motel de moka

The Undertones - Teenage kicks
The Undertones (1978)

A charmful ode to young lust and according to John Peel, the most perfect three minutes of music ever pressed into vinyl. While I beg to differ with him, truth is the man was right, nothing can be subtracted from this to make it any less perfect.

Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazlewood - Some Velvet Morning
Nancy & Lee (1968)

A nightmarish, ambitious masterpiece about drug addiction. With its startling juxtaposition of Hazlewood’s wry, haunting delivery and Nancy’s dizzying chorus all drenched up in flowery, childlike experimentalism, ‘Some velvet morning’ distances itself far away from all the summer-of-love idealism and naiveté, coming up as one of the most strange and unnerving pop hits in the history of music.

Can - I’m so green
Ege Bamyasi (1972)

The contagious bounciness on this song underpinned by Jaki Liebezeit’s hypnotic, milimetrically precise drumming style and Damo Suzuki’s often unintelligible, playful vocalization catchs me off-guard all the time and sucks me deep into its spiral before I can even think of reaching for the skip button. Hard for me to choose for a favorite Can composition, but I’ll leave the high mark in between this one and ‘Bel Air’.

Captain Beefheart & the Magic Band - Her eyes are a blue million miles
Clear Spot (1972)

An oddly beautiful love song with a little jagged edge. The Magic Band stomp out a delightful rocker with a disjointed feel to it, while the Captain’s vocal tics are put in the service of a pleading emotionality, like a drunk just barely keeping it together but pouring out his heart nonetheless.

The Beatles - Lovely Rita
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)

What appeals me the most about Lovely Rita it its strong transitive sense of kinetic, physical action being expended. Set to a rhytmic backbone that keeps chugging its way through a brilliant piano solo and an awkward climax, the composition menaces with falling apart at any moment as the vocal parts get increasingly complex and sound effects come and go. I always feel the urge to turn the volume up when this comes up on my stereo.

Belle and Sebastian - Dog on wheels
Dog on Wheels Ep (Jeepster / 1997)

Musically emulating Love’s Forever Changes with it’s vaguely hispanic rhythm, dark chord voicings and a gorgeous trumpet break halfway through, Stuart Murdoch sings a soft-voiced ode, both intelligent and humorous to one of his childhood toys. One of the band’s finest moments.

Devendra Banhart - Mama Wolf
Cripple Crow (XL / 2005)

Mama Wolf echoes the sinister dichotomy that lies at the heart of Devendra’s music, an uneven mixture of jocular humour and fey mysticism that places Devendra’s lyrics somewhere in between childlike innocence and sinisterly demented storytelling. At any rate, Mama Wolf, presents us Devendra at one of his shinier moments, a deceptively simple and effusive lullaby delivered with such phatos and a couple of wolf’s howls that makes it almost impossible not to fall hard for it.

David Bowie - Letter to Hermione
Space Oddity (1969)

Bowie’s gifts for building atmosphere are easily discerned in ‘letter to Hermione’, using nothing but a simplistic acoustic guitar strums and ocassional electric arpeggios as an accompanient, Bowie creates an unsettling, melancholic bubble inherent to the heartbreaking nature of the lyrics.

Images: Siggeir M. Hafsteinsson.
Also See: Moka’s Favorites No. 1

We came to California the same year as the ill-fated Donner party. It started about a month ahead of us, but it kept taking imaginary short cuts and hurrying until it met with frightful disaster. My father, who was captain of our train, led his party of about eighty people across trackless plains and mountains for five months, simply with the sun and the stars as guides, and came west almost as straight as the crow flies. He believed in moving every day, if only three miles and the result was that all our oxen were in better condition when they arrived in California than when they started. Several of the survivors of the Donner party, young George Donner and Mrs. Reed, came to our house in Napa after they were rescued. I heard the other day that Mrs. Reed’s daughter, ‘Patty’ Reed, who was then a very little girl, is living on Franklin street in Oakland. She is Mrs. Martha Lewis now. - Story from California Gold rush

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” California Revisited ”

01. Takka Takka - Everybody Say
Migration (Ernest Jenning, 2008)
02. Tracy Shedd - Whatever It Takes
Cigarettes & Smoke Machines (Teenbeat Records, 2008)
03. Luke Doucet - Blood’s Too Rich
Blood’s Too Rich (Six Shooter Records, 2008)
04. Telepathique - Love And Lust
Last Time On Earth (Control Group / Tcg, 2008)
05. The Moondoggies - Changing
Don’t Be A Stranger (Hardly Art, 2008)
06. Human Highway - Sleep Talking
Moody Motorcycle (Suicide Squeeze, 2008)

note: Sunday mellow list. California theme in my mind. There is this mythical idea about California. That it’s the last place where civilization stops, hitting the big ocean. The western civilization ends and the east is on the other side. All on one needs to get there is a dream and certain push to get away from the establishment. Life will be different, the weather temperate and the people are happy. Thousand dreams to be made, start afresh without past. It is not the techniques, shape or difficulties to obtain the dream, but if the state of mind to reach the dream exists, sort of post existentialist struggle. It’s beautiful if one can get it to work.

image : sicoactiva , FelipeArte

Billie Holiday & Lester Young - When You’re Smiling
Billie Holiday and Lester Young Complete recordings 1937-1946

If I had to choose only one Billie Holiday song, without question it would be “When You’re Smiling.” Everyone plays like a genius on this one. Benny Morton’s gutsy and smooth trombone to kick it off, Buck Clayton’s impeccable obbligato behind the singer, and Lester Young’s magnificent solo that starts at 2:05 and sends the song into stratosphere.

Nina Simone - My baby just cares for me
Little Girl Blue (Bethlehem Records / 1968)

So simple and effective. There’s some sort of vocal stretch she does from 2:42 through 2:52 that showcases her incredible vocal range and makes me lose my breath everytime I hear it.

Jacqueline Taïeb - Le Cœur au bout des doigts
Lolita Chick 68 (Mad French / 2000)

60’s french pop with a stunning horn section and an undeniably funky and infectious rhythm. Incredibly fun and sexy.

Norman Greenbaum - Spirit in the sky
Spirit in the sky (1970)

One of my favorite radio hits from the 70’s. Classic guitar riff and best use of rattlesnake percussion ever.

Tommy Roe - Sweet Pea
Sweet pea (1966)

It’s all about that drum break. Sweet pop that never gets corrosive and that in my humble opinion, stands out above everything else done in the genre at the time.

Marshall Crenshaw - You’re my favorite waste of time
Marshall Crenshaw (1982)

A lo-fi masterpiece and one of those songs that always brings back a collection of idyllic childhood memories. I think a big part of the charm of this recording is how the whole thing sounds like a beautiful accident, a group of friends jamming in a home studio after smoking a few joints and setting up everything in one simple take. There’s genuine happiness spread all over it.
I was delighted to read Sean’s post a year ago where he tells this was his favorite song ever (He’s actually referring to Owen Paul’s cover, mind you, but I’m happy about the coincidence).

Tom Waits - Alice
Alice (Anti / 2002)

A sensuous nocturnal ballad with violently beautiful lyrics. It’s hard to top all the imagery and sounds Mr. Waits manages to evoke with such little space.

Louis Armstrong - Hello Dolly!
Hello Dolly 7″ (1964)

I imagine that caught up in the political and cultural turmoil of the mid-sixties, ‘Hello dolly’ would have sounded a tad out of place: sappy, lighthearted lyrics and a simple acoustic jazz arrangement in a time when mainstream didn’t really care about jazz anymore. And yet, Armstrong presents this little piece of timeless ditty in such a charming and deliriously engaging way that it even managed to push the Beatles off their #1 perch on the charts when they were at the peak of their popularity.

Note: For the past weeks I’ve been spending a great deal of time doing a reinventory of every song in my collection. I tend to organize my music following mood rather than genre, so I’ve been spending full days categorizing, trashing and rekindling my love for some songs and albums that I haven’t heard in a while. Amidst all the nostalgia and surprises I made a 24 song playlist with songs that never fail to amuse me, some of which have been with me for more than 10 years, and which I’m splitting into 3 different parts to share with you. Hope you enjoy them as much as I do. I’d love to read recommendations if you have any and your very own list of favorite songs of all time if you wish to share.

Images: Matte Stephens

Photo: 蛙式大人

The sky is eating, is whispering and eating.
It roots in the straw that the asparagus may stay with its garbage sky of distant lands and of the hearth.
Now that the sky has stopped raining
joy, joy cries the pig and is an animal that grows fat in fair weather.

- Jerome Rothenberg. Of the doctor who Stopped the Pig by his Cleverness.

Antonio Zepeda - Aztlán
Retorno a Aztlán (Olinkan / 1989)
Shackleton - Death is not final
Death is not final (Skull Disco / 2008)
Stimming - Una Pena (Argy remix)
Una Pena Ep (Diynamic / 2008)
Shed - Slow Motion Replay
Shedding the past (Ostgut-ton / 2008)
Carl Orff - Gassenhauer
The trip curated by Jarvis Cocker (Family UK / 2006)

I do not wish to speak light statements this evening, at least not while the sky is eating. Life has taught me it is better to remain silent when the grass is burning. When the river fills up.