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Ear Bliss
Ear Bliss
2d
Ear Bliss
New Radicals - "You Get What You Give"
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Mark my words, they'll be studying this song 1,000 years from now when trying to understand the slice of history we call our lifetime.
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12
5
2d
Ear Bliss
Don Cherry & Terry Riley - Köln, February 23, 1975
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A brilliant cosmic collaboration between two of the 20th century's great innovative musical minds. Terry Riley's hypnotic, dancing organs paired with the aerial gymnastics of Don Cherry's trumpet improvisations start with Riley's "Descending Moonshine Dervishes" and then proceed into outer orbit from there. There has been no official release of this session (or of the one held the day before), though some grey market pressings exist. You can easily find the audio of the Feb. 22 improvisation, but it is noticeably rougher with Riley's organs very foregrounded in the mix to the point of being a little bit abrasive, though don't let that scare you off if you enjoy the performance from the following day.
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1
2d
Ear Bliss
Mal Waldron Quintet - "The Seagulls of Kristiansund"
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I played this for myself for the first time 2-3 months ago, and I can't stop returning to it for its misty and melancholic beauty. Calming yet pensive, "The Seagulls of Kristiansund" first appeared on Mal Waldron's album One-Upmanship (1977); this performance, recorded at Greenwich Village's famous Village Vanguard in 1986, is a 26-minute impressionistic improvisation that places you within the titular Norwegian municipality as you listen to the musicians take their time and their turns in describing the fjords and fauna and overcast weather to you via their instruments. In a word, chilling. And, yes, you'll believe you're hearing the seagulls that this song is dedicated to right there inside the New York club. One listen through this recording can easily turn into two or four. Stream: YouTube | Apple Music | Spotify
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1
5w
Ear Bliss
Fugazi - "I'm So Tired"
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Shout out to anyone that's tired. Sheep are counting you.
13
5w
Ear Bliss
John Coltrane - “Dearly Beloved” (1965)
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September 23, 1926 - July 17, 1967 - September 23, 2026 - ♾️
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6w
Ear Bliss
Grateful Dead / John Oswald - Grayfolded
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In the mid-'90s, Canadian media artist John Oswald, by invitation of Phil Lesh, sampled and arranged audio from over 100 different live performances of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" to create two sprawling supercut compositions. Grayfolded is not only an aural history of the Dead's mythical jam vehicle, it is also a sonic chronicle of the band's own fabled legacy. Oswald pulled samples from tapes dating back to 1968, when "Dark Star" was evolving into the vast cosmic fields of sound that it became known to be, all the way to the final few iterations in 1993. In doing such, every band member of the Dead from each of its eras is heard at some point in this time-hopping amalgam. Both understanding the assignment and being naturally drawn to experimentation, Oswald often layered more than one audio track at a time (as the Dead had experimented with for Anthem of the Sun in '68!), so you get surprising results of hearing the band in one decade jam against itself in another. What is already supremely trippy on its own gets even further out there; take, for instance, the beautiful eeriness of hearing multiple Jerry Garcias from across the years singing in unison. These intersections are all laid out in the comprehensive "visual time maps" diagrammed in the Grayfolded liner notes that allow the listener to watch for the addition and subtraction of varying "Dark Stars" from the audio. It is surprising to learn that John Oswald hadn't paid attention to what the Grateful Dead were doing for ~20 years when he was granted carte blanche to the band's tape archive. The way he assembled both suites of Grayfolded shows sincere concentration to completing this project with care and fidelity. All of the hallmarks of the ever-changing "Dark Star" experience can be heard here, from appearances of thematic jams (e.g., "La Estrella Oscura" layering performances of the "Spanish Jam"), to freakouts and feedback squalls, to the Phil excursions into deep sound familiar of many 1972-'74 Stars, to the MIDI explorations of the late '80s and '90s, to the ambient expeditions of all eras (see the incredible "Cease Tone Beam," in which you can be forgiven for forgetting what band you're listening to). The pacing and flow of Grayfolded maintains that organic feeling of the Dead charting their course on stage when improvising, and Oswald never makes the playback sound overly busy when interpolating multiple audio sources.
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6w
Ear Bliss
The Free Design - "Kites Are Fun" (1967)
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Introverts, this one's for us! Now, I mean this without malice, but if you see a few promo photos of sibling vocal group The Free Design, you might expect it's preppy fodder for the listening diets of squares that they created. The Dedrick family kept their sonic palette loaded with lighter tones, that's for sure, but the way they applied them was with substance and a will to be adventurous. For instance, I'll argue that the wordless vocal arrangement in the final minute of their cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "59th Street Bridge Song" is one the most purely psychedelic moments in the whole discography of the sixties. Anyhow, when Stereolab dedicates a song to you, you must be doing something right as far as artistic relevancy goes. "Kites Are Fun," title track to their first album, is a good example of what I'm talking about. On paper, it seems like a lightweight affair: pleasant acoustic strumming, a lilting recorder piping away, a three-part harmony singing about, well, kites being fun. But the instrumental melody and vocal lines are whimsical yet unexpectedly a little haunting as well. The way the verses start airy and then pick up like a heart gone racing, as though mimicking the change of the kite from grounded to airborne as you run with it, and the lyrics going from innocent to intimate with that shift is brilliant. The voice of the narrator reveals of themself and their kite, "[W]e'd like to be a zillion miles away from everyone / 'cause mom and dad and Uncle Bill don't realize," then that transfixing bridge, "...kites are fuu-uun." Love it. You can interpret the kite as literal or figurative, but either way, I'll always applaud a song that celebrates being alone, but not lonely, and not caring a whit what others think (because they just won't get it...I mean, we all agree that Uncle Bill doesn't know shit, so why bother). The whole album is a great listen.
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2
7w
Ear Bliss
Donna Summer - "I Feel Love"
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A quick perusal of the RL archives via the Explore search indicates this Summer/Moroder/Bellotte all-timer has yet to be recommended on the platform. Therefore, humbly, please allow me to be the first!
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6
7w
Ear Bliss
Disco Inferno - "The Last Dance"
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In the hypothetical (nightmare) scenario of being limited to listening to no more than 100 songs for the rest of my life, "The Last Dance" would 100% make the cut. Disco Inferno were always an intriguing band, but they were almost never as outright accessible as this (they made plenty of catchy, memorable songs, but they did that on their own terms). It's one of those songs I come back to every so often and find myself completely re-immersed in again. My lazy summary-advertisement of this song is "the best New Order song that they had nothing to do with" (though Michael Johnson, who did loads of work behind the board for New Order, did produce this song). Soaring guitar pop standing on a bubbling bassline, twinkling synthesizers and a drum machine. Lyrically, "The Last Dance" addresses the anxiety of living in the shadow cast from millennia of human invention. In one regard, that's creative invention, the ever-expanding challenge posed to the modern artist to produce something original and worthy without merely rehashing what has come before or been done more capably by the talents of another. In a different sense, it's destructive invention, the continual evolution of warfare that poses a perpetual threat to erase both the creator and their work, or anything else we hold precious, in the devastation of artless, fruitless combat: "And a fear of the future beats so deep in our hearts That they'll all but destroy ourselves Like the centuries-old feuds Being upgraded with high-tech weapons In the end it's not the future But the past that'll get us" But, in the end, a resolution is made to reject fatalism and creative pessimism and push on anyhow: "But now my eyes point ahead / away from the ghosts of the dead."
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7w
Ear Bliss
Chris Bell - "I Am the Cosmos" b/w "You and Your Sister"
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Pop music of a rare class. Achingly, heartrendingly gorgeous songwriting. A founding member of Big Star who left the group after their first album, Bell recorded these songs somewhere between 1974 and '75. This 7" single was released in 1978, the same year that Bell, 27 years old, was killed in a car crash two days after Christmas. Every night I tell myself, "I am the cosmos, I am the wind," But that don't get you back again.
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1
8w
Ear Bliss
Louis Armstrong - "What a Wonderful World"
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Mindfulness meditation. Gratitude journal entry. Sensory detail log. Centering exercise. Appreciation for the ordinary miracles of daily life. Reflection upon the sublime fact of our existence. Egoless embrace of the idea a generation exceeding the bests of those before it should be hoped for and celebrated. Optimism at its most true. A hymn of unburdening. Relief from the intentions of those who seek to seize or lay waste to what is ours to share. Hope in its purest form. All of the above, and one of the biggest wins in all of human history, that's what the two minutes and twenty seconds of "What a Wonderful World" will always be. Introduced to me by my kindergarten teacher who played it repeatedly throughout the school year as we kids sat together on the carpet and learned what beauty and wonder were.
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19
9w
Ear Bliss
Lush - "Ladykillers"
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Fell in love with this song all over again today not once, but twice, after not having heard it for years. Once for rediscovering what a killer song this indeed is, then twice for learning that at least half of the lyrics here make it an Anthony Kiedis diss track.
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5
10w
Ear Bliss
Pharoah Sanders performs "Kazuko" in a tunnel in the Marin Headlands (1982)
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With harmonium accompaniment. I'll just quote a very-upvoted remark left in the comments section for this video: "i cannot overstate how infinitely and eternally cool this is"
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30
2
10w
Ear Bliss
Magdalena Bay - "Top Dog"
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Yeah, I can be like the girl in Jurassic Park at heart ...at heart
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2
11w
Ear Bliss
Paul McCartney - "Temporary Secretary"
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2
11w
Ear Bliss
X-Ray Spex - "Oh Bondage Up Yours!"
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There will never be enough femme punk anthems in this world, and there certainly will never be enough femme punk anthems with a bleating saxophone part.
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4
12w
Ear Bliss
Chic - "Good Times"
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Clams on the half shell and rollerskates (rollerskates) 🛼
1
12w
Ear Bliss
Taj Mahal Travellers
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Celestial transmission music. Taj Mahal Travellers didn't so much make music as they channeled astral frequencies using their instruments as antennas, generating experiential soundscapes that prioritize tone, texture and space over melody, rhythm and structure. This enigmatic free-improv collective took shape in Japan during the late sixties and disbanded at some point in the mid-seventies; the group's name is from an actual road trip sojourn to Agra where the musicians explored sonic traditions and instruments of the cultures visited along the way. They are one of the most organically psychedelic groups I am aware of, playing acoustic instruments in non-traditional ways as the sounds they produce are electronically processed to further stretch and recast them into shapes that the depths of your mind will understand when your ears no longer can. There's something about the Traveller's fields of sound that I find helpful for escaping from various kinds of ruts, especially productive and creatives ones. They are also second-to-none for an immersive listening experience if that's your kind of thing (i.e, good headphones or stereo with as little light present in the room as possible). This is my advice for listening to this group (as I'll offer for any abstract/non-linear musical performance): Approach this the same way you would a field recording taken from nature, e.g., birdsong, ocean ambience. Let the sound happen, and you might find yourself someplace else without moving. August 1974: Recommended starting place. A 90-minute expedition through places outside the realm of the visible world. Stream: Youtube | Apple Music (tracks 4-7) | Spotify (tracks 4-7) July 15, 1972: A more ominous experience overall, but that comes with the payoff of the daylight breaking through in the sublime third part. Stream: YouTube | Apple Music (tracks 1-3) | Spotify Stockholm 1971: For experienced travellers only! Stream: YouTube
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2
13w
Ear Bliss
Marcos Valle - "Estrelar"
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Marcos Valle: Ambassador to Good Vibes, Champion of Summertime, Spokesperson for Beach Bods. Lyrically, "Estrelar" is a workout motivation anthem set to an infectiously funky instrumental (ooh that bassline) encouraging listeners to get their physique good and toned 'cuz summer is near. Key lyrics to muse upon: "Domingo é dia / de um ti-ti-ti a mais e de bumbum pra trás" (in translation: "Sunday's the day / for gossiping and showing off that butt")...just like the good Lord meant for Sundays to be spent! The chorus of this song is pure boogie heaven musical ecstasy and literally cannot be grown tired of. I got to see Valle in concert recently, and at age 82, the man is a portrait of health, so I can only imagine he's been taking his own words to heart for a while. ("Estrelar" is the lead track from Marcos Valle's awesome 1983 self-titled album. The album cover shown above captures the vibe perfectly...saúde, Marcos!)
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3
14w
Ear Bliss
Miles Davis - "He Loved Him Madly" (1974)
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Music to get utterly, profoundly lost and found inside of. Meditative, enveloping, haunting, blissful. Like much of the music of the “Electric Miles” period (late-‘60s/mid-‘70s), what is heard here eludes tidy categorization, but a descriptive estimation of “He Loved Him Madly” might be “psychedelic ambient jazz fusion,” or a long walk down a hypnagogic corridor. Clocking in at 32 minutes, the piece is paradoxically massive yet lighter than air. The title of this work riffs on a favorite saying of Duke Ellington in paying tribute to this legendary man who had passed away two months prior; it is a hybrid composition assembled from snippets of a day spent jamming in the studio and was released as an entire side of the double LP Get Up With It in autumn 1974.
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2
14w
Ear Bliss
Pentangle - "Hunting Song" (BBC in Concert, 1971)
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This is the hype track they needed to play on every school bus in Southern California headed to Buena Park with a troop of middle school students on board for their field trip to Medieval Times. From the first spectral peals of glockenspiel, all I want is to go nuts over a jousting tournament while I dig incisors into a slightly overdone turkey leg. Pentangle is one of my favorite ensembles from the transatlantic folk boom of the sixties. Any combo of the time would have been so lucky to have Bert Jansch & John Renbourn picking guitar strings for them, but for me, it’s Jacqui McShee and her otherworldly vocals that often gave the ‘tangle that X-factor. This televised performance of a great track from the quintet’s great Basket of Light album (1969) is one such example.
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3
15w
Ear Bliss
Caroline Polachek - "The Gate" (Extended Mix)
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For the first anniversary of her solo debut Pang (2019), Caroline Polachek released this extended mix of the album’s opening track. What was originally a brief yet alluring invocation becomes a portal to tranquility when expanded to ten glorious minutes. Put it on loop and let the layers of celestial vocals and washes of cosmic synths work their way into your brain and slow racing thoughts to a pleasant standstill, i.e., works great for whenever you next catch yourself saying out loud, I just need to chill the f*ck out right now..! I look forward to whatever Polachek releases next, but I certainly would not be a critic if her follow up to Desire takes more of this kind of a direction.
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