Song of the day: #24 Ben Butler & Mousepad – "Super Motion"

Originally wrote this preview of my pal Joe's new act for Never Enough Notes, where there's a Soundcloud player with more material and so on. This tune's deffo my favourite BB&MP tune tho, at least at the moment. Some of the greatest awkwardfunk i've heard in years.

Ben Butler and Mouse Pad is the new project of Joe Howe (previously known as Germlin, or one half of gay against you), in which cardboard castles and adult hyperactivity disorders take a backseat to freeform synthesizer solos and extremely geometric pullovers.

Joe's long-standing synth fascination shines through, but this time there's much more of an emphasis on playing. It's still dancefloor-friendly but more reined-in and richly melodic than before, recalling the warm ooze of the Weather Report or Zappa's Waka/Jawaka and Grand Wazoo albums, as well as a sense of pushing synth sounds as far as they'll go that's akin to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (another stated influence). Or, as one last.fm user neatly describes them, "like Prince and Stevie Wonder on your favourite arcade machine".

As well as the laudably unfashionable likes of prog and jazz fusion, BB&MP identify with the Scandinavian skweee scene, and have released one side of a 7" named "Future Tent" on the genre's spiritual home, Norway's Dødpop label. As well as that record, there's a mini-album of "Future Tent" remixes by the likes of oMMM, The Niallist and Tangles, and a 5-track compilation of early stuff named, fittingly, Early.

So far, gigs have been largely conducted in Europe, but North American audiences will soon be able to get their first taste of BB&MP in the flesh, as they play 22 dates across the US in January and February in  support of indie stalwarts Deerhoof. Any of our transatlantic readers would be well advised to take a look.

28 Jan 2011 US San Francisco, CA – Great American Music Hall
29 Jan 2011 US Los Angeles, CA – Echoplex
01 Feb 2011 US Austin, TX – Mohawk
02 Feb 2011 US Dallas, TX – Palladium Showroom
03 Feb 2011 US Memphis, TN – The Hi Tone
04 Feb 2011 US Nashville, TN – Mercy Lounge
05 Feb 2011 US Athens, GA – 40 Watt
06 Feb 2011 US Raleigh, NC – King’s
07 Feb 2011 US Washington, DC – 9:30 Club
08 Feb 2011 US Brooklyn, NY – Ridgewood Masonic Temple
10 Feb 2011 US Cambridge, MA – Middle East
11 Feb 2011 US Philadelphia, PA – Theatre of Living Arts
12 Feb 2011 US Pittsburgh, PA – Altar
14 Feb 2011 US Pontiac, MI – The Crofoot Ballroom
15 Feb 2011 US Chicago, IL – Bottom Lounge
16 Feb 2011 US Madison, WI – High Noon Saloon
17 Feb 2011 US Minneapolis, MN – Triple Rock Social Club
18 Feb 2011 US Iowa City, IA – Blue Moose
19 Feb 2011 US Omaha, NE – Waiting Room
21 Feb 2011 US Denver, CO – The Marquis
25 Feb 2011 US Seattle, WA – Neumo’s
26 Feb 2011 US Portland, OR – Holocene

mp3: Ben Butler & Mousepad – "Super Motion"

And the prize for fastest-aging meme EVER goes to...

— BANG! ...first joke off the starting line (within about 20 minutes... RIP Pat);
— Kanye West interrupts your website;
— Punctuation FAIL;
— Apology generator;
— Entirely formulaic and lame "Hitler disses Kanye" modified Downfall clip (for the 400th time this year)¹;
— Image macro compendium;
— Piss-weak "topical" cartoon strips each including a semi-relevant and tangential reference to the cartoonist's area of interest (perfect example).
— Post-match meme analysis in The Grauniad (tardy).

How i actually feel about the Kanye incident:

(via Joe King @ Tw*tter)




(came up with this one all on my own.)

And finally: Terry Moran and his ABC compadres should have been fired from a cannon for violating an off-record agreement with an interviewee within minutes of it being made. All the little Che Guevara wannabes on the net going "there's no such thing as off-the-record! If the President said something, he said it! Da Troof™ is all that matters!" miss the point comprehensively and utterly (as usual). There is such a thing if you've just agreed to it as a professional, actually. Google that word, "professionalism". You'll be surprised.

The following is the only piece of music by Kanye i've ever felt the need to listen to (hint: somebody else produced it).

mp3: Kanye West — "Love Lockdown (Bean Butler rubdown)"

¹ Seriously. You don't have to be Alejandro Jodorowsky or anything, but why not at least try subtitle-modding a scene from a different movie even, you lazy, unfunny, desperately unoriginal rehashing tedious internet pricks?

#9: The TV Theme Players — "Then and Now" (Big Eye, 2009)

Or: "things i have learned from listening to The TV Theme Players".

— My god but there are a lot of TV shows. This double CD has 110 tracks. And they're pretty much all American shows, the only UK representative being the really crap Skins.

— The Blind Boys of Alabama version of "Way Down in the Hole" is apparently the definitive Wire theme. Which is balls, of course, as everyone knows it's the Tom Waits original.

— Hardly any TV themes are in irregular time signatures. There's Mission:Impossible (5/4), of course, and stalwart Britcop drama The Bill (7/8). And that's literally about the lot. Wasted opportunity, this.

— No kind of treatment could make the theme from Nip/Tuck sound like a decent piece of music. That isn't on this album, i'm just sayin'.

— A lot of shows nowadays don't have proper themes so much as an inoffensive little ambient sound-squiggles (see: Lost, Heroes etc.) This, too, is a waste of potential.

— Ben Butler & Mouse Pad absolutely must cover the theme from Tequila & Bonetti. possibly also Jump Street. It's ok, i've told them already.

— The 80s were truly halcyon TV theme days.

— i've really gotta watch Twin Peaks soon.

— i do not find the theme from ER to convey the requisite sense of urgency, being far too relaxed for this purpose. In hospital terms, i think it would be a much more convincing soundtrack for somewhere like the Ear, Nose and Throat department.

— The TV Theme Players are likely a group of highly competent session musicians capable of convincingly switching between myriad styles and instruments with ease. However, the reason i say "likely" is because there's no clue anywhere on the internet who's responsible or why. Their last.fm page has no comments and no bio. In the absence of any sort of personality or obvious motive to the group whatsoever, what we're left with is the '00s equivalent of those weird Top of the Pops albums they had in the '60s where groups of session musos would perform ten Top 40 covers — mostly quite passable, sometimes incomprehensibly awful — to skirt licensing regulations.

Considering the potential audience for this creeps me out a little. Who is it aimed at? Prankster radio stations with archive space to fill? People who think TV shows are just a waste of 40 minutes between the cool music bits? The sort of people that listen to anime soundtracks, or consider Jonathan Larson their favourite composer?

At times the atmosphere is uncomfortably close to being stuck in an office Christmas party in Purgatory. The instrumental themes tend to fare better than, for instance, the Tesco No Frills version of Happy Days, which is like being badgered by a hyperactive Butlin's redcoat while trying to eat a cooked breakfast in peace. The most wretched of the lot are the themes which are actual songs: Jane's Addiction's horrible Entourage theme was bad enough to start with, and an anonymous cover of a bastardised excerpt, as here, only adds a sheen of gloss-eyed vacancy to the usual cock-rock bluster. Gruesome. Likewise, South Park illustrates the folly of trying to sound like Primus,¹ and Massive Attack's "Teardrop" gains nothing by being oversimplified and renamed "House". And let us never speak of "Jackass" (a.k.a. a horrible bowdlerising of the Minutemen's "Corona", but with all the "Corona" removed). If anything, the themes-that-are-bona-fide-songs mainly serve to reinforce the earlier point that good TV theme composition is a rarefied art, to be increasingly valued over the lamer and more prevalent options of licensing some generically hip alt.rock or setting a synth to AutoBloop.

— Jack White of The White Stripes shows up to do backing vocals on the Friends theme.²

— By the 85th consecutive theme i have started to feel as if someone has injected my entire face with Lidocaine. Only another 25 to go...

— The L.A. Law theme sounds like Christopher Cross playing "The Little Drummer Boy".

Highlights: Six Feet Under (wonderful theme in general; includes inventive rendering of the discordant modern classical mid-section vamp); Quantum Leap (which i've always felt to be quite a mediocre theme); Justice League Unlimited (too much metal for one hand); Dragonball Z (session-muso metal is just too hilarious); The Cosby Show and any of its jazzy cod-new-Jack-swingin' 80s contemporaries, against all odds (just unashamedly joyous and daft); Twin Peaks (atmospheric); Prison Break (rare class for a modern theme); Quincy M.E. (parping, clownish); New York Undercover (sounds like an MJ Dangerous outtake); Magnum PI (even, say, the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain would have trouble fucking up a tune that good); Young Indiana Jones (a class rendition of Laurence Rosenthal's Boingo-esque theme); Boston Legal (just because i'm pretty sure the original did not feature someone imitating a guitar solo by going "wow waow waaooowww....").

Lowlights: The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (no version of this will ever escape lame-o student-disco ironyland); "Woke Up This Morning" from The Sopranos (it was a terrible song to start with, this is just a straight cover. How have Alabama 3 managed to wangle the role of "the Gomez it's ok to like" anyway?); One Tree Hill (shockingly bland college rock crap); Walker, Texas Ranger (widdle widdle widdle); Murder, She Wrote (generally pretty good, but reorchestrating out the flatulent quacking trombone sections is total desecration); Baywatch (always was fucking awful, with its sand-in-the-joints phallic sax breaks farting all over everything, but this version is egregiously bad. it actually sounds like MIDI programming); the aforementioned Heroes (good effort, though); Chappelle's Show (funny for the first thirty seconds, excruciating for the next five lots of thirty seconds); Flintstones (wailing lead/synth revisionism).

mp3: TV Theme Players – "Prison Break"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Justice League Unlimited"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Six Feet Under"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Young Indiana Jones"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Tequila & Bonetti"
mp3: TV Theme Players – "Twin Peaks"

¹ Even if you are Primus. No, especially if you are Primus.
² Not really.

Ben Butler & Mousepad - "Infinite Capacity (for Love)" (plus Dolby Anol edit)

A little late, but i was in Southern France on a steam-powered mobile when it came out - but some more awesome shenanigans here involving Joe from gay against you/Germlin¹/Ben Butler & Mouse Pad. It is under this last alias that this one's going to be released, and with any luck it's coming out on tigerbass (a subsidiary of the redoubtable tigerbeat6) later in the year. Guest vocals are from the excellently-named The Niallist.

For the bonus round, a remix of same by tigerbass dwellers and "acid-electro fiends" Dolby Anol, composed of one member of Danananananananaykroyd (got no idea when to stop with that word) and one louche-yet-ever-so-slightly-sinister synth wunderkind, in the form of Graham Peel, who once played a entire keyboard solo for an old group of ours while standing on one leg, with one of his arms under his leg as if for emphasis, the odd lad.




MP3: Ben Butler & Mousepad feat. The Niallist – "Infinite Capacity (for Love)"
MP3: Ben Butler & Mousepad – "Infinite Capacity (for Love) (Dolby Anol edit)"



¹ Well, he's not really "from" Germlin so much as he "is" him.

50 Cent vs. Peter Gabriel: thank-you, Joe!

My friend Joe, aka Germlin, Ben Butler and Mouse Pad and one half of gay against you, wrote a pretty interesting blog the other day about an interview with Kanye that he'd read in the Grauniad, wherein 'Ye confessed that he was tired of hip-hop's perceived contemporary simplicity and formulaic basis, and how with his new one, 808s & Heartbreak, he is in fact attempting to "transcend" h.h. altogether in favour of something called "pop-art" (tho as the Grauniad article points out, surely "art-pop" would have been a little more modest, notwithstanding Mr. Warhol, Mr. Liechtenstein, Mr. Johns, etc.)

While i had my doubts as to either Kanye's ability to spearhead such a movement or, indeed, the sincerity of the challenge itself, Joe's interpretation, in seeing the worth of it all as being in "pop music holding a mirror up to itself again", convinced me. He (Joe) ends with the thought:

Let's hope it provokes a bit of competition too - If Kanye is aiming to be the noughties Phil Collins, maybe 50 Cent can get way into world music and take on the mantle of Peter Gabriel.

Well, Joe - while i am obviously (so far) incapable of making such a collaboration happen in reality, i can at least do it virtually. Here's 50's "I Get Money" getting the Gabriel treatment. The oddest thing about doing this was actually making me realise what a well-written song "Sledgehammer" is.

And yes, i am aware of the potential irony of this tune falling into the very same "generic hip-hop" category that Kanye lambasts in the Guardian article. For that reason, i'd prefer to think of it as "generic mash-up" instead ^_^

MP3: 50 Cent — "I Get Money (30KB Hammer Party edit)"