It's hip to be square: the lost sounds of New York City
A few years back I did a couple of blogs/podcasts based on stuff I'd scrappily recorded with my cheapo handheld devices at various gigs in London during those golden years 2000-19. Yeah, happy times (except when they weren't), and full of great music. These recordings - rather brilliantly called Das Kapital (geddit?) - were, it has to be said, too much bloody work to do very often. There I was pulling out dozens of minidiscs from my shelves, listening back to hours of music (complete with between-songs crowd chat and bar noises), trying to pinpoint some standout stuff and then - all rather painstakingly - threading these together into a new 80-minute compilation, complete - aha - with craftily-placed snippets from the audio book of Marx's meisterwerk. Yeah, it was a lot of er, labour. Anyway, one of these live compilation things I did years ago was - slightly differently - based on stuff I recorded on a short trip to New York with a friend in 2008. An age ago. Time irretrievably lost. One of the shows we caught during our pretty hectic cultural tour of the city was by the Santa Dads, a duo (one in a fancy dress tiger suit, the other in santa-elf get-up I think) doing an utterly mesmerising beatbox/ukelele-backed close harmony vocal thing at the Cake Shop on Ludlow Street in the Lower East Side. When the Santa Dads started up and then proceeded to perform one uninterrupted 30-minute stream of musical weirdness, I think it's fair to say that my companion and I were ... stunned. So yes, I've dug out 60 minutes of that 2008 NYC comp (Santa Dads included) and here it is. RIP all the excellent New York venues that have since closed down and please, kids, don't forget that, despite what they all say, it's hip to be square ...
2: Ching Chong Song: Sidewalk Cafe, 31/1/08
Comments
Post a Comment