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Dusted Features
Every Friday, Dusted Magazine publishes a series of music-related lists compiled by our favorite artists. This week: acclaimed Italian guitarist Giuseppe Ielasi and Michigan punks Skate Laws.
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Listed: Giuseppe Ielasi + Skate Laws
Giuseppe Ielasi
Over the past decade, Giuseppe Ielasi has played many roles: improvising guitarist, sound engineer, installation artist, distributor, label head, and more. Fringes and Schoolmap, two of the three labels he’s been involved in, have released works by a who’s who of avant-garde innovators, including Eliane Radigue, Rolf Julius, David Toop and Tom Recchion, as well as albums by contemporary electronic composers and improvisers such as Andrew Pekler, Akira Rabelais, John Butcher and Annette Krebs. Senufo Editions — his newest label, which he runs with his partner Jennifer Veillerobe — specializes in low-run vinyl, cassettes and CDs of subtly engineered field recordings, cracked electronics, sound art and more.
His most recent solo work, as heard on his 12k album Aix or series of Stunt 12”s, investigates his own personal intersection of musique concrète, turntablism and psychoacoustic effects. An expanded edition of Handcut, a 2010 LP by the duo Bellows (Ielasi and Nicola Ratti), is being reissued by Senufo on CD this spring.
1. Robert Ashley - "Automatic Writing (Lovely Music)
A lot of Ashley’s music has no beginning or end, like opening a door to a space where something is happening, and leaving after a while. I love this piece’s accidents, imperfections, random interaction between all the elements, and the way it deals with the composer’s own ’limitations’ (a mild case of Tourette’s syndrome) (not far from Alvin Lucier’s stuttering voice, which gets ’corrected’ in "I’m sitting in a room"). The cd version also includes two text-based pieces, from an early opera (and all of his operas are marvelous).
2. Miles Davis - Get Up with it (Sony)
I could have chosen any of his late ’60s / early ’70s records....this is certainly the wildest and darkest (well, apart some of those bootlegs that appear now and then).
3. Gangstarr - Moment of Truth
The whole list could be easily filled up only with hip-hop classics. Maybe not their best record, but the one that started my own interest in contemporary black music.
4. Jon Hassell - Dream Theory in Malaya (E.G.)
One of my favorite, often overlooked, composers. ’Fourth World’ precursor, looking for a possible contemporary western music that incorporates all sorts of non-western influences, without being a pastiche or a cheap imitation.
5. Infiniti - Skynet (Tresor)
TOP Juan Atkins productions !
6. György Ligeti - Mechanical Music (Sony Classical)
Incredibly fast and complex compositions for musical automata: the versions for computer controlled barrel organ are great, as is the randomly polyrhythmic ’Poéme Symphonique’, a fluxus-inspired piece for 100 metronomes.
7. The Peuls (EMI Musical Atlas)
For the past few years I have been collecting ethnographic LP’s (mostly African). Basically everything recorded or produced by Charles Duvelle, Hugo Zemp, Jean Jenkins, John Levy, Hugh Tracey is incredible, but the list of amazing discoveries is endless. This is a lesser-known LP on the Musical Atlas series. Side A contains those incredible donndolooru (a rudimentary jaw’s harp without frame) recordings to which the Eselsohr cassette on Senufo Editions is dedicated.
8. Eliane Radigue - Chry-ptus (Schoolmap)
I could have listed any of her works. I choose this one not only because I was involved in its release, but mainly because it’s quite a special piece (actually two pieces, to be played simultaneously, realized in 1971), somewhere between her early installation pieces and the latter Buddhism-influenced compositions.
9. Toru Takemitsu - Film Music by.... (7 cd box on Victor, Japan)
An amazing collection of film scores for Kurosawa, Teshigahara, Oshima, Imamura and others. Includes one of my favorite soundtracks ever; the one for Kobayashi’s "Kwaidan" (1965).
10. David Tudor - Neural Synthesis (Lovely Music)
Apart from my total admiration for Tudor as a pianist, his ’difficult’ choices and his commitment to (real) new music, I love the way he dedicated the second part of his artistic life to develop an electronic system / network which would generate its own patterns, have its own life, somewhere between electronic engineering and biology. I find the idea of a composer / interpreter that decides to design a setup and lose control over its behavior very inspiring.
Skate Laws
Skate Laws was formed in 2002 from the ashes of Ann Arbor legends Precinct 14, Scum:Kill and Vomit. Consisting of longtime member FJ and a rotating cast of quasi and demi-collaborators, Skate Laws has explored the darker, louder intersections of hardcore and standup with unwavering integrity and power. Dedicating songs to making "your own rules" and culture entrepreneurialism, Skate Laws posits themselves as a vital, uncompromising voice of dissent in a modern tide of apathy, bile and regret. Their upcoming release on Penile Crucifixion Tapes, Cops and Oxy, addresses the inherent deceit of matrimony and the law with vicious aplomb and dissent.
1. John Lurie - “The Resurrection of Albert Ayler”
This might be my favorite piece of music. John Lurie nails this gnarly/gorgeous/no wave/jacked-but-transcendent melody thing like nobody’s business. It’s sans the noir kitsch of the first Lounge Lizards record and far from the funkiness of later Lizards, plus Arto Lindsay shreds all over it. It’s such an intense experience; I can’t imagine what it would have been like set to the dance piece it was commissioned for (The Elizabethan Phrasing of the Late Albert Ayler by Karole Armitage). Given his condition, I doubt Lurie’s heard it in years. If I meet him, I’ll ask if I can re-release it on vinyl.
2. John Giorno - “I Don’t Need It, I Don’t Want It, And You Cheated Me Out Of It”
Whoa nelly! I wasn’t prepared to hear this. Who is? His delivery is uncanny. You can shut down a party with this. John Giorno inspired me to work toward memorizing long monologues because I thought, “If this guy can rip these wild, tangled tirades without reading lines from a notebook... that’s powerful.” Later I saw a photo of him performing with a manuscript.
3. Infinite Body - Carve Out the Face of My God
I’m a bit enamored with the familial vibes emanating from Cali’s PPM and Not Not Fun. Such good music dripping off of tight crews! I’ll pick up anything Infinite Body puts out. It’s one of my dreams to produce a skate video with a soundtrack comprised solely of musical “dips into the void” by the likes of Infinite Body, D.A., and Growing. There’s something about a harsh ambient skate vid that sounds so great.
4. Angus MacLise "Loft Collage”
What begins as a fairly innocuous lo-fi collage roving between a chattering couple (Angus and Hetty?) and some oh so tasty hippie jamming dives head first into a whole other dimension just short of two minutes in. It’s like hearing the world splitting open to show you how insane the core is. Snatch it for “>free
5. Suicide “See You Around”
Although it sounds a bit like “Ghost Rider,” this demo has such a loose, open groove and structure with Vega dishing spooky whispers over top. Something happens to the tape and mix throughout; you can’t really tell what’s going on what with spikes, drop-outs, weird sounds, etc. You can almost picture the room it was recorded in but . . . so mysterious. Another genuine creeper from Suicide.
6. Stan Brakhage/James Tenney - Score to Desistfilm
Imagine the lost noise jams of the 1950s! If costs weren’t prohibitive back in the day, recording studios were probably NOT down to put your skronk on tape. 1954 is especially early for this kind of radical score -- buzzes, screeches, signal overdrive. I love the film but the score was particularly mind blowing upon first view. It precedes many of the canonic musique concrete pieces by years.
7. Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet - Dim the Lights, Chill the Ham
My favorite album. I own it on tape, CD and vinyl. Each format has its own bonus track!
8. Francis Bebey - Akwaaba
A recent find. Akwaaba has a certain kind of nimble, minimal funkiness akin to Byard Lancaster’s ’It’s Not Up To Us.’ Bebey rocks a bizarre throat-singing/double-voice thing that sounds like a damaged vocoder. Strange & beguiling.
9. Pharoah Sanders - Izipho Zam
The emotional breadth of Pharoah Sanders’s music is pretty unreal but Izipho Zam has those dark, world shaking moments, and especially on the title track, an unrestrained joy I don’t think I’ve heard in any of his other tunes. Stuff like “Astral Traveling” is great to be sure but the ragers like “Balance” from Izipho Zam boil my blood. It strikes me as the most emotionally true music. So human. By the way, a good DJ trick is to cut the bass on Leon Thomas’ live version of "The Creator Has A Master Plan" & mix it with ESG’s "UFO." If you got a little echo on the mixer, Leon’s yodels bubble all over the track.
10. Greg Ginn - Let It Burn (Because I Don’t Live There Anymore)
This album is a litmus test but for what I’m not certain. It’s soooooo dumb but it’s so good too in a way…but it’s really not good either. Every time it plays it at my record store, someone inquires about buying it and I think, “Are you on drugs?! This record is soooooo dumb!!” But the dumber Black Flag got, the more I liked them. Loose Nut and In My Head trump Damaged.
By Dusted Magazine
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