Besties for 2010

My favorite album of 2010 is the debut by Lower Dens, "Twin Hand Movement"

Here's a song:



Other favorites:
Quantic Presenta Flowering Inferno "Dog With a Rope"
Weekend "Sports"
Surfer Blood "Astrocoast"
Deerhunter "Halcyon Digest"
Seu Jorge & Almaz
Walkmen "Lisbon"
Erykah Badu "New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)"
Marc Ribot "Silent Movies"
Kelley Stotlz "To Dreamers"
Whitefield Brothers "Earthology"
Dungen "Skit I Allt"
No Joy "Ghost Blonde"


Fave 2010 late-night trip-outs:
Ulaan Khol "III"
Flying Lotus "Cosmogramma"
Benoît Pioulard "Lasted"
Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and John Frusciante s/t


Best single: Sleigh Bells "rill rill"

Others:
Spoon "Nobody Gets Me But You"
Squarepusher "Megazine"
Erykah Badu "Window Seat"
The Roots "Right On"

Best live albums:
Medeski Martin & Wood "Stone Issue Four: Live in Japan"
UA "Haruto live"

Best comps/reissues:
Wooden Shjips "Vol. 2"
Mulatu Astatke "Steps Ahead"
Tumbélé! Biguine, Afro & Latin Sounds - French Caribbean 1963-73
Syd Barrett remasters
Nigeria Afrobeat Special


Best live show: Frisco Freakout @ Thee Parkside

Honorable mention, cause it's really a movie and a live show and it's old, but I saw it this year and it really touched me: Califone doing "All my friends are funeral singers" @ SXSW


2 much HYPE: shoegaze/chillwave, SF garage rock demigods, Kanye, OK GO, reverb pedals on vocal mics, Reagan-era production values, the Phil Spector vibe, iPad DJs, beards

Working on another crop of mixes, I'll post something here soon. Ciao!

Peter Tosh Interview from Head Magazine, 1977

I found this quaint interview with Peter Tosh today. It was in an issue of Head magazine from 1977 that I bought at a warehouse sale. The place was Oddball Film, a film archive and licensing house on the third floor of this unassuming San Francisco warehouse. Check them out. The owner, Stephen, hosts screenings of old bizarre movies on Friday and Saturday nights.

He was having a sale and he had put out these boxes of old magazines -- art and architecture journals, old pornos, strange counterculture mags -- and I found a few choice items. This Tosh interview isn't very deep, and I'm still not sure whether it's really an interview or just a carefully transcribed record of what Peter was saying on stage at the concert the reporter attended. Peter was known to go on these long, two or three minute diatribes about music, Jah, the government, the "shitstem," the political situation, obeah -- whatever topics the lyrics in the next song dealt with, or whatever he had read in the paper that afternoon.

The image above is the centerfold from the magazine, and here's the interview in its entirety. Click through on all of these for the larger versions:











The particular issue of Head magazine is advertised as "The Cocaine Issue," and the interview is nestled in between an article about DMT and a primer on how to tell how much Clorox has been cut into your cocaine. The ads are amusing, too -- everything from "the passer," a 24-inch-long roach clip, to "The Bug Alert," a device that detects DEA phone taps. There's a small picture of Peter on the cover, which is dominated by a close up shot of a giant blob of cocaine. I'm curious how Peter, a devout Rasta, would have felt about seeing his photo dwarfed by a big hunk of Peruvian Marching Powder.




He probably would have been a little more into the back cover, a full-page ad for X-rated rolling papers from the fine folks at Hustler magazine.




I put up these scans because this article is probably next to impossible to find anywhere. If you hold the rights to Head magazine and you want me to take it down, just ask.