Jon Tabakin - It's Never Too Late To Smile

Label: n/a , Tapete Records (reissue)

Year: 1975, 2017 (reissue)

Genre: Private Press, Power Pop, A.M. Rock

Mary Kay Cosmetics - Gentle On My Mind

This is the stuff this blog exists for! I found this incredible CD in Exiled Records in Portland the other day and knew I'd struck gold as soon as I started reading the liner notes. Product Music Vol 1 (the first and seemingly last volume in the 'series') is a compilation of songs from 'industrial musicals', the stage productions put on by corporations to boost morale and sense of team spirit among employees. Limited to a run of only 1000 copies, what the listener of this CD is privileged to is an experience of creepy, capitalism-at-play. Each song is an ode to a company or brand, a hymn of consumption, a song for corporate worship. The whole record is mind-boggling: Who wrote and sang these songs? How did employees react? Were the songs effective? The song featured above is one of the less sinister offerings on the album, a nonetheless eerie piece of showtune muzak, to be looped over a store's PA system until time's end.

Label: Honest-Abe Disc!
Year: 1996
Genre: Consumer Crooner, Easy-Listening, Showtunes, Muzak

I Am Just A Pupil - Family Dollar

I came across I Am Just A Pupil's tape 12 Hours FULL RELAXATION a few weeks ago when my tastes were at an intersection of glitchy, restless electronica and placid, minimalist composition. Described by label 1080p as "New Age / Comedy", the tape weaves together ambient and impressionistic music with chaotic and comedic vocal samples. Album opener is a conversation between a child and Siri, warped by vocal manipulation and set to a soundtrack of new-age pan-flutes. The album's second - and strongest - track is 'Family Dollar', a Satie-esque piece enhanced by samples of what appear to be a domestic argument and a Youtube gun review. I think Hank Hill even makes an appearance. The piece is slowly submerged in reverb, as rounds of bullets are fired and cicadas come to a rest. It is strangely affecting, the beauty of the music juxtaposed by its decontextualised violence. Balanced and thoughtful, the music reaches a sincerity that so much post-modern, web 2.0 music fails to realise. I was, and still am, very taken by this track - by how harmonious its dissonance is and how sensitive it is in its absurdity.

Label: 1080p
Year: 2015
Genre: Ambient, New Age, Electronica, Experimental, Comedy

Graham Kartna - Null 2

"you know how in happy feet they sing songs to each other to find their soul mate? this is my song."
"Its so weird, there is always some music that you havent heard of before that is weird like this"
"I love you so much"
"what you hear when you die"
"I'm about to break the replay button. Sorry peeps... =l"
"What type of music is this?"

Label: self-released
Year: 2015
Genre: Glitch, Experimental, Electronica

MilkCan - Keep Your Head Up

Late last night I somehow found myself browsing through Playstation One soundtracks online. Things got a little weird and I became obsessed with this: a song from a game I've never played (nor even heard of). The game is UmJammer Lammy, a rhythm adventure in which you play along to music by a fictional band called MilkCan. This tune, 'Keep Your Head Up', is completely out-there. It starts off like a pop-punk showtune before spiralling into a psychedelic whirl that sounds like something Van Dyke Parks would have done had he sold-out. It then transitions into a ska tune, all the while our protagonist Lammy wails in a theatrical, out-of-tune kinda way. But it's all so good. Imagine Frank Zappa doing the music for a musical about Reel Big Fish with the witch from Wicked playing lead.

Label: Sony Records
Year: 1999
Genre: Pop-Punk, J-Pop, Psychedelia, Showtune

Z-Rock Hawaii - I Get A Little Taste Of You

Z-Rock Hawaii is a collaborative effort between Japan's legendary noise group Boredoms and the unstoppable, indescribable, Ween. The latter are in some ways a perfect representation of Dig That Treasure!'s spirit; off-kilter pop, simultaneously esoteric and accessible, serious and tongue-in-cheek. Ween have, however, built such a reputation that they are now by no means obscure. Z-Rock Hawaii are, though. For some reason this project, bringing together the US and Japan's two masters of the underground, did not reach the same heights as either Ween or Boredom's non-collaborative works. Shame. This song, 'I Get A Little Taste Of You', is a sweet ditty with an infectious melody and bonkers passages of Yamantaka Eye's non-verbal yaps.

Label: Nipp Guitar
Year: 1996
Genre: Experimental Rock, Novelty, Noise Rock

Jeans Wilder - Sparkler

Here's a song that follows a relatively simple formula with great results. Jean Wilder's 'Sparkler' is hardly unique in its looping of a reverberated rockabilly chord progression, like a warbling prom slow-dance (see also: Suicide's 'Surrender', Dirty Beaches' 'Lord Knows Best'), but it does execute this warm, comforting moment in sound with great skill.

Label: La Station Radar
Year: 2010
Genre: Rockabilly, Experimental Pop

Diveo - Ferris Wheel

This is an unusual inclusion for the blog but one that is wholly justifiable! I don't need to justify anything that I post on here, but I want to because... Well, it might be interesting. At least to me. 'Ferris Wheel' is a saccharine pop song, somewhat in the chiptune vein but also part of a wider pop subculture triggered (but not started) by the emergence of PC Music. The last couple of years have seen a tidal wave of brilliant no-fear pop songs, sweeping the underground but belonging in sound to the greater realms of chart music. However, unlike the folks over at PC Music and a few others (Le1f, Sophie, Anamanaguchi) most of this stuff goes unnoticed in both mass and indie media and instead suffers the fate of being shelved as an internet oddity before being forgotten. This is under-appreciated pop music and that's why it belongs on this blog! Let's just put it this way: if had been recorded in 1983 by a Japanese group I would have not thought twice about posting it. Anyway, Diveo's 'Ferris Wheel' is lovely and highly theatrical bubblegum pop, with a narrative split into two voices: boy dreaming of girl on ferris wheel, and girl on ferris wheel. The male voice gives a wordy rollercoaster of a verse which the girl echoes later and, huzzah, the romance is complete! As the male voice foreshadows at the beginning:"...we find out with some accidental realisation on a summer night beneath the stars where everything feels like a simulated dream but simultaneously real." Synthesizers playfully flirt with percussive pops and hi-hats behind the vocals, completing a really adventurous, modern love song.

Label: Activia Benz
Year: 2015
Genre: Pop, Chiptune, Bubblegum

Jeannie Piersol - The Nest

I've been away from the blog for quite a while now, having either been abroad or stressing about one thing or another. I thought it was apt to return to business with a song that I discovered this summer and one that, since my becoming aware of it, has popped up all over the shop ever since. Jeannie Piersol's 'The Nest' seems to be something of a staple in obscure music circles. It doesn't quite fit into any real classification due to it's relatively idiosyncratic production and vocals, and Piersol only released four tracks in her brief two year career, so the whole joint inevitably faded into the 'to be rediscovered when nerds start blogs' bin of record shops.

Label: Cadet Concept Records
Year: 1969
Genre: Soul, Funk

Ava Luna - Carbon

Ava Luna are a group from Brooklyn who have recently released a new record, Infinite House. Its sound lays somewhere between the fairly vague confines of no-wave and soul, and the less vague, very New York-centric alternative rock formula. Typically, new music released on an established independent label (Western Vinyl) is more the business of Pitchfork, "DIY" and other press-release zeitgeist generators. But this record - albeit from a band I knew I loved - has really stolen my heart. The trouble with the aforementioned sites (those that publish all the same acts doing the press circuit) is that they won't give significant attention to anything that won't return the favour: a major website giving a 'relevant' artist an exceptionally good review will generate a lot of attention and 'clicks' for the site in return, but a major website doing the same for a smaller act with less promotional buzz will, while making a few people happy, do relatively little for the website. Ava Luna are not as marketable as many of their counterparts and subsequently their music is criminally underplayed. It has jittery Captain Beefheart guitars and ESG's funky vocal work, with a heart that follows in a line of awkward erudite New Yorkers -- Talking Heads, James Chance, Dirty Projectors. This track features Carlos Hernandez's calls of "that's the trouble with... that's the trouble with love", possibly the highpoint of the album for me. Anyway, this blog is for the overlooked and I think that, for what it is, this record is exactly that. It is fantastic, nothing less.

Label: Western Vinyl
Year: 2015
Genre: Rock, No-Wave, Experimental, Soul

R. Stevie Moore & Ariel Pink - Come My Way

On my Resonance FM show I've dedicated whole episodes to both Ariel Pink and R. Stevie Moore, each time spinning my favourite rarities from the two. That said, up until about five years ago everything they'd released was a 'rarity'. Anyway, they are two of my favourite artists and ones who have opened me to a load of music that's informed this blog's identity. Naturally, them coming together to collaborate is always going to be pretty special. 'Come My Way' is cut from their record Ku Klux Glam, although the song originally featured on Moore's 1976 effort Stevie Moore Returns. This time around it's Pink providing the vocals while Moore and Jason Falkner lay down the instrumental. Pink is so perfectly suited to the tune - a gorgeous 60s pastiche that you can imagine Pink might have based songs like 'Dayzed Inn Daydreams' or 'Only In Dreams' on.

Label: Stroll On Records
Year: 2012
Genre: Rock, Sunshine Pop

David Darling & The Wulu Bunun - Lugu Lugu Kan-Ibi

On this blog I often cover music that is indebted to intercultural exchanges; products of traded ideas, or the obsession of one culture with another. I've written previously on the Francophilic tradition of Japanese pop, the admiration of Ethiopian pop by Western indie rock acts, and the exotic fantasies of island life. But this is quite different. On the record Mudanin Kata, American composer and cellist David Darling matched the a capella songs of the Taiwanese aborigine tribe the Wulu Bunun with his own New Age accompaniments. Unlike, for example, the exotica of North America and Europe that reinterprets or - more often - completely constructs fantasies of the Pacific islands in a playful imaginative way, Darling's project involved actually taking recordings of the tribe's ancient song and altering them. It was a project with the potential to be tacky or even disrespectful. Yet, the sensitivity with which Darling handles the aborigine songs is remarkable, and his arrangements are subtle and tasteful: they are there to amplify the effect of the melodies, not overpower them. There's a duo of tracks on the record that work as a suite. Whether that was the intention or not, they complement each other perfectly and are tied together by field recordings of what is presumably the Taiwanese rainforest. 'Ku-Isa Tama Laug' is followed by 'Lugu Lugu Kan-Ibi', these two tracks characterised by beautiful cyclical melodies. I feel like this project is a real testament to human compassion, sensitivity and appreciation.

Label: Riverboat Records
Year: 2004
Genre: Traditional, New Age, Folk

Sume - Forventning / Ankomst

Greenland is perhaps one of the last countries whose music I expected to write about on this blog. But, as so often happens with my research and curation for Dig That Treasure!, I've surprised myself again. Trawling the web I stumbled upon Sume, a band whose initial attraction to me was largely based on the fact that they come from the musically curious island of Greenland. However, that's not the say the appeal ended there. An amply-political band with lyrics critical of Denmark's colonial power, the cover to Sume's debut record Sumut depicts the rather magnificent image of an Inuit hunter killing a Dane. Somewhat conflictingly, the band actually recorded Sumut in Copenhagen, but we needn't hesitate over that. The album, seminal in Greenland, was purportedly bought by 20% of the country's population. Impressive? If you consider that 20% of Greenland's population at the time of the record's release in 1973 only equalled a figure of around 10,000 people, everything begins to come into perspective. But you get the significance. And the music? Oh yeah, the music is great. Sume took influence from the progressive rock and hard rock of the United States and weaved that together with Greenlandic vocals and freewheelin' horns. In an upbeat quasi-indie pop track like Forventning/Ankomst, Greenlandic sounds like Welsh and, well, the whole production sounds like Gorky's Zygotic Mynki. Never a bad thing; Gorky's reign supreme as the best Welsh band of all time, a country that appears, like Greenland, invariably wet, cold and dour.

Label: Demos (DK)
Year: 1973
Genre: Folk Rock, Indie Pop, Progressive Rock

Dorothy Collins & Raymond Scott - Singin' In The Rain

Raymond Scott is best known as an electronic music innovator - creating and playing his own instruments, and experimenting with electronic methods before electronic music was a major player in people's minds. Aside from that, he was a composer, a pianist, engineer, producer, and bandleader. Here he is as the latter, leading his Raymond Scott Quintette and with his wife Dorothy Collins on vocals. A singer and child star, Collins was vocalist for Scott's band from the age of 15. This recording is very much 'of its time': Scott provides an arrangement more modest than his usual forward-thinking experiments, and Collins provides vocals that are, in hindsight, dated and antiquated. The recording, from 1955, comes only three years after Singin' In The Rain - from the classic musical of the same name - was originally released.

Label: ?
Year: 1955
Genre: Jazz, Broadway

Sean Nicholas Savage - Caitlin

Out of print, unavailable for download, and with under 40 listeners on music scrobbling site Last FM, Sean Nicholas Savage's 2008 CDr Little Submarine is virtually untraceable. Yet, as Arbutus Records's first ever release it acts as a landmark: the beginning of 'weird Canada' - a modern scene and sound manifested in acts like Makeout Videotape, Majical Clouds, Doldrums, Tonstartssbandht and other affiliates. This release is special and 'Caitlin' is the best of the lot. The guitar line is frantic and Savage's vocals are strained, but still it remains sugary, sweet and infectious. It's a real modern treasure, one that's very hard to find but easy to digest.

Label: Arbutus Records
Year: 2008
Genre: Indie Pop, Freak Folk

Nancy Leticia - Would U Like Some Flan

Nancy Leticia is a pianist based in Vancouver whose music inhabits - but seamlessly blends - two different worlds. A formally trained pianist, she's posted videos of herself playing Chopin, Satie and Scriabin on YouTube. Yet, the music she composes herself is electronica in a similar vein to producers like Hot Sugar (who she's collaborated with in the past). Her music embraces net art, Classicism and Hypermodernism and the combination of classical influences with internet-age means produces something really beautiful; her piano playing is elegant and fluid, but the musical aesthetic belongs in the considerably 'kitsch' world of the internet. This track, 'Would u like some flan', is a perfect example of her work - an aesthetically gorgeous piece, whose lush synthesisers and modest beat build slowly and warmly.

Label: n/a
Year: 2014
Genre: Electronica, Classical

Harpers Bizarre - Come To The Sunshine

Despite working with Harry Nilsson and Randy Newman, Harpers Bizarre are a rather obscure name in 60s pop terms. They released a few records between '67 and '76 but never seemed to 'make it' in the way that many of their more memorable contemporaries did. Still, they put out some great tracks, thanks to the songwriters they worked with and their choice of cover versions. Written for the band by Van Dyke Parks, 'Come To The Sunshine' is a typical Sunshine Pop song, with jangly guitars, vocal harmonies and a heavily orchestrated arrangement; woodwind, strings and brass all put to use here. I've been a big fan of this track for a couple of years and although I probably prefer Van Dyke Parks's recording, I'd say this version captures the 'swinging 60s' better.

Label: Warner Bros.
Year: 1967
Genre: Sunshine Pop, Baroque Pop

Julian Lynch - Es's

Julian Lynch needs little introduction. A favourite of mine, the multi-instrumentalist has released several criminally overlooked records over the last few years. These records have seen him develop a sound that weaves together freak folk, electronica, psychedelia and ambience to form a really distinctive, pastoral sound. As an Ethnomusicology PhD student, a profound and audible understanding of global musics and cultures lines all of his works, whether that's rhythmically, melodically or simply in his instrumental choices (clarinet, synthesisers, percussion and whatever he can lay his hands on!). This song, "Es's", is from his limited edition cassette Buffalo Songs, a tape that collates various cuts of Lynch's unreleased home recordings and demos. "Es's" is a warm potpourri of Moog synthesisers, strong percussion and sweet vocals.

Label: Goaty Tapes
Year: 2011
Genre: Folk, Experimental, Electronica, World

Warfield Spillers - Daddy's Little Girl

This is a seriously rare and hard-to-trace track from 'Warfield Spillers' a band who seemingly only ever had one release, a 7" with this on the A-side. It barely exists online, but for on Ariel Pink's 2010 FACT mix, which led me to think that it could be an Ariel hoax... I was over-theorising there and have decided it's just a super weird and low-fidelity one-off release from the 80s. Most simply it's a cracking soul song, but it definitely borders on new-wave territory.

Label: Compography
Year: 1988
Genre: Soul, New Wave

Gary Wilson - In The Night

Gary Wilson is one of the most curious figures in 'Outsider Music'. Fascinated by lounge music, rock n roll and The Beatles, Wilson established himself as component musician at an early age, although it was only after he became mentee to John Cage that his music took a turn for the experimental. After his 1977 debut and subsequent tours, he 'retired'. Almost thirty years later, and with fans in the likes of Beck, The Residents and The Roots, Gary Wilson returned. This song 'In The Night' - from his 2010 record Electric Endicott - is typically his. Experimental but strongly melodic, it calls out funk, lounge and noise pop to create a weirdo stew a fascinating sound. 'In The Night' particularly brings to mind R. Stevie Moore and Talking Heads, although with music this idiosyncratic comparisons seem futile!

Label: Western Vinyl
Year: 2010
Genre: 'Outsider Music', Pop, Funk, Experimental