Laura guests on Jason Forrest album

[johnfoyle]

http://www.dotshop.se/ds/release.php?code=SONIG49CD

Jason Forrest - Shamelessly Exiting

Sonig (SONIG49CD)
This item will be released on October 3rd, 2005


( extract)



An overview of "Shamelessly Exciting" begins with “Walls Of The City Shake”, a fist-pumping anthem of maximum intensity featuring David Grubbs on piano. Forrest refines his conceptual cut-and-paste aesthetics in “My 36 Favorite Punk Songs” on which you can literally hear Forrest’s 36 favorite punk songs, cut up and mixed to 2:20 minutes. Then he flips to something more appropriate for 70’s AM radio with “Dreaming And Remembering” and “Skyrocket Saturday” - both tributes to forgotten pop heroes and one hit wonders. “War Photographer” gets down to a funky blend of big beats and a kicking brass band and “Evil Doesn’t Exist Anymore” is a massive blues-fueled masterpiece where Forrest collaborates with Norwegian experimental artist, Maja Ratke.

Yet the biggest surprise on the album is “Nightclothes and Headphones” featuring Matador recording artist and renowned country singer Laura Cantrell. This beautiful and completely disarming pop song further proves just how versatile and unpredictable Forrest really is.

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http://www.cockrockdisco.com/DS-bio/bio-main.html
( extract)

' Jason Forrest used to make music under the moniker 'Donna Summer' but now is just Jason Forrest. He has released records in the US, UK, and Japan. He has been featured in periodicals such as Spin, Blender, German Rolling Stone, Muzik Express, The Wire, XLR8R, Urb, Crash, Muzik, Trax, The Village Voice, Style and The Family Tunes, Go Mag, Gonzo Circus, Grooves, De:Bug, and Vice. His music is a combination of many, many styles of music, all edited into a sort of new rock music. His live shows have garnered him a huge international audience, that involve much bad dancing, possibly some blood, and a few shattered laptops. '

[johnfoyle]

· · Vol 26 · Issue 1290 · PUBLISHED 8/24/2005

URL: www.citypages.com/databank/26/1290/article13627.asp
HOME: www.citypages.com


Pet Sound Boys

Minotaur Shock and Jason Forrest's beat collages for non-dancers


by Keith Harris



Minotaur Shock
Maritime
4AD/Beggar's

Jason Forrest
Shamelessly Exciting
Sonig


David Edwards and Jason Forrest are not kindred spirits. Though both make electronic music you don't dance to ("can't" is overstating things), each inspires a far different lack of motion in the listener. Edwards, doing business as Minotaur Shock, is your prototypical diffident bedroom composer. Bloc Party and Super Furry Animals are the sorts of bands who seek the pretty nuances of his remix services. On Maritime, Edwards's tracks are modest, detailed, and slightly cartoonish. By contrast, Forrest, who made his name as DJ Donna Summer on North Jersey kitchen-sink radio station WFMU, is gregarious and trashy, generating thrills out of a tumble of clashing dumb-ass rock samples. Shamelessly Exciting is just what it says.

Unpretentious as they are, though, both men are progeny of those ponderous DJs who used to call their sets "journeys." They bust open the circular unity of funk in favor of beat compositions that stretch forward--in fact, these tracks move so that you don't have to. Edwards soundtracks a sort of conflict-free video game, where pixels politely make way for each other. On Maritime's opening track, "Muesli," synth clarinets bob up and down like pistons, their tones gradually coloring over one another, before a xylophone pattern nudges in to provide counterpoint. Then, horns explode into a bright carousel melody. Forrest is more direct about getting from A to Z. "My 36 Favorite Punk Songs" is, again, what it says: three dozen snippets stitched into a hardcore herky-jerk. As critic Rob Sheffield once pointed out, the Ramones' m.o. paralleled that of early hip hop--you strip your favorite songs down to their coolest parts and cut off the rest. Forrest one-ups 'em all.

Edwards's arrangements are firmly classicist; each Minotaur Shock track builds with a sense of purpose Jimmy Page would envy. But that doesn't mean he's predictable. "Mistaken Tourist" runs generic "ethnic" polyrhythms overtop a Casio beat for a spell, then blurts into Georgio Moroder electrodisco, swiping fake strings from a Commodore 64 commercial. And since a video game would be a linear bore without some wrong turns, Edwards isn't above designing blind alleys like the wimpy Daft Punk of "Vigo Bay," which feigns interest in below-the-waist activity just long enough to trick you onto your feet. Yet his new-wavey referents are always carefully integrated into their surroundings. "(She's in) Dry Dock Now" staggers like a drunken robot waving his arms to bat away the waves of disembodied Kraftwerk, while "Six Foolish Fishermen" laces an A-ha synth riff through one of those swinging bottoms that Paul Weller convinced the U.K. is what Motown sounds like.

Forrest's use of kitsch is both gaudier and more explicit--on "New Wave Folk Austerity" he turns Blondie's "Call Me" into the DOR battering ram it always dreamed it would grow up to be. But though he sometimes courts the "Hey, I recognize that crappy song!" response for snark's sake, he's well aware of the subtlety required to be effectively crass. And if his new full-length isn't as exciting as last year's The Unrelenting Songs of the 1979 Post Disco Crash, it's equally shameless: When "Skyrocket Saturday" smooshes Seals & Crofts with Starland Vocal Band, this is Big Beat carried to extremes even Norman Cook never envisioned. Of course, Fatboy Slim albums were (and theoretically, still are) designed to instigate dancing, where Forrest's music seeks more often to collect interjections of "Whoa, cool!"

Like the Big Beatniks before him, Forrest stumbles when he crafts some catchy simulacra of songs. "Nightclothes and Headphones" shows that FMU pal Laura Cantrell is not quite a Beth Orton in the making. He doesn't need a discrete verse 'n' chorus to structure his music anyway--one rhythm building off another does the trick. Edwards wisely avoids voices, though the temptation must be strong; since Maritime often flutters somewhere between Pet Sounds and Pet Shop Boys, a pedigreed vocal could conceivably turn Minotaur Shock into the kind of synth-pop that folks might have to pay attention to. But I mean, really--songs? How hopelessly 20th-century can ya get?

[johnfoyle]

Laura gets jiggy!
You can hear this track via a link in the following link ( if you know what I mean) ; it's pure 70s disco and just great!

http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2005/09/laura_cantrell_.html

September 02, 2005
Laura Cantrell & Jason Forrest Make Beautiful Glitch Together
In the tradition of Lindsey and Stevie, Elton & Kiki, Captain & Tennille, Mitch & Mickey, and Shields & Yarnell, a classic male/female artistic duo has collaborated once again to make lovely sounds (or in Shields and Yarnell's case, non-sounds). In possibly the first commercially-available musical team-up of two WFMU DJs, Jason Forrest AKA Donna Summer (of Sunday night's Advanced D&D radio extravaganza) and Radio Thrift Shop Proprietess Laura Cantrell have released "Nightclothes and Headphones" (MP3) as a track on Jason's new Shamelessly Exciting CD (Sonig label) hitting the streets now. Laura's sweet pipes add some nice sheen to our boy's music, but don't worry, he gets back to blowing up David Essex in a digital blender and spitting his carcass out at 300 BPM shortly thereafter and we love him for it. Laura, as many of you may know, is basking in the glow of many fans and critics alike with her new full-length album on Matador, Humming By the Flowered Vine, played a fantastic set in Battery Park on July 4th on a bill with Yo La Tengo and Stephen Malkmus, and she may be playing in your neck of the woods sometime soon.

[Letter Bee]

Hey John,

Thanks for the link to the Jason Forrest and Laura mp3 - it sounds, well, very electronic, although bits of it remind me of the end of Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell, you know where you kind of hear the sound of the phone ringing :confused:

Anyway a nice little Laura 'oddity' to collect - cheers! How d'you keep finding these new links to stuff on Laura anyway - surely you don't spend all day surfing? :)

[johnfoyle]

' How d'you keep finding these new links to stuff on Laura anyway - surely you don't spend all day surfing?'

www.feedster.com or googlenews usually do the trick.

[Letter Bee]

feedster.com...RSS, XML, blogs, feeds, links, head, hurts, so, much, info :eek:


Thanks, I think :)

[johnfoyle]

http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1102741_4_0_,00.html

Entertainment Weekly

Download This
Recommended songs for the week of Sept. 16: Find tunes on the web by Tori Amos, and others


including -

Eclectic sound-collage dude Jason Forrest employs twangy singer Laura Cantrell on ''Nightclothes and Headphones,'' a brisk electro-folk-pop amalgam from his new album, Shamelessly Exciting. Sonig.com/ew.html

[johnfoyle]

http://www.cockrockdisco.com/ShamelesslyEx-comments.html

Jason comments -
( extract)

So here I am now, a much, much different person after the whirlwind that has been the past year and a half, now living in Berlin, and writing about my 4th album. “Shamelessly Exciting” has been a labor of love more intense than anything I have created before. More love, sweat, physical and mental anguish have gone into this album than anything I have done. It’s been a long process, with many highs and lows, but here I am, finally, at the end.

Ok, so this list of comments is designed to spark some conversation, and let you know a little about what I have been thinking about for the past 18 months. The rules are, I type these comments while I listen to my CD, and when the song is over I have to move on to the next song. As always, if there’s something you want to discuss as a result of these notes, please feel free to email me: cockrockdisco@gmail.com

Nightclothes And Headphones

So like many, I was very, very saddened by the unexpected death of John Peel. I never had the opportunity to meet Mr. Peel in person, but I felt as though I knew him. Like so many other artists, he championed my music since the very beginning, and because of this he ended up really pushing me artistically via his support. So when he died, I was on some email lists from the Peel show people and also on the list was fellow WFMU DJ Laura Cantrell. . For those of you that don’t know her work, Laura is probably one of the US’s best new country singers with a wit, charm and soul reminiscent of the REAL greats like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn, etc. I wouldn’t be the first person to say that I was really stunned by her voice the first second I heard her sing.

So anyway, I saw Laura’s name on this list and knew her just a tiny bit and decided to ask her if she would collaborate. I suggested it should be about Peel, or at least the idea of radio. She agreed, I made the music, and we met in NYC. We (well, mostly Laura) wrote the lyrics and melody extremely fast and recorded everything in about 3-4 hours total. I am so moved by Laura’s generosity and this track really touches me when I hear it. I get teary all over again even after hearing it countless times.

[Paulw]

http://www.getunderground.com/underground/features/article.cfm?Article_ID=1907

(extract...)


And the other track with Laura Cantrell was a totally different experience. I was actually getting toward the end of my album and I had this idea for a folky, but really warm sounding guitar song. John Peel had just died and I saw Laura’s e-mail address on a bunch of e-mails that I had from the Peel people. I had met Laura a few times at WFMU in New York where we both did radio programs and I thought, “Well, I can ask her. All she can do is say ‘No’.” And so I e-mailed her. She was at the very end of recording her album on Matador and she was totally stressed out. She wrote back something like, “Well, really if anyone else in the world had asked me about this I’d say ‘No’, but since you asked me it just sounds so weird and absurd that we have to do it.” So then we met in New York City and recorded the whole thing in three hours, which was amazing.


MC: Wow, and it resulted in a beautiful song.


JF: Yeah, sometimes I still hear it and get a little misty-eyed because I feel it’s really a major accomplishment for me and, of course, what Laura did was just unbelievable. And it’s so funny how she works. She gets really humble. She’s a professional musician and she has played a few shows at Lincoln Center and places like that, but when she started to sing what she had prepared for me, she said, “Can you turn around? I get really embarrassed when I sing.” She’s Laura Cantrell, come on! [Laughs.]


We were writing the lyrics together really quickly. Every time I came up with a suggestion she would use that but then alter it at the last minute and make it sound so much better, just the way she would turn the phrase or make the melody just a little bit different. I’m super-happy with it.