Yes, -just when you're out of funk, out of sugar, out of junk, just when you ran out of rock n roll only fooling teen blues, just when we barely made it out alive from post colonialist world music salsa-disco : stolen like the blues from its rightful criers, just when you entered the millennium with the hangovers of last centuries glory and boredom just then came BLUEBOB.
The first Industrial Blues album and illegitimate progeny of the David Lynch you knew : who usually sculpts dreams into films as modern folk legends, the seer who has been given all the names of strangeness to wear, only because his describers ran out of epithets to coin the guy whose bewildering images they saw, but whose voice they had never heard.. and so? So, David Lynch has now added real trippy music to his far off adventures into the familiar unknown, when he is well into cinematic and cultural super stardom. David Lynch -now telling his stories in these strange songs from the heart of a born again dreamer.
Do you also know John Neff?
The other half of BLUEBOB and Lynch's soul buddy / sidekick: a California suburban guitar alchemist, who windsurfs the frequencies on distorted sound waves, a genius who haunted the musical scene for many years, and who of course got repaid with too little recognition, but that too suits a voice exiled from sun-dried California angst, a voice that hangs on to raunchy Americana brew, 'industrial blues' in this tree o blues, in dust real blues: that you would play anywhere, but especially at night, driving a truck down Pacific Coast Highway, just to get away from the silent sleep of the Valleys, reminded by these songs of your life in the sunny freeway madness of missed twilights, and all the missed moments of breathing, while you learn to survive in the belly of the world, and so..? So, David Lynch and John Neff came up with this testimony about life in the Mirror-Years of The Third Millennium!
BLUEBOB the first Industrial Blues album which paints the soul of California in its make over of glitchy sounds turned to rhythms, of electric lines buzzing along heavy staccato distortion guitars that genuinely cry, slowly, and never without humor; and while David Lynch's expressive touch is at work behind the vocals and lyrics, he seems of course to be speaking from inside your head. This music is lunatic 21st Century Sci Fi scorched by memories of non Sci Fi 50's Americana about women you usually miss or reminisce - but not here, not in these songs where woman betrays in purest blues tradition, in pure Lynch vision of earthly love never attainable. Love? - just a thing to cry or laugh about, behind masks, Hollywood peripheral lives burnt by dreams. Ras Daveed
Film director David Lynch and his indie-rock guitarist partner,
John Neff, call this “industrial blues,” an apt description for the guttural sonic atmosphere of distorted guitars, stark production and Neff’s netherworld vocals. Although some tracks drone on too long, songs such as the convenience-store-stop-gone-wrong “Bad Night” and the instrumental “Blue Horse” conjure up palpable fragments of L.A. noir with Lynchian dark humor, sexual intrigue and dire plot twists.
THE TAHITIAN CHOIR
"All the Tahitian voices dive together like a plane in freefall before taking off again. It's an incredible feeling of vertigo, a unique performance with a total unexpected microtonal sound. Above all, it is a magnificent music." Peter Gabriel
The Tahitian Choir's Joyous Celebration by Trudi Miller, Billboard
Rapa Iti is a tiny island 1,000 miles southeast of Tahiti, with a population of 328. This small village of people has passed down its centries-old floklore through a unique style of choir singing in quarter-tonal voices. In 1991, French producer Pascal Nabet Meyer traveled to Rapa Iti to record this rare form of music. The session took place in the village meeting place, with 126 people singing and crickets chirping. The result, “Rapi Iti” by the Tahitian Choir (Triloka), is both a joyour celebration of voices singing in harmony and a preservation of Rapa Iti’s cultural heritage, with song lyrics that tell ancient folk legends about the creation of the island, wars, and the afterlife. The Tahitian Choir's Joyous Celebration by Trudi Miller, Billboard
Daily News
Fred Shuster
Choir tops world chart
The Tahitian Choir
Producer Pascal Nabet Meyer, whose “Rapa Iti” disc by the Tahitian Choir currently tops the world music chart, said the process of taping the Polynesian a cappella singers was similar to an underwater recording session. “It was almost impossible because of the humidity,” he said. “Everything – the tape recorder, the microphones, the tapes – was wet. I used equipment designed for Vietnam.”
Nabet-Meyer spent two months on the tropical island of Rapa Iti located about 1000 miles off the southeast coast of Tahiti, recording the 126-member choir. The sound, which involves microtone harmonies, was unknown in the West until the release of the compact disc, he said.
BLUEBOB
David Lynch: 'Blue Velvet' to BlueBob by Steve Hochman, Special to The Times
Music has been nearly as important as the scripts and visuals in such influential David Lynch film and TV projects as “Twin Peaks” and “Blue Velvet.”
And Lynch has been active as a producer and collaborator with composer Angelo Badalamenti and singers Julee Cruise and Jocelyn Montgomery. So his opinion probably is worth noting in a discussion about the music and marketing strategies of a new act called BlueBob.
“It’s all horse manure,” says the director, sitting in the combination screening room/recording studio of his Hollywood Hills home, smoke trailing from his cigarette as he gives his hand a dismissive flip.
Sitting with him, John Neff and Pascal Nabet Meyer roll their eyes. It’s not just that they’ve heard this act before. It’s that Neff is half of BlueBob, while Nabet owns Soulitude, the label releasing its debut album.
Oh, and also because Lynch is the other half of the group.
Lynch writes the lyrics (little vignettes of paranoia and underbelly cruising) and plays guitars and various percussion items, while Neff adds everything else and handles the gruff, largely spoken vocals. Overall, the space-age bluesy atmosphere and dark scenarios make it perhaps a cousin to Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart more than to the stark, haunting beauty of Lynch’s other collaborations.
“BlueBob started because I love machines,” Lynch says. “I said, ‘John, I want beats like machines, like dogs on PCP — when they bite down you feel it.’ “
Lynch and Neff became acquainted in 1997 when the latter, a longtime studio engineer and designer, built Lynch’s home facility and wound up being hired as the director’s audio specialist.
Soon they started some musical experiments and officially teamed to produce Montgomery’s 1998 album, “Lux Vixen,” which featured interpretations of compositions by medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen. It was released in this country by Mammoth Records.
BlueBob, Lynch says, started as an experiment. “There was no thought of an album at all, until we got four things recorded,” he says.
More serious about it, they continued writing and recording and last year finished the debut BlueBob album. It was released in Europe last month and got strong press interest and is due here in February or March.
The group, with the two joined by Nabet Meyer and three other musicians, made its first and so far only live appearance Nov. 11 at Paris’ historic Olympia Theatre, sharing a bill with Portishead singer Beth Gibbons.
Lynch, with no real musical performing experience, is thrilled about the opportunity but dubious about his own live role. “John is a performer and we had a killer band,” he says. “I am not a performer. I just sat there like an idiot. It was torment.”
However, with much radio exposure outside of public and college stations unlikely,
there is talk of designing a multimedia theater presentation to bring the music to the public. Lynch is not committing. “It just depends on how much torment you can put up with,” Neff says to his partner.
LA Times
The Groove Master Jerry Jemmott
