Archive for the avant garde tag

Patrick Wolf: Hard Times + Damaris

Patrick Wolf was born in 1983 to famous musicians Siouxsie Sioux and Adam Ant. Shortly after his birth, he was possessed by the ghost of Klaus Nomi. He currently resides in some sort of weird time warp where he's stuck in mid-'80s England.

Ok, so I don't know that any of that is true. BUT IT'S POSSIBLE. Siouxsie and Adam are old enough and Nomi died the same year he was born. Also, his biography is SO vague: "Patrick Wolf was born in St Thomas' Hospital, South London, into a creative family."
"Creative family"? Mmmhmmm. And what kind of kid is making theremins at 11?! Maybe they just hid him from the press. There's really no other reasonable explanation for this guy's existence.

I present to you two examples that I believe back up my claims:

Both tracks are from his 1985 2009 release The Bachelor.
Buy The Bachelor on Amazon.com
official website

Yello: Bostich

Last night started off really slow--after all, a good portion of our crowd was at The Queen Is Dead early in the night--but by the time Arturo went on and The Handsome Devilz arrived, it was a juggernaut. While Kamar was rallying the dancers over to Neo, I got to do a long early set. One of the things I love about doing early sets at Atomic is that I get to experiment a bit and gauge reactions before I play a song to a packed floor. Will they dance if I play this? Will the regulars run up to the booth screaming about how they love it or how they'll strangle me if I ever play it again? Sometimes, I realize that I should've been playing it at 1am all along.

Such is the case with the Yello classic "Bostitch". It blows my mind that this single was released in 1979. Typical of Yello's style, it's sophisticated, dark, and avant-garde. It's very new wave, it's really tech-house, it's vaguely industrial…and no, that is not Douglas McCarthy from Nitzer Ebb singing. Actually it's Dieter Meier [himself a very interesting person], the conceptualist half of Yello, whose ideas are executed by self-claimed perfectionist Boris Blank, who reportedly has a library of over 100,000 samples he made from scratch.

Now in their 60s, Meier and Blank are still making music as Yello, and it's still just as good. Most of their current work is in soundtracks these days. Recently, they've worked with Audi and been the subject of a documentary. I hope I'm half as cool as they are when I'm their age.

"Bostich" is on their debut album Solid Pleasure.

Solid Pleasure on Amazon
Yello Official Website