This post started out as a piece about the band Riot, whom I vaguely recall reading about in such magazines as Hit Parader and Hit Parader when I was a metal-obsessed youth.

Riot’s album covers were notable for featuring some kind of humanoid, polar-mammal guy.  At first I thought the guy/creature was a snow owl. But then I looked closer, and the features revealed themselves as mammalian, not avian.

The Internet informs me that the Riot guy is called “Johnny.”

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Tags: Michael Cade's audio files by Michael Cade
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I didn’t know much about Johnny Ramone before I read his autobiography, Commando. After a brief time as a thug, he became the leader of The Ramones. Johnny Ramone was serious and businesslike, maybe both to a fault. There are no throwing-televisions-out-of-hotel-windows-rock-star stories in this book. Johnny liked to get milk and cookies after performing a concert, and he meticulously tracked and saved money he made with The Ramones, planning from early on for his retirement. He brought his construction worker blue collar work ethic to rock music. If none of this sounds like the behavior of a punk rocker, maybe your definition needs rethinking. As Johnny Ramone wrote in Commando:

People have asked me, “What makes a punk?” About five years after we’d retired, I was driving in Los Angeles, and somebody called out to me, “Hey, you’re driving a Cadillac. How’s that? How are you a punk if you’re driving a Cadillac?” I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? I wrote the book on punk. I decide what’s punk. If I’m driving a Cadillac, it’s punk.”

Tags: books & writing, music by Scott Stein
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So, a friend posted the following Billy Joel video on Facebook the other night.

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Tags: Michael Cade's audio files by Michael Cade
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So I’ve been reading The Air-Conditioned Nightmare by Henry Miller, which has an entire chapter devoted to French-born composer Edgard Varese. And it’s some great music writing.

“Some men, and Varese is one of them,” writes Miller, “are like dynamite. That alone, I suppose, is sufficient to explain why they are handled with such caution and shyness.”

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Tags: Michael Cade's audio files by Michael Cade
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I’m back with a rare Thursday night edition of  the once weekly and now sporadic “Audio Files” column.  And look out, because I’m armed with the contents of my Google Reader, namely…

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Tags: Michael Cade's audio files by Michael Cade
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I have a tendency to find songs that I get addicted to–listening to on repeat incessantly, walking around with its lyrics in my head all day. One of the most recent examples of this has been Gotye’s “Somebody That I Used to Know” (linked below for your convenience.)

As this song keeps finding its way back on my playlist, I started to wonder what it was that made me love the song, and even the video, so much. [Read more →]

Tags: music by Sara W. Moreno
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I first encountered Rammstein in an almost empty cinema on Glasgow’s Buchanan Street, during an afternoon matinee of the largely unloved David Lynch movie Lost Highway. Balthazar Getty had just broken into a house, a porno starring his lover was unfolding on a giant screen, and something was about to go very wrong — a point underscored on the soundtrack by sinister chanting, tolling church bells and an impossibly low German voice muttering words I didn’t understand. It was ominous, bombastic, absurd, utterly hilarious- and yet also thrilling: [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, music by Daniel Kalder
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For me, like most people, memory is intricately intertwined with music. Another Brick in the Wall pt 2 was a hit the year I started school, and so the song always resurrects those early experiences of classroom tedium. Falco’s Rock Me Amadeus,playing on the ferry that brought me from England to Holland in 1986, summons textures of my first trip abroad from the sinkhole of amnesia; while Kraftwerk’s Radioactivity is forever fused with a 6am walk I took around Amsterdam ‘s Schipol airport. Endlessly and subjectively I can listen to a track and landscapes, people, places and moods return.

What is the mechanism behind this? I don’t care. I note only that the links in the chain of music and memory are almost always forged accidentally- standing in a shop, watching TV, sitting in a café. When I was travelling in Central Asia a few years ago however I decided to conduct an experiment- I would intentionally fuse some music with the landscape to use as an aid to memory later. [Read more →]

Tags: art & entertainment, music, travel & foreign lands by Daniel Kalder
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Fantastic and strange Godley & Creme tune.

Tags: art & entertainment, music by Michael Cade
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We’re all familiar with the genius of YouTube; how it lets the unknown masses contribute to pop culture as freely and often as they’d like. But lately I’ve taken a particular shine to YouTube’s vast array of fan-made music videos (i.e. fan-chosen footage splattered onto musicians’ songs).

A few such gems recently caught my attention.

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Tags: Michael Cade's audio files by Michael Cade
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