Hello everyone, welcome back for another fantastic hour with Sunday at Bob’s! I hope you guys had a great summer break if you had one. What a time to be alive, it seems the world is spinning faster than usual. We would love to think it is for the best. We would love to. I myself have moved in a place where I, once again since my time in Norway, have no wifi. I should be here for a couple of months at least so expect the coming articles to be less documented than they once were. They will probably contain more anecdotes, less quotes. My schedule this year will most likely be slightly more intense than in the past two years, so I might struggle to keep up the bi-monthly rythm. For that I apologize in advance once and for all (I got told recently I was too polite, I said sorry). But, I am trying to get more articles from magnificent people I meet who have knowledge about music I lack, in the hope of expanding the blog’s musical territory. That being said, let’s begin.
Sometimes, around this moment after the summer was consumed and real life is showing its nose again, we get a sense of the deadlinesque aspect of sunny days and an urge to accomplish all fun that was postponed. We continue listening to sunny music while cycling but with a nostagic after taste. It is in this spirit I tried to gather music for today’s playlist.
We start with music from a country that is still an enigma to me given its capacity to continuously provide for the best football players since the first world cup while having less than half the population of Switzerland, Uruguay. It is this mystery that made me click on the beautiful compilation Candombe Uruguay when it appeared on my screen. Lucky was I, Dino Gastón Ciarlo started singing through my speakers and Don Pascual never left me since.
Once upon a time, in the lobby of a youth hostel, a receptionist was looking for a way of playing music without the use of youtube suggestion’s flow that seems to always end in the same areas, and without losing to much time on his actual job either. He opened a youtube account and added songs he enjoyed in the « watch later » section. After a couple days the section had enough songs to cover his 8 hours shifts and more. Eventually the hostel acquired a spotify account and the « watch later » playlist was forgotten. Years later it still happens that he stumbles upon a song that once was in that playlist, put smiles on visitors faces and his own, was the soundtrack for good times and remained a souvenir for years. Letta Mbulu’s Normalizo is one of them.
I don’t remember how or when I heard Koop for the first time. Their album Waltz for Koop is amongst the easy-listening, easy-to-pick-when-I-don’t-know-what-to-listen-to records.
Iggy Pop, in a interview for some goofy trendy media that pops up on my facebook thread once in a while, mentioned Tropical Fuck Storm and I thank him for that. What an exciting band to listen to! I must link you to the clip of Braindrops, featured here today but also recommend you the album of the same name. It is amongst this kind of albums that take you in many unexpected places. After listening to a cool song, one usually checks out the album it is taken from with the (unconfessed?) hope to get more of the same, it is rare that the album manages to disapoint in good (in Switzerland we say décu en bien).
We enter the traditional Brasilian area of our playlist with the very cool Os Tincoãs. They are this kind of band from whose discography you can simply pick blindfolded and enjoy.
I would like to dedicate the next song to a very dear friend of mine who moved out of Amsterdam a few months ago. He is a great guitar player and we recorded a song together, a George Brassens song that means a lot for the both of us. Hopefully this song will be buried for ever, quite unlike Letta Mbulu’s. It was a very enriching experience nonetheless. I mention that because here we have Rodrigo Amarante’s take on another very dear song by the monument Brassens: La non-demande en mariage. A song where he is honoured to not propose to his girlfriend.
A French philosopher with whom I have less and less affinities used to talk a lot about how in philosophy, life is not separable from writings. He argued a genuine philosopher acts as he writes, there shouldn’t be no gap in between action and statement. Walk the walk, talk the talk. He wrote a couple biographies following that train of thought, comparing the life of the subjects, to their writings. The reason I talk about him is that I am always fascinated about how Brassens songs can be reflective of his own life. In songs like La non-demande en mariage, La mauvaise réputation or Le gorille one can find a look on life that already exists in his parcours. A bit as if you could transpose the famous saying used in the world of design since the Bauhaus: « form follows function » into the world of music, poetry, Art in general something like « work follows life », « oeuvre follows experience » for the lack of better formulation.
Now I realise I jumped over Lee Alfred’s very dancable Rockin’ Poppin’ Full Tilting, in my hurry. I would say it is a song that illustrates very well the first statement I made about sunny music with hidden nostalgy in it.
I must confess, I compiled this playlist weeks ago and I completely forgot where I got Tetty Kadi’s wonderful song from. It must have been a blog. Probably amongst the ones listed on the side. Nevertheless I reckon it makes a very beautiful and welcomed apparition in between music we are more used to in here.
We arrive in a folky time with the great Dave Bixby and his sun going down taken his inspiring Lost Songs Found, suggested to me by a dear friend a few months back.
We continue with a true UFO in terms of compilation. Who knew this existed? How can we stop listening to it now that its existence has been revealed? I personaly cannot. I wish I had internet right now to be able to expand on it without worrying about the facts. I urge you to purchase Bulawayo Blue Yodel and to dig more into it, it’s the best I can do for you.
And then we have the magnificent Bert Jansch, who we heard here before but really, there are these musicians who we would welcome over and over without ever being tired of them.
After him comes a duo very dear to me. They have been recommended to me by a recent friend who accepted to honor us of his contribution to this blog in the coming months. I won’t expand to much on Duo Ruut because I don’t know much and I hope we will get to know more very soon. I couldn’t insist enough on having a listen to their album Tuule sõnad though.
We finish with a fascinating song by PLOD, taken from Still In My Arms: Compiled by Bayu and Moopie. I am not sure what to add about it except the fact that I have been wanting to feature it here for months but never quite found the right spot for it.
That’s it for this week, I hope you enjoyed as much as I did, I see you in two weeks!
Check out time is precisely 30 minutes before 11h00.
The receptionist
Playlist:
1. Dino Gastón Ciarlo - Don Pascual
2. Letta Mbulu - Normalizo
3. Koop - Modal Mile
4. Tropical Fuck Storm - Braindrops
5. Lee Alfred - Rockin’ Poppin’ Full Tilting
6. Os Tincoas - Acará
7. Rodrigo Amarante - O Nao-Pedido de Casamento
8. Tetty Kadi - Ratapan Anak Tiri
9. Matthew Jeffries - Iwe Kusidio
10. Bert Jansch - Sylvie
11. Duo Ruut - Ema Haual
12. PLOD - Aptaxi
