Cliff: You're listening to TuneDig.
Lucky you.
A conversation between two lifelong friends about the power of music.
One album at a time.
I am Cliff.
Kyle: And I'm Kyle each episode, we talk about a single album in depth, unpacking
it through conversation to understand what makes it worth appreciating
and hopefully, mercifully learning a little bit about life along the way.
Cliff: Please.
If you're listening for the first time because we're covering an artist or
a record you love, we do promise you will learn something new or gain a new
perspective by the end of the episode.
Kyle: And if you stuck with us for multiple episodes, you know, by now.
One, that we're strange, and two, that you are bound to expand your horizons.
So as we share a clear entry point for artists you may have
never tried to get into before, today is perhaps one such example.
We're talking about Gour, Fantastic Planet soundtrack.
Cliff: La planète sauvage.
Kyle: I will be attempting no French.
this
Cliff: I'm gonna make a meal out of it when we do though.
Kyle: A delicious meal because it's
Cliff: Yeah, lots of carbs.
This one's awesome.
it's somehow unusual uh, in terms of it being a lot of things we'll
talk about a movie soundtrack among several things, French, et cetera.
And at the same time, I think we'll probably find that it's for the
most part directly and straight up the alley of the normal things
that we do like to listen to.
We'll probably draw a thread that.
We'll hopefully only surprise people who didn't know as much about
this record before we got started.
Because it's more everywhere than it feels like at this moment if you don't
already know that it's everywhere.
Kyle: I'm also very surprised that we've made it this far without not just
talking about a film score or something directly film involved, but like it
anything this adjacent to film at all.
And like you alluded to, I think there are places where we've touched intersections
and I know we'll talk about those, but I don't know why it's never occurred to us.
I don't know.
No time like the present.
I think it surfaced for me that I don't really ever sit down to listen to it's
a category that's very easy for me to mentally other and I know there are
people who feel the direct opposite of that and seek things out because they're
done by a film composer or because they accompanied a film somebody liked.
I've had to sit down and examine why I place it in some other, no pun intended,
extraterrestrial category of music when you have examples like this that
exists that are very much their own thing that just work on their face.
Cliff: Luckily, I think this episode will do that for anybody who isn't
already doing it with this album, because it's a real good one to pull out.
It stands on its own, and as opposed to probably many musical works that would
be associated, driven from, whatever, a visual medium, movies, whatever else,
this one doesn't need a specific level of explanation to get why it's good.
It adds a level to it, instead.
Even with a lot of orchestral scores or things like that would normally
go along with the movie, there's some foundational amount you need to
be aware of in the plot or whatever else to truly make sense of it all.
And this one just has multiple levels.
of why it's worth checking out, listening to actively, passively, whatever it
works in every possible context, which is why we'll spend most of this episode
reminding you of how many places it's in hip hop, which is exactly the place
where things that are good, at their core dissected a lot end up because they get
pieced apart and shoved into new ideas and they end up making a ton of sense.
Kyle: ever since we talked about Marvin, I have been thinking a
lot about that idea of I want you being a, you can start from zero.
I've never heard this album.
I know nothing about Marvin Gaye.
I just put it on and the sounds hit me.
This is like that too, where starting from zero is actually
really good and you should do that.
And that's not always the case with music.
Sometimes you can't make heads or tails of it without some amount
of context, but this just works.
And there's some groove and some repetition just sounds the
combination of sounds are cool.
And I think they hit you in a reptile brain but then every little
bit of context you get beyond that.
enriches the information your body is receiving.
so it's, very cool that we're like two for two on that.
" Start from zero and it only gets better from there" way of appreciative inroads.
Cliff: A hundred percent.
And I think we can probably drop a boat anchor early in the episode too, for folks
who are coming in more blind than usual.
Let me just go ahead and make a few, probably, associations
that we'll explain as we talk.
But, These are really quick ways, almost like a musical spoiler, I guess, a way
to start looking at this really quickly, where if you're not already convinced
this is going to be worth some time, let me just show you the range of things
you can already look at from the jump.
About this because one is yes Hip hop if you like any form of trip hop or you've
ever liked any form of trip hop lo fi almost anything in that Meta genre at
all One this is gonna hit In a way that surprises you, but secondly, and at the
exact same time, if you like the band can, you're going to like what's happening
here for totally different reasons.
If you like funk, you're going to like what's happening here
for totally different reasons.
If you like really experimental music, and I'm sorry to bring them up for
the second time, but it's a good kind of front door for the whole thing.
If you like the way that Mars Volta gets weird and interluding, this is
another way for you to experience what's happening on this record.
Cause it's all of those things.
And then.
Is jazz it's just like french jazz So there's this whole other direct path and
doorway into the thing and I hope to make some associations from the jazz angle as
we go along too, but There are so many different sides to look at the music
that's here And it's enjoyable from all of those angles and it becomes really
shocking in my experience The more you listen to this record that it's really
We have this experience with some of the episodes that we do, but the more you
listen to it, the more confused you become about why this isn't kind of a really,
really big deal in the sense that you're always talking about it with a lot of
people and that everybody knows about it.
And that's a pretty strange thing to say about an animated film
from the seventies in France.
That it would 50 plus years on still feel immediate and urgent and relevant and
interesting and it sounds really good
But that's the type of stuff we're trying to dig up anyway,
Kyle: There's, so much embedded in the little knowledge nugget that This
film premiered at Cannes in 1973, on the back of a few, very weird
sociopolitical conflict years in Europe.
The Holy Mountain, premiered that same year, the Jadrowski film at Cannes.
I'm still like Imagine seeing those in the same weekend or
a double feature or whatever.
The nugget is that it won The special prize or whatever it
did, not the palm your but won
Cliff: it was the first animated film ever Yeah
Kyle: But my understanding of the special prize is that it it is for the stuff that
sort of defies Categorization it's like I don't know what I just watched but It
left an impression, and there was a real spirit of that the film that took home the
overall prize was also an adaptation of a novel, like Fantastic Planet, but it was
much more grounded, realistic, dramatic, so it's that was a very interesting
sort of mental starting point for me.
Because I thought about this film long before I really started concentrating
on the soundtrack, in the early Netflix rent two DVDs and get them at home days.
This was one of the first movies that Serious people told me that I needed to
see and I did and then just was like, whoa That was weird and filed that away for a
long time before streaming So it exists between categorization on the visual
level, on the audio level, on the sort of like cultural, creative, contextual level.
I get the sense that it doesn't get talked about more because
there's not easy places to slot
Cliff: I want to encourage people to just start slotting it into the
weirdest places you can imagine.
I was telling Kyle recently uh, we were laughing a little bit.
We'll talk about the movie in a second because I think we should go
ahead and just highlight a little bit of that to sort of, vibe check
this anybody who hasn't seen visuals associated with it especially.
I
Kyle: if you haven't
you probably have somewhere in the culture sphere.
If you ever had Tumblr, if you've been on the internet, any amount, you've
seen something, If you haven't seen it, you've seen something influenced by it.
Certainly you've seen something it influenced.
Like you're aware of it somewhere deep in the recesses of your mind.
I, I can say with a high degree of certainty,
Cliff: 100 percent And I have a little bit of trouble once my brain
decided to associate the modern I guess it would also be kind of
surrealist, but the Strange Planet comics are sort of like an extremely
modern version of this like Yeah.
Kyle: damn, you're right.
Cliff: which is, totally unrelated but now there's at least a little
visual mental hook for people to start thinking about blue people saying
ridiculous things uh, in a fun cadence.
But yeah there is a striking visual style to this whole thing, but
it's a wild thing in and of itself.
Point being, Kyle and I were talking about watching this movie uh, and I specifically
really enjoyed the idea that I'm just gonna kind of brutalize my own psyche by
Watching this really weirdly psychedelic film in the strangest and most difficult
contexts I possibly can just to sort of go all the way to the inside of it and
just, have the experience I might have had with the movie Heavy Metal, or Song
Remains the Same and just, you know,
Kyle: like the wall.
Cliff: yeah so yeah, let's just, let's go hard into the weird and I'll
watch it and um, like most things that I go at with that attitude, they
end up just being funny and fun and enjoyable so don't overthink watching
this movie when you get the chance.
Put it on in the foreground or the background, it doesn't matter.
It's gonna be weird, freak you out a little bit no matter what, cause
it's, it's It was a 1973 animated film that was designed to freak you out.
So we're
Kyle: You were rattling off that list and I thought about how much
you love Xavier Renegade Angel, and is definitely in that same spirit.
So like, put on your Adult Swim glasses for the viewing, for sure.
Cliff: Man, I love that.
Yes.
If you'll combine Xavier Renegade Angel and maybe the animated yellow submarine
stuff from the Beatles, you'll be somewhere in the right headspace, I think.
But yeah, so as you mentioned this story translated as fantastic planet, which
for what it's worth, quick note, even on that, it's not a super direct translation.
Generally speaking, a more direct version of that actual title in French would
be something more like the wild planet.
I did a little bit of reading about that uh, and this is fun, like seventies
context, but several people decided to.
guess that the word fantastic in the 70s meant something a
little bit more like radical.
And if you put that veneer over how that word was used, that'll track a
little bit better than uh, what the word fantastic probably feels like today,
which is a little bit more cheesy or fun,
Kyle: Yeah, not, not an emotional connotation like, in the literal
sense of, it is a fantasy.
This is a sci fi film, sure
Cliff: Yes.
Extremely science fiction in both.
Both of those words go really hard on their definitions here.
This is an allegorical story, yes, about humans, called Oms living on
a planet where they are effectively dominated by giant aliens called
Drags, or Trags, depending on how you want to translate this.
Long and short of it without spoiling the movie because for real watch the movie.
It's cool We're going to talk more about the music than that but effectively
aliens have these little humans basically stored up like little pets and the whole
thing kind of follows the hero's journey, honestly, and seems to have a lot in
common with dune such as little vignettes of Fighting to the death for your survival
to be welcomed into the tribe and Odd ceremonies and things like that uh, which
is just fun to watch people's brain kind of pour out but the whole story is about
humans being dominated by these aliens and basically what happens when people
cross Boundaries between two species or whatever else and what happens there?
So just watch it, but it's based on a 1957 novel I think by Stephane Wu.
But, I don't know what the book was like.
I haven't had time to check that out.
Also, I'm going to assume a same French.
So that'd be a tough read for me personally, but I don't know that
there's anything inherently animated or psychedelic or anything about
it from the jump, especially being written, you know, 15 to 20 years
prior to this movie being made.
But the lenses that get put on in 1973 to make what is effectively
a really psychedelic sci fi animated film really comes on
strong, gives a really solid vibe.
And all of that.
I can't say whether it would have worked with or without this soundtrack, but I
can tell you it works with it The coolest thing about this record, I think, or the
biggest thing that struck me uh, which maybe it's obvious to say, but it stands
alone as a piece of music and works really well as the soundtrack to the movie.
Watching it actually, I'd encourage you, if you can, and if you haven't seen the
movie, listen to the album at least once.
First and then watch the movie because you get a real appreciation for how they
play with that music and it starts to really impress upon you what a talented
composer and arranger, alone was here and his ability to think through apparently
in the span of about three weeks at the very end of this project the ability
to put together the soundtrack that would work so well for such a wild
story It's one of those moments where it's not only enjoyable, the fruits of
his labor, but you also start standing in awe at how good people are at music
in general, that they could crank out something like this that would work
so well for so long across the board.
Kyle: So big plus one to listen to it before you watch the film and just
appreciate it as a piece of music.
If we're catching you fresh on all of this stuff, the definite entry point is
the album first and then the film, both of them cold before you read anything.
Reiterate what we said last episode, stop the tape right now, go enjoy all the stuff
and then come back to this material later.
Because I can assure you that we have both listened to and watched quite
a number of times at this point.
thing that will strike you immediately is that it's 25 tracks in 39 minutes.
So it's a bunch of very short snippets, which, if you're familiar
with film scores, Sometimes you will have lots of little snippets like
that, but sometimes you will have like Long orchestral pieces that get
broken up into snippets in the film.
The film itself is only 72 minutes it's a very very lean watch Arguably a little too
short as a film if anything so like very much of the film is accompanied by this
music and it it is very contextual but there is sort of a strange juxtaposition
there it's a bunch of short pieces but it also because it's based on or grows
from one arpeggiation sort of feels like one long thing also like Marvin Gaye
I don't think we intended to compare but it is interesting there are like
Cliff: We never do, but it
Kyle: Yeah, similar energies.
Cliff: always happens.
Yeah,
Kyle: feels like no discernible beginning or end point because of
the sort of core running through the heartbeat of the thing.
it is a little strange to like, figure out what's going on and be like, at what point
in the score am I at any given moment?
Because it's like 47 seconds and then you're on to the next thing.
one thing that I really enjoyed.
in reading about the film and I've never spent any time reflecting on the
film or contemplating its themes or whatever but like film is a world like
music where there are people who have like written very extensively and done
a lot of Provocative thinking so We'll link when we post this episode to some
of the film reviews There are a lot of like great film blog sites, whatever
with smart scholarly people sharing views on the thing there was one of like
four or five that I really liked each of them had like a new dimension that they
opened up for me like the symbolism of the colors or different interpretations
of the allegory You Of which there are three or four potentially, but film cred
had this thing I think not only enriches the viewing of the film, but sort of
informed the way I listen to the music.
After that, and it said, ultimately, perhaps the best way to view the
film is as a pay into the value of compassionate, intelligent and knowledge.
Lulu, the director himself, defined the story as, quote, sort of a hymn
to education in the 1973 French press book released to promote the film.
Tear, the main character's narration, pointedly stresses his
delight in learning, a privilege that the drogs, the other race of
creatures, seem to take for granted.
In listening, there is a thread of, enlightenment,
enrichment, seeing the other.
We're two American males who only speak one language, and there is some pretty
pointed metaphor in all of it to me in, all the layers of unknown unknowns
that get exposed just by like stumbling Ignorantly as a westerner into like this
delightful little 40 minute piece of music
Cliff: I do think two more very quick things will help hem in the
what's happening in the movie so we can keep focusing on the music.
One is, just a delightful quote that I pulled from New York Times
review of this movie in 1973.
I feel that it encapsulates a little bit more of what you need to know about it.
One sentence I pulled from it, quote, There is some inoffensive
nudity, and not one smidgen of humor, not even for Christmas.
So for the last time, this is a French film.
Uh, And it meets all of those criteria very well.
But yeah, it's got that great This is not funny.
The allegory is very clear.
I do really understand what you are saying, even if there are levels that I
can keep getting as I watch it a little bit more, like you're gonna understand
the point of the film fairly directly, and there are some real cool like, oh,
oh, there's boobs, neat, okay, so we were doing a, okay, so we were doing a
serious thing, okay, and then, okay, the boobs, okay, but the boobs are serious
too, okay, we got this, okay, so I had to
Kyle: Like an Oppenheimer, you know
Cliff: yeah,
Kyle: Strictly for historical purposes, bro
Cliff: like an Oppenheimer, yeah, One more thing I'll add is, so we
mentioned, you know, this is all French.
It gets translated uh, into, you know, the word fantastic planet and all that.
But for most cases, what I've seen is that the track names themselves remain
untranslated, generally speaking.
I'm gonna read a few of them translated.
In chronological order like of the track listing of the album because it does
a decent job of sort of highlighting what happens in this movie and what the
fuck was happening in the 70s, dude So that first word, like the first tracks,
there are multiple de homonization.
So that's a word that refers to the moment when the soul has become
separate from the body itself.
So you've got that to start with.
Next track name.
Generic.
The Bracelet.
Yeah.
Which the bracelet pops up in a lot of the samples we'll talk about well.
but they're, you know, they're all kind of like, obviously named, so, Dehomonization.
Generic.
The Bracelet.
Further down.
Drag Council.
Men.
The Great Coexistence.
The Woman.
Death of Drag.
The City of Free Men.
Robot Attack.
The Long March.
Waltz of the Statues.
The Rockets.
Generic.
Striptease, Children's Meditation, The Old Woman Dies.
So, that's, um,
Kyle: prompts the way that you read them.
Yeah.
Cliff: Thank you so much.
Yeah, I had been practicing for that.
that last three in a row is a good, you know, Striptease, Children's
Meditation, The Old Woman Dies is a good encapsulation of how the
end of that movie feels in general.
yeah
Kyle: and in that quick succession, like when I say 72 minutes is a little too
lean, it does really fly at the end.
Cliff: Oh, I'm agreed with you.
They could have stressed it out.
I was there for it.
Tell me more.
Kyle: Yeah.
And
Cliff: I want to root for us,
Kyle: and it's so, you wouldn't want it to be three hours,
obviously, but it's so, Cool.
Disorientingly immersive, that you really start to feel inside of the world and
then it's like, it's over, you know, the way that Zeppelin four and all the, great
eight song albums of the seventies are like 36 minutes or whatever, like this.
And you're like, we're back.
We're like, I just started thinking thoughts because of this.
Hold on keep going, stretch it out.
Cliff: With more context of the movie in pocket, the music is what
we're really here to talk about.
And I want to swing back to it in several ways.
But one is one of the most fun parts.
Of telling musical stories to begin with not to always zoom all the way
out immediately like this but One of the reasons we even do this podcast at
all is because there are cool stories that exist For you to go discover about
music that's interesting like usually interesting music Had interesting
things happen while they were writing it or while they were making it or in
the time past after it was released or something unexpected happened 50 years
later or So, this story has all of that.
Just all of it.
It was cool at the time, 50 plus years ago, it did something unique
and interesting that was shocking.
That he could churn out this type of music, again, within
the span of about three weeks.
Uh, Which on top of that, he did not have access to the movie itself
during the time that he wrote this.
this was arranged, composed, written, recorded from the memory of what he could
track from the time that he had seen the animation and what was going into it.
He didn't have time to, actually be able to view the film back
then because it was still the 70s and he was on a tight deadline.
Kyle: Which was the opposite of the way.
It was very often done in the studio systems where they would bring a
composer in early and the rhythm of the score would help inform the pacing
of the scene or movements or whatever.
And.
It's like the worst, the worst group project ever, in that the film took
five years to produce and animate and they kept iterating on it and on
the vinyl re release page, they did a great write up, and like actually
shared some anecdotes from it.
Apparently, Lelou when they would talk on the phone, he'd be like, we'll
have you ready to come in and do your thing in three months or whatever.
And then that just kept going and going for five years and then they were like,
all right, we need the whole thing in three weeks or a month or whatever.
So he wrote the whole thing in three weeks, blind.
And recorded it in three days, March 8-10 including a session for part of
it with a string section of 26 players.
So we're not talking like Kevin Parker, Tame Impala, bedroom pop.
I'll knock this whole shit out in a weekend by myself type thing.
There was a heavy degree of coordination with the large studio involved.
So it's like the more detail you learn about that.
The more insane, the whole thing becomes.
And then you listen to it with that in mind and it feels so fully realized
and it's so utterly unique, nothing sounded like it before I mean, it was
like if aliens made blaxploitation a little, so like maybe tangentially you
hear strains of things, nothing sounded like it, this weird mix of elements.
And to this day, nothing sounds like it since.
So it's just.
A remarkable achievement, to your point, speaks to, the true genius
that musicians are capable of, especially up against pressures.
Cliff: Getting people to record like that is always ridiculous when I hear that.
I can't get 26 adults to a dinner given three weeks time, much less write
and record things that I need them to execute on in a short time span.
It's truly incredible.
But it's good to just highlight and reinforce this
was a cool thing on its own.
Had no one ever cared.
Past when it was released in 1973, but this story is cool because basically
despite Alain specifically never really wanting to be super well known.
He ended up doing a thing that had so much impact down the road by people
who would use technology to sample music that wasn't even available
at the time that this was written.
And so, couldn't be conceptualized, right?
But, We see that Alain was known as Gogo for short he went by other
monikers and names, I tried to figure out why don't I know more about
this guy, and part of it turns out
Kyle: And why can't I more?
Yeah.
Cliff: part of it, it turns out, seems to be because he didn't
want to be known for a while.
Which just adds to not only the mystique of the whole thing, but like, that's
what makes it that much more surprising and shocking that his particular
work here has gotten a second and third life through primarily hip hop.
Kyle: Yeah.
It's also strange that he's not more well known, he is in the last
few years, and he passed away.
last year in February of 2023.
It is strange that he's not more well known relative to the volume
and type of output that he had.
So like prior to the score work, he was a side man and a composer primarily
for Serge Gainsbourg, who was enormous.
And then a number of other European superstars.
Who like, when I talk about cultural immersion bit of all this, I clicked in
on some of the names that I'd never heard of people that he wrote for, and these
were like some of the biggest artists of the 20th century globally, and they were
names that were totally unfamiliar to me.
So like he had a huge career a bit in obscurity as a songwriter.
He won the Eurovision contest with a song he wrote.
And I think I couldn't find a like full discography anywhere, but I,
I think he wrote somewhere in the neighborhood of like hundreds of songs
Cliff: Yeah, seems like it.
Kyle: in the like French pop, jazz, whatever.
He released a solo jazz album, you know, and this is all prior to the
mid sixties in his first 35 years.
Or so of life before this kind of work even really started happening.
So, Another pair of a lot of Marvin Gaye in that way.
long and deep career already before this little thing even happened.
Cliff: I want to talk more about the specifics of not only how all this
stuff got sampled, but then all of its sort of musical siblings and
all the cool stuff to look out for.
But being a little meta here, we've been trying to add some structure
to our episodes in the sense of we have a few kind of tent poles where
we stop and look at what's a good way to just let this album hit you.
we've talked a little bit more about Our experiences both intentional and
sort of unintentional in experiencing the music that we're listening to For
the episode whether it's in prep or whether it's hit us in a different way
at a different time Well before know, we ever start talking about it so we
always make sure and cover how to take it in, but tune in for those key moments.
So really kind of guiding you through the first couple of times you listen
to a new piece of music, especially if you've never heard it before.
So we talked.
Already about the kind of association with the movie, which is a, an aspect that
we don't always get to bring into play honestly for the most part we're we're
not even huge on watching music videos a lot of the time As some sort of additive
or contextual bit to understanding an album probably because there's Not
usually video for all the songs anyway.
so we've got some there, but I wanted to just say like really clearly,
yeah, this is a hundred percent, a great active listen if you're
ready for the vibe, but it's also a really, really, really good passive.
Listen, it is a very good, put it on in the background, but
make sure you turn it up enough.
To where you can catch stuff record it's not dense or full or in the kind of
modern Mastering term of this it's not loud the way that a lot of other records
are And so there's space in there for you to like hear yourself think while you're
still listening to the record and you can do you know You can do other stuff.
It's a great smoke session record.
I mean, honestly, if you just want to kind of blow anybody's lid the next time
you're hanging out and smoking a joint with your friends, just put on this
record and you will either be ridiculed by people who don't understand music
as well as you or lauded by the people that do mess the way everybody wants
to feel when they get past the joint.
Kyle: It's a, for sure, like leather jacket moment in that way.
Yeah, we went over to her apartment and
Cliff: Now, her loft.
Kyle: yeah, her loft.
And she had all these cool, all these cool pieces of art on the wall and
we were hanging out drinking wine and she put on the Soundtrack to a french
sci fi film from the 70s and was explaining how it won top prize at con
that year and it was an allegory for fascism or coexistence among people.
Anyway she's got a boyfriend, but I her again soon.
She
Cliff: He's in finance.
Kyle: me a little.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
He's neither fantastic nor helping the planet.
His name's Todd.
Cliff: yeah, leaving Brad aside, who would never like this record.
we, it's good to be really straightforward, especially with a
good, like a good passive listen.
Because everything we talk about has some aspect of it.
That's a good active listen, but not all of them will vibe with
you the way that this one will.
I mean you're gonna you're gonna do that like low key slow head nod thing
when you're not paying attention Because you're just gonna catch it.
There's gonna be a couple of times that make you go.
Oh shit something will roll in that'll surprise you and it just sounds right
And that's just because that's the feeling of listening to good music
my friend It just so happens that it comes from a 73 french jazz album.
That's about a movie
Kyle: And I'll say it's the month of May weather-wise you should have decent
environmental context around you, it's as good a time as any to pick up this record.
So when we say passive listen, a lot of times that could mean one time and
then it's on a playlist with a bunch of other albums you've been meaning to
listen to and you go into the next thing.
This is a you can leave it on all day.
album So if it's a nice Saturday and you open all your doors and windows and
you're letting fresh air in, cleaning the house, whatever, play it somewhere
centrally and get some fresh air, but be in the safety of your own home too.
And, it's so I don't necessarily want to call it atmospheric.
It has ethereal moments, but for a soundtrack, especially it
is very present and rhythmic.
But the movie.
is about a a planet.
It's about an environment and the animation style of the film
is very environment focused.
It's a lot of stills of renaissance type quality scenery contrast that with
like a Disney where it's way more fluid animation, way more focused on the
character in the center of the frame.
there's a lot of beauty and focus on the environment and
the look and feel of the thing.
And that's reflected in the music.
let it physically fill your environment on a Saturday or something.
I can't recommend that highly enough.
if you like Seth Rogen's houseplant playlist and you are the person with
the like custom clay ashtray type of thing, some of it's sativa, some of it's
indica houseplant playlist type material.
So try to enjoy it in that way.
Cliff: The way you're talking about Taking care of your aesthetics, listening
to this record the same way they, they cared a lot about the aesthetics
and the visual style of this film.
you mentioned, the animation style is and was unique even at that time.
those were chosen very intentionally to feel and look a certain way.
So that's a, yeah, that's a cool takeaway, honestly, but that's
a really good way of putting it.
It's a great background record you can put on loud, but vibe check, take
care of the area that's around you and give it some good feel so you can
really draw what's being put down here,
Kyle: So musically, what.
I always look to you for the, the technical, literal end of
things, tonally, musically, vibe wise, whatever what surprised you?
What were the ones that perked your antenna up?
Cliff: A couple of main things, which I think will contribute to the
sample ability of this thing that we'll talk about some more as well.
one is the way that, uh, especially the way the tracks are laid out, you
know, as you already mentioned, a lot of them are kind of shorter, and they're
chronologically related to how they're coming out in the movie, but you've
got kind of a one minute track that sort of noisy builds up on the way in.
And then it hits that second track and it feels like the groove drops like a hammer.
The way you sort of shift from anxious to rhythmic is noted, As always can't believe
I'm going to bring out this reference, but the thing that made me feel and think
about especially the first time I noticed how it would go from noisy interlude
to aggressive, like slow backbeat.
I know I made you listen to this back in the day, but Buried Insides Chronoclast.
Kyle: Oh, man, deep.
I haven't about that record in a long time.
Cliff: it's so it's basically a kind of.
It's an atmospheric black metal album, we'll just say it that way, but they
have this sense of they're doing songs and they're doing almost literally
interludes in between them but The interlude is basically has a beat and a
rhythm that's at a really similar tempo to the main motifs in this record in
the way that it just kind of like snaps you back into it really fast Even when
the rhythm didn't guide you there just a few seconds before kind of reminded
me of that and it It was one of those moments where sometimes the way that music
surprises me just makes me laugh out loud.
And that was one of them.
It was just like, Oh, that's, but that's so good.
That feels so good.
The way that it built up, went in a different direction
and then dropped you back in.
that's part of how, you know, it's good.
And then before long, you're, you're humming that to yourself anyway.
So to feel that backbeat come in.
And hit so strong was awesome.
The second thing that stood out that was sort of related to that on Mira at
tear, there is this guitar work in the background and funk guitar being a part
of jazz here is we could probably spend an episode on that in and of itself, right?
But like one of the cool things to know here is this is ostensibly
a French jazz record, but it's.
there's funk guitar everywhere, really clearly, really easy to hear it's not
subtle at all that they're aping that uh, and we could probably talk about
um, how French jazz uh, was probably aping things the same way that British
blues was back in the seventies.
In the sense of they're sort of making caricatures of a culture that they're
actually not a part of, but it's cool enough that they want to borrow it.
and so, while everyone is welcome under this tent I think that's a good way
to think about why funk was so heavily intertwined with what's supposed to be
sort of jazz or soundtrack y music here.
So they're approximating something.
But it works and part of why it works, especially on, on Mira Eterra, the thing
that stood out to me was they do some sort of syncopation with the rhythm guitar.
And again, I think this is what will lead us into the sampling talk more, but they
play with rhythm really subtly here in both the guitar and in a couple of the
different instruments as well, in a way that really lends itself not only to Good
repetition but the actual composition and arrangement of motifs over a long
period of time, like they are reusing really simple ideas and then playing with
or reversing or spreading out the rhythm around it to give it a different feeling.
And it's again, without a kind of better reference for what that means.
Like it's one of the reasons I like the band between the buried in me the drummer,
Blake he takes one riff and just shifts the rhythm and the emphasis or makes a
syncopated version and just shifts between those really quickly and goes back and
forth and it makes everything feel new.
And then when you bring it back later, You can bring it back in 80 different
ways because you've already played it all those different ways And it creates like
a memorability out of a simple Like melody in a way that works super well here so
those were kind of like the things that hit me and then what kept surprising me
was That those things just kept happening we would go in one direction and then
drop back into the beat But then the beat would kind of syncopate or shift around
a little bit and then it would take you off in a different direction And then
you'd snap back to something else again
Kyle: We also talked about that in the Meshuggah episode, and I was one of
those people that tried to make more of what there is to get about Meshuggah
than what those guys are going for.
Everything wrapping around 4 all the time is the big trick with Meshuggah, and I
think there's a version of that here, and it's not like the alternating time
signature Berkeley College type of thing.
it's the kind of shift that, comes naturally when you try to play
it to just find different feels.
And then you only realize it's like a thing when you try to notate
it, you're like, Oh, it's this.
And then it's this on the 16th and then whatever.
which I, I appreciate it as a person that like, doesn't do any of that, but I I know
it's like the Nick Cannon drum line thing.
I could do a rhythm or a syncopation in my head.
And it's like a thing.
And I know it's cool.
And maybe it's smart and maybe it's not, but I don't know
how to tell the difference.
So I'm in a very Cro Magnon way picking up what you're putting down.
Cliff: We both just saw the callus dalboys together we can both hold
the backbeat we're good to go
Kyle: People, uh, speaking of, pulling the rhythm into a million different fragments.
It was cool.
It was one of the coolest, weirdest bands I've seen in a minute.
And cool, cool that we just did a, triple combo invocation of three weird
metal bands in the French jazz episode.
Cliff: Sorry goes to classical music class once ends up this
Kyle: I mean, I guess, yeah, I guess if you like, if you like the rhythmic aspect
of all this, go in those directions where people are pulling groove against, chops.
Cliff: Yeah, and even across those bands and this record though, I think
a way to talk about it, even if these bands wouldn't say it the same way,
is all of this music is arranged.
I, and that, and that's not to shortcut any other form of
music writing, anything, right?
There's a lot and there's a lot of magic in just, we're just doing the thing, it's
live, this is how it feels, this is how it works, in, in just executing until
you get to the right place, but there's always a kind of subsection of music,
especially the more complex you can get with metal, jazz, and other things like
that, where you can tell that someone has looked at it, it's live, As if it were on
a spreadsheet and went Hmm, I'm going to move these pieces around on purpose now.
And some people know what they're doing with that.
And when they do it well, it shifts things into, they begin to mess with your
sense of the time that you're spending.
listening to the music, which gives you a feeling that's significantly different
than other types of music, I think.
And it works really well here.
because you're, you're going in nearly concentric circles.
Like actually one way I thought about describing it was, you know, those
little geometric drawing machines that'll draw a circle and then you
make one small shift in it and it starts drawing a slightly different
shape on top of it, but it's sort
Kyle: dad
Cliff: Aspirograph is a great example,
Kyle: of a toddler here.
Cliff: Glad to hear they're still cool, but the way that you're basically still
operating off of the same sort of orbit or axis or whatever But you're slightly
changing something and at first you're doing that and you're just like well,
okay Well, I just sort of drew three ugly circles beside each other cool job
Uh, but if you keep going eventually you end up with something that's like
wildly complex And it's not the thing that you intended to make necessarily
But you made little tiny tweaks You As the machine kept running and you ended
up with this big kind of complex thing.
And whether you knew it or not, when you started, you made something pretty cool.
It's fun to look at and interesting and would be hard to create from
scratch with intention again.
this just feels like that because of how specifically it again
uses like a handful of motifs.
Like a handful of basic melodies or rhythmic lines or string parts.
And for the most part, it's just, I mean, I would almost think of it as
like a bucket of five to 10 different things that are happening on this record.
And then they get sequenced together differently over time, iterated on,
repeated, returned to or in other cases they will, take the same.
If you take de harmonization one and generic, you'll notice that the way
both songs start, the same underlying melody on the first bar, but the
second bar, it just changes slightly.
Otherwise it would be indistinguishable from the track before it, but it
just like changes two or three notes out of that second bar, then goes
back to repeating the pre like it's making subtle shifts over time in a
way that you can sort of trace, but.
That I think is why it's so inherently well designed to be picked up and
sampled because now there's Basically, instead of there being 800 parts to
a song to sample, there's 8 parts to a song that have 10 variations each.
And so anybody who picks it up automatically gets a song that sounds
different or a hook that sounds different than anyone else who might
have sampled the exact same song.
So now this album is going to make decades worth of hip hop.
Kyle: I like a couple of things that you said.
One, in contrasting to those two tracks, one of the things that I kept thinking
was Okay, clearly it's all coming from the same arpeggio or the same bass
idea, which is a jazz thing, right?
It's, I guess that's what modal is.
Essentially, this is like a version of that.
But how elastic one idea can be.
And like you talked about it being fractal and geometric.
There was another episode where you mentioned Tom Holland's Spider Man and Dr.
Strange being on top of the train and the world opening up fractally like that.
So interesting to invoke that
Cliff: The Mirror Dimension, bro.
Kyle: the mirror dimension.
So I thought about that a lot with the melody, how fractal the melody was and
just, you can sit and pontificate about the note C or whatever the base note of
this thing is, how much you can stretch that in a million different directions
and just marvel at the miracle of repetition or a thing against a different
counterpart note to note or measure like that's a Very basic musical idea.
But if you are a non musical person, this is a really cool, the repetition
and arpeggiation on this thing is simple enough and repetitive
enough that it lets you really appreciate that without being boring.
In fact, quite the opposite.
it's very exciting the whole time.
The second thing is you talked to someone that like laying it out on a spreadsheet
thing, that sort of visual block idea.
And of course that would lend itself to hip hop and sampling because like,
think about an MPC and when it's going through the 16 buttons or whatever.
And the light's going and it's like a Simon Says or whatever that toy was.
Like, that's just, you're arranging the, beats in a measure.
And finally with technology, we had a way to visualize that.
So it's a cool, in the ways that we were talking about with Tangerine Dream
a long while back, where they were starting to use technology less visually
to hit some of those, fractalizations.
You have another early sort of analog example here that would lend
itself to the rhythms of hip hop.
So just very cool.
in addition to celebrating black music as the Rosetta Stone of everything being like
a central theme of this podcast over the years, the line from music concrete in the
forties and fifties and the Stockhausen school and all that going into Sampling
and the interplay between live instruments and especially like funk, rhythmic type
stuff and technology all the way through to sampling, that's probably the richest
fountain for like every fruit of music that's ever been cool comes off of that
vine in some way like you're no more than three degrees from it at any given point.
is interesting how much ground we've been able to cover and still
come back to that over and over and over again on this podcast.
Cliff: It is the undeniable and inevitable truth.
So we would just be pretending we didn't call it out all the time.
Relative to what we were just talking about, we, so we also mentioned those
kind of tent poles for ways to listen.
So let's just talk about that really briefly, because the other thing we
like to do is, okay, once you've, once you've heard it and experienced it.
Once or twice maybe especially here with the movie once if you want to go deeper
and you want to really like Listen to the music on purpose to learn things to
feel things whatever But it's kind of like your primary activity to consume the
music and pay attention to it and learn from it we like to talk about some things
that you can then focus on and isolate sort of as you know, you can think of
it as like when you're meditating, it's returning to your breath, it's visualizing
it's a framework to help you channel.
The energy that you have and sort of get the thing that you're thinking
about back out of that experience.
And so we give you some things to focus on or isolate that won't take up so much
of your brain uh, and won't take you off the music, but tunes you in enough.
To where you are paying attention and not drifting and so one of those then
relative to everything that we just talked about is paying attention to what
is repeating Versus what is changing?
Just simply I think noting Uh, you don't have to follow it.
You don't have to think about it a ton, but just sort of noting, you
know, like I was just mentioning the, Disharmonization and, uh, Generique,
going into both of those, paying attention to the fact that they sound
really similar, but what part of it is actually different than what I just heard?
And just giving yourself a moment of reflecting I think that's really
helpful here in a cool exercise.
because maybe it's, it's obvious, but it's worth saying like when you are
reflecting on music relative to what's changing, you're also sort of using a
little bit of your memory and you're going to have to pay a little bit of
attention to what you're listening to in order to do this thought exercise at all.
And so it's a cool way to focus in.
And notice things.
And then you'll start to, I think, notice as well when you do that,
the way that the music progresses.
And it tunes you into the intentional arrangement and composition
that we were just talking about.
None of us like, Me or kyle included we're fucking dummies man.
We're not smart enough to understand what You know endlessly talented
french jazz composer was thinking doing trying to do whatever okay But
that's never the exercise What we're trying to do is understand it as best
we can and have an experience with it.
And so that's A layman's way, I think, of tuning into arrangement and composition,
just sort of paying attention to what's staying and what's coming and going,
noticing that a little bit more, and then letting yourself return to it later
when you notice something has come back or is similar to what you heard before.
All of those are just really cool ways to get in deep with the record.
And I can tell you with certainty, that is exactly the exercise that's
being done when this gets picked apart.
Kyle: Yeah, and I would say as somebody who's never really played and, whose sort
of default mode structurally is verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus,
exit, three minute rock and roll song.
What you have here is a great teaching tool that's different than that,
and it's different from jazz in that it's taken idea and improvise
in whatever different directions.
But it can help train you to start thinking about changes in music in
general, like going part to part or contrasting different parts against
each other within a song or across an album and how they create movement.
In your mind, the emotions that come from listening to music come from
the changes, as much as, or more than they come intra part, you hear a riff
or a tone or whatever that you like.
And it helps you create narrative or story from mood.
musical movement becomes lyrical in that way.
So like, Listening to composed instrumental music with no words to tell
you any story, is a good way to go back and like, maybe you appreciate a really
well crafted, Bob Dylan song or whatever.
And when you return to the things that you, where you
think you want to know more.
Cliff: It's also a fun exercise, related to that again, you have to
have seen the movie at least once to get the vibe of it, but you can start
to discern music that has a sort of related on screen action to it versus
music that is sort of the backing while a thing is generally happening.
you'll start to notice some of the very particular and noticeable
elements of the music end up being not literally sound effects, but
practically sound effects from the movie in the sense that they're like
related to a specific thing happening.
And especially once you get a mental.
Vibe of that visual style and the feel of it and all you start to be able to
recreate a little bit of the scenes In your head as you're listening to the
music And going back and remembering sort of what was happening during
it and it fits astonishingly well Sometimes when my brain will not calm
down I will listen to something Like bass and dumb uh, like Seinfeld without
actually watching it and only listening to the audio in my headphone to sort
of like Bring me all the way back down and just sort of like, I don't know.
Sometimes it's like resetting, cause I get a little bit confused, but
I'm, I'm listening to something dumb.
That was cool.
I feel like I just disclosed something embarrassing and weird about myself
uh, and then forgot what it was worth saying all that for to begin with.
So I've just ended up saying a thing,
Kyle: podcasts just like worse versions of Seinfeld?
Anyway.
All podcasts are the podcasts about nothing brought to you by Bluetooth
One thing that I noticed though, I love that point about really present versus
passive Almost like saying a thing versus texturizing a thing in the film.
I felt that too One thing that I thought was interesting is like when
you listen to the record divorce of the context of the film or whatever.
Very little of it is what feels like a score to me, thinking about like
a Hans Zimmer type of thing, right?
Where it is all sort of atmospheric and around the action and world building.
So it's the ambient stuff where you're like, Oh, this feels like a film
score that really stands out to me.
Like robot attack is a great example, or even striptease, which is ethereal,
but they're still like very subtly played distinctive rhythm, but it's more
noticeable when it does pull back to me.
But then that got me thinking, Oh, I want to go watch a bunch of other movies.
That I thought the sound was cool or mentally filed away just to see what
percentage of it feels like it's helping drive the action versus it's just texture,
or I love that phrase that came up when we talked about Portishead all those years
ago, you know, the air around the thing.
So that is sort of its own exercises, like go back to your top 10 or 15
favorite films or look on the IMDb lists people have generated for, films with
the best soundtracks or best scores and do that exercise of like what
Functionally, the scorer is doing to your senses at any given moment because
I'm too engrossed the narrative and the visuals typically when I watch a
film to think about that dimension.
And that's like a whole new way to experience film for me now.
Which is crazy as like a huge music fan who's had a music podcast for years
to admit that I don't really do that.
I can think of all the moments where there's like pop music sync.
But score, again, is in a different category for me.
So I'm excited to go back and do a bunch of that in the weeks and months to come.
Cliff: Yeah, to your point uh, the point of my, uh, listening to Seinfeld without
the screen on thing was exactly kind of what you were just mentioning, that
because of the intensity isn't the right word, but the visuals are very particular,
sometimes that can be a lot to experience, and the movie's relatively heavy itself.
Being able to have another sort of milder form of experiencing it is I think what
can happen once you've watched the movie Just once or twice maybe and then you've
gotten familiar with the music And now you're able to just use that music to
kind of call back to memory some less brain energizing visuals That represent
what's happening without getting quite so caught up in some of those moments because
like of them will swallow you whole.
Kyle: For sure.
And I think, divorcing it from the visuals works so well with this particular piece
of music because of a quote that I found.
uh, that really resonated.
It said, this album feels curiously unmoored from.
It's time and place.
While the opening guitars and bass of Dehumanization are transportative to
Europe's 1973 experimental rock scene, rubbing shoulders with Cannes, Future
Days, and Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, in moments like the baroque pastiche
Concealed Drags, The Drag Council, the score hurtles centuries into the past.
Gorger's orchestral instrumentation suspends everything in a state of
temporal ambiguity, while his constant jerking between aesthetics, there's
that word aesthetic again, means even acutely contemporary sounds, like the
Black Sabbath esque drums on Ter and Midor, feel like brief stops in 1973
rather than grounding us for good.
So it, the mix of sounds play with a sense of time and, terrain, uh, which
is, I think, exactly what the film good example of what reality is intended to
do It's clear that it's an allegory.
There are things that you recognize but it is fantastic as well.
Cliff: So enough with the teasing.
This all makes it really good for hip hop sampling.
So real fast, for the uninitiated, let me just go ahead and give you
the quick summary to get you excited.
Because if you like hip hop at all, this will be an interesting bit for
Kyle: Remember guy Atlanta that used to be like, you like hip hop?
Little Five.
Cliff: burned a lot of CDRs.
Kyle: haven't thought about that guy in a while.
I hope he's doing well.
He sure
Cliff: A lot of CD Rs man.
I did try to like hip hop once or twice, but anyway People you may know who have
sampled off of this album alone Not just the artists in general not related
things just literally this album Mac Miller, Run the Jewels, Flying Lotus,
Denzel Curry, Madlib, VIC, Lil Sims, probably more than that, but that's
just the easy group to grab off the top of people who grab all this stuff.
Also uh, is sampled on KRS One tracks.
J Dilla mixed it in on some beat tape stuff like It's so good It's so good
in a completely different vein than you expect it to be good If you came into
this record totally blind and didn't know that it became like a crate diggers jewel
going forward But it is and it seems to have started with Madlib Uh with the
track come on feet, which I like a lot Also, I just want to say really directly
because we're all adults here I feel like that phrase might mean something
different in 2023 that probably was not necessarily intended At the time where
that track name was written, so i'm just going to say that and move on from it
But I just want to make it really clear.
I don't think there's anything weird about that song but And
in fact, it's really funny.
Kyle: This instance of Cliff's Intrusive Thoughts brought to you by Therapy.
However much you're getting, get more.
Now back to your scheduled program.
Cliff: Forever haunted by the idea that I'll forget a caveat one day.
Kyle: My brain was in the pool!
Cliff: Yes,
Kyle: My audio probably clipped there again, but it was worth it.
We're not gonna call it clipping, we're gonna call it castanzing from now on.
Cliff: My fear is that I'm George Costanza when the truth is I'm probably Kramer
But so that track come on feet, right?
Like it had not only a sample from tenant Tua it had a drum beat from
little feet in it, like the band little feet, which is awesome.
Uh, And then snippets from a blaxploitation movie by Melvin
van Peebles, sweet backs.
Badass song has a lot of S's in it.
So I did my best with it.
But.
Kyle: Cliff Seal, famously a Blaxploitation fan.
Cliff: I'm just trying to read the sentences together, my man.
But yeah, it's a really fun track it immediately like I understand why that
track would be listed as sort of the catalyst for everything else starting to
sample it more and more heavily because it immediately captures why it works.
It sounds.
Right As the right vibe and what's continued to be interesting, which
I'd love to hear more from you about to is like The samples here seem to
have really like seamlessly gone from being totally fine with like boom bap
to more modern forms of production and hip hop now like all of it works.
It works if you just throw a really simple beat on top of the rhythm
section that was already there.
It also works in like.
When Run the Jewels samples the bracelet they're just shifting we
talked about shifting and re sequencing rhythms they just shift their downbeat
around on that sample, and it works for the whole rest of the song.
And somehow sounds like LP!
A very particular production style, even though he's grabbing something
from this, which has its own lineage.
It's really cool how much life this thing has gotten in the hip hop scene.
Kyle: well, and if you think about the list of artists that you name, they
cut across a lot of time in hip hop and very different sort of context
and scenes, which speaks also to the elasticity of the source material.
And you're right.
It is used for In pretty profoundly different ways large swaths of sound
from the record all the way down to little Dilla esque fragments, and by
like, Pretty different MCs, like Big Pun is very different than KRS One,
is very different than Little Sims, is very different than Mac Miller.
So just having like a spiritual through line between all of those artists who love
the form but express it very differently, it makes it, all the more potent to me.
Also, I'm glad to have a Madlib celebration moment.
if we had started the podcast earlier in the year, it probably would
have made a lot of sense in March to talk about Madvillainy on its
20th anniversary and how it was a relatively obscure gem like this record.
And if you know, you know, type thing with Madlib and Doom, and now it's
in the multiple millions of streams.
Category in the past five years alone.
And like, it's like a hockey stick trajectory year over year.
So 20 years of mad villainy.
It's a good time to just appreciate Madlib and, the craft of sampling.
We've talked about Dilla a great deal, but like Madlib should be appreciated.
Pretty deeply as well.
and just the, the mirror anthropology of taking like very different things and
sewing them together into a new quilt.
So like French sci fi soundtrack with country ass little feet with
blaxploitation film, turning it into a new thing and like anthropologically
what those layers say together.
That's what makes sampling really exciting to me, but you have
to have something that like.
Is a canvas that you can impress a lot upon, which is what the
fantastic planet score does as well.
Lots of really exciting stuff with all of these, but the Madlib one
is particularly exciting to me.
And then you mentioned Flylo and Denzel's sample, but we'd be remiss
if we didn't also mention that Flylo.
was like directly organically inspired by this album and film for "You're
Dead", which also touches on a lot of the same cosmic socio cultural types of
themes and ideas of death and rebirth and coexistence and our place in the universe.
And in the New York Times interview where they were like what inspired this
he he was like, This film straight up.
There's a handful of things, but like this film.
Very much so take this all the way back out in addition to sampling
to brain feeder you know, what they represent as the like peak of the
intersection between the layers of jazz and hip hop as they exist.
So that's fly low thundercat, especially in other cats in that orbit.
Cliff: So the last thing we like to do In terms of those ten pull exercises Is think
about what to listen to next or sort of what to do next If this one got you like
our sincere hope is that every album we introduced to you if it hadn't already
Gotten you that it got you during the process of listening to it or listening
to our dumb asses Talk about this record and how great it is but there's a moment
and I think it's probably different for everybody But like you know what it feels
like you know what it feels like when you hear something and you go that's it Yep
So when those moments hit Whether it's in that moment or whether it's sort of
later when you come back to it or you want something that feels that way We try to
give you some things to explore and go further in Because just clicking around
Spotify's related artists tab is not gonna do it for you in most cases and certainly
not and even algorithmic playlists are not going to know really what to do with this.
It is too far afield in too many categories to be I'll use this word
loosely, but correctly associated with other things that would match the vibe.
Cause I would sooner put this beside Clam's Casino than I
would beside other French jazz.
More than likely, but
Kyle: I'm pulling up.
I really am curious to see what the related artists are.
Alan.
'cause I, that didn't even strike me until this moment.
Let's see.
Cliff: Hopefully it'll list search because that's one of the main areas.
We want to encourage people to go explore.
Kyle: Not on the list, bro.
Not on the list.
Raymond Scott of powerhouse fame is on the list.
Cliff: doing great.
Kyle: some French and Italian score work on here.
Bruno Nikolai, experimental artist, Basel Kerin on here.
Jean Claude Vanier on here.
Very interesting.
Yeah.
The related artists list does not do it for you, spiritually
speaking, in this case.
Cliff: Spiritually speaking.
Thank you for that.
Kyle: So where do you go?
Cliff: Well, So one thing you called out, which I think is great, but
not always for the faint of heart.
Yes, this is French jazz, which is a reminder that non American jazz exists.
And even though,
Kyle: you know there are country, not America?
Cliff: it's rude,
Kyle: For four are to have landmass other than this one.
Cliff: right?
If you're going to be in another country, be like Canada or Mexico where you're
touching us at all times so that we to.
Kyle: Or we'll bomb you!
Don't go too far!
Cliff: So, Not for the faint of heart, but yes foreign composers, jazz artists,
et cetera, and especially during the sixties and seventies uh, when
jazz was doing all of the very weird things that jazz was doing, including
effectively being far broader than the jazz that we talk about today.
So there's a million things to explore.
There are countless, and I'm not even being sarcastic here, just like countless
artists from France, Belgium, Greece that worked with Surge, Gainsbourg, or
or that Alon worked with or composed for just sort of like going down those
branches of who did they work with uh, and were they important and why we'll
unveil some interesting things to you that we'd otherwise never really be
exposed to, coming from an, uh, America centric purview on some of this.
Kyle: Agreed.
Two things on that.
One, you know, I mentioned earlier in the episode, clicking into some
of those names he worked with.
One was Salvatore Adamo, who's a Belgian artist.
And
Cliff: Sold a few records.
Kyle: the top of his wiki, it says by 1964, Adama was the world's best
selling artists behind the Beatles.
And through his career, he sold more than million 80 million eight zero million
albums and 20 million singles worldwide.
One of Belgium's all time top selling artists.
And here, if you're like me, all you knew about was the waffles.
A reference point that is a little closer to home though.
Especially if you're a hip hop fan is David Axelrod famously sampled by Dr.
Dre for the next episode and sampled a gazillion times throughout the
course of his discography, but what I think is cool about Alain and Serge
Gainsbourg, David Axelrod has the same cool that makes it inherently
samplable aesthetically, energetically, in addition to the sound of the music.
Also if you're into the like most recent Arctic Monkeys stuff or the
general character Alex Turner is trying to play in the world, that
all comes straight from the French jazz pop stuff, Serge Gainsbourg, to
the extent that they play it on the front of house before their shows now.
So if you want the long cigarette cool, go push further in that direction.
jazz pop, especially like you said, in the late sixties, early seventies,
when it was heavily influenced by funk.
And the sort of like globalization of cinema and that sort of thing we're like
cultures were starting to mash a little.
Cliff: Another angle?
Certainly trip hop, for sure.
There's a lot we could say here.
Uh, One highlight I would give when we, let's see, we are of the very
particular part of our generation where we effectively did crate
digging through MP3s in middle school, high school, early college, right?
To the point that we were, you know, doing the big hard drive swapping
and we had hundreds of gigs of music.
Okay.
We, I don't just mean we were randomly downloading things on Napster.
I mean, we were trying to build a music collection it was impossible to
imagine the idea of being able to stream virtually everything endlessly one day.
And through doing that, you know, I came across stuff like handsome boy modeling
school and just other stuff that has.
A cool factor to it uh, a real solid vibe and it just feels confident,
is the sort of family of stuff that ended up sampling a lot of things
that feel vibe related to this here.
I just, it's always a good time to go down some of those rabbit
holes if you haven't in a while.
They just feel good and it's always to me.
That's always a fun musical journey to go on anyway, because if you need
to shift back to like doing something other than actively thinking about
music, you can make that work pretty quick without changing too much.
Kyle: Trip hop is such a cool example.
Handsome boy modeling school is such a cool example, like not
exactly trip hop, but I get with like suit music of nineties.
Yeah.
Portishead dummy is obviously the best.
They were going for spy film vibe on that.
And they made that short film, to kill a dead man.
So very much spiritually in the lineage of, 60s British spy films and then
this sort of con evocative atmosphere.
Cliff: While we are reaching for tangents and rabbit holes, I'd also say.
Even stepping away a little bit from the music, but if the veneer of psychedelia
and the willingness to talk about, some of the most deeply consequential concepts
on earth via animation uh, if that is your vibe, first of all, let's hang out.
And second of all, you might want to consider things like Midnight Gospel
on which is, yeah, inherently not musical, but it has a similar approach
to, we are going to layer psychedelic visuals on top of a sort previously
unrelated thing in order to augment that experience for you and draw
something really different out of it.
I mean, Yeah, I can assure you that you would feel differently.
Just hearing midnight gospel episodes as the origin podcast episodes that they
are, as opposed to watching them as an actual kind of film that's developing
that thought through something different.
I'm fairly convinced that's not a comfortable exercise for everyone, but
I think it is for some people and if you're one of those folks who feel,
comfortable kind of indulging in that and letting your brain swim around
in all of those colors, then Midnight Gospel and some other similar psychedelic
animation films may be for you.
Kyle: Midnight Gospel is an amazing example.
two grown men texting about how a cartoon made him cry.
one finale with Duncan Trussell and his mom, wasn't it?
Midnight Gospel is so good because it exists in the animation pulls
emotionally in my mind between Bluey, the sleepy time episode of Bluey, which is
beautiful and made me as a father cry.
It was like the first time after I became a dad, I realized like, Oh, I'm, I'm
not a person who doesn't cry anymore.
But there's like such a warmth in that.
And then on the other end is Rick and Morty that has all that same
sort of cosmic whatever collision and uh, is very cold and cynical.
Or is trying to be, you know, wants to be.
Midnight Gospel is a hearty mix of the two.
It sits more in the Carlin place between them.
It's like, I have seen it all and I accept it all because I have no choice.
And I feel like the film Fantastic Planet sort of arrives in that
place spiritually as well.
So totally agree on Midnight Gospel.
I also think that the beauty in the simple and just like sort of fumbling
away toward appreciating being here also exists in the world of Miyazaki
films a lot, which I am super late to.
My wife tried to get me to watch them for years and years when we were
dating and only started very recently.
the collision of fantasy to tell a really grounded story about people and
love and all the feelings in between.
That's the bread and butter of Miyazaki films.
So I think you can go there as well.
I think about the music a lot less when I watch Miyazaki films, but it's there too.
Cliff: Yeah, they're all going to be different kind of extensions of whatever
catches you About this music or this movie or the combination of them or
them in isolation, whatever These are a bunch of different directions.
You can go in certainly exploring Animated psychedelic films or japanese films.
It's going to be a pretty different vibe than trying to explore belgian
jazz composers but Whichever one strikes you at the moment, because for
real, it does feel like if you kind of give yourself over to this music
or this film or both, you're gonna get surprised how you feel about it anyway.
So you might as well just do it, pay attention to it, and then see what
kind of felt good out of it, and chase that rabbit a little bit more.
Um, It's just that it could lead you in a bunch of different
directions across time and space.
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