ghostlier gestures and disembodied pan-ethnic bric-a-brac.

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BOB BANNISTER-EIGHT DAY CLOCK, LP, 1992, USA

This first solo outing by Twisted Village recording artist and Tono-Bungay member Bannister is a lightly agitated pool of fuzzily wandering and mystically (if sometimes murkily) shimmering late night bedroom 4-track guitar string tangle, with Bannister bending said strings to ends that shimmer like soot blackened mirages and hang suspended in some purgatorial zone that feels pitched somewhere in-between ex Mission Of Burma and Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic member Roger Miller's solo electric guitar entwinements on his "Oh" LP and the fuzz burnished meditations of Org Records string slinger Yuzo Iwata. The fuzz fixated among you will wish you could smear this sound on toast.

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ALL DOWNED MEDIAFIRE LINKS NOW REPLACED WITH RAPIDSHARE LINKS

Now that that's done, new posts will be up by Saturday night, with the remainder of the downed links from earlier in the blog to be re-upped to Rapidshare over the following weeks.

MEDIAFIRE WIPEOUT AND THE SAVED-BY-THE-BELL OF RAPIDSHARE (FOR NOW, AT LEAST!)

MUCH AS I FEARED THEY MIGHT, THE BASTARDS AT MEDIAFIRE JUST REMOVED ALL OF THE CONTENT THAT I'VE RE-UPPED TO THEIR SITE OVER THESE LAST WEEKS (I.E. ALL OF THE CONTENT THAT HAD BEEN DOWN FROM THE PREVIOUS MEGAUPLOAD SHUTDOWN DATING FROM MARCH 2011 FORWARD) AS OF EARLIER TODAY. AS IT HAPPENS, BASED UPON THE POSSIBILITY OF JUST SUCH AN EVENTUALITY, I'VE BEEN IN THE PROCESS OF RE-UPPING THIS VERY SAME CONTENT TO RAPIDSHARE, WITH THE MAJORITY OF THOSE TO DEBUT CIRCA TOMORROW NIGHT. THUS, LINKS TO THIS NEWLY DOWNED CONTENT WILL BE BACK UP AND SHORTLY, AS WILL, RELATIVELY SOON, ALL THE OTHER DOWNED CONTENT FROM THE MEGAUPLOAD DEBACLE AND ALL OF IT NOW TO BE SHARED VIA RAPIDSHARE ALONE, GIVEN THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALL OTHER VIABLE OPTIONS. EVEN WITH THE TIL NOW RELIABLE RAPIDSHARE, I WILL NOW OPT TO USE ONLY INITIALS TO IDENTIFY MY FILES FROM NOW ON WITH ALL THE FUTURE TITLES THAT I UPLOAD WITH THEM (BEYOND THOSE THAT I'VE ALREADY UPLOADED TO THEIR SITE WITH FULL NAMES EARLIER THIS WEEK). GIVEN THEIR SWISS LOCATION, ALL SHOULD STILL BE OKAY WITH THEM, BUT THIS CONTENT POLICING IS GETTING FUCKING RIDICULOUS AND YOU CAN'T BE TO CAUTIOUS NOW.

ANYWAY, EXPECT RE-UPS OF THE ABOVE MENTIONED CONTENT BY TOMORROW AND NEW POSTS BY THURSDAY OR FRIDAY, DEPENDING ON HOW FRIED I AM FROM CONTENDING WITH ALL THIS BS.