Austin Sound

(Music Is Happiness is a sometimes column from Austin Sound’s cantankerous critic Noah Mass)

I’ve been stealing online music for so long that I barely know how to buy it anymore. That’s not my fault, though — the stuff is just out there, low-hanging fruit waiting to be plucked. Just put the name of any album and the word “blogspot” into a search engine and you’ll likely find a bunch of sites with whole album files uploaded to each one, ready for you to suck onto your hard drive with a quick, digital, slurp. Until, that is, the site gets shut down by the music industry, or you get sued for perusing the site’s wares, or your ISP starts charging extra for hogging everyone else’s bandwidth. Or all three.

However, not all blogspot sites are the same. Some of the best (and potentially most legally defensible) are those that host MP3 audio streams of obscure vinyl recordings that are either out of copyright or long out of print. Dumpster divers and record collector-nerds have been digitizing and uploading the best of their collections for a while now, and it’s their sites that are the wave of the digital music future. Often, these sites make individual music tracks available for a limited time, always with disclaimers about how they’ll happily take them down if any artist or copyright holder complains. (Of course, most capable computer users can figure out how to save audio streams to their computers as music files, but that’s another story).

More importantly, MP3 audio sites are turning us on to ripped vinyl greatness that we didn’t even know we needed to hear. Although anybody can upload a CD to Rapidshare, it’s the bloggers who put up a track or two from crackly seven-inch singles or worn vinyl albums who are the real stars in the online musical firmament. These blogspot heroes specialize in music that’s old and unjustly forgotten, or that’s representative of some fringe musical sub-genre. By opening their fans’ ears to such unusual audio discoveries, these folks blow even the most jaded of musical minds on a weekly basis, and their sites deserve some serious attention and affirmation.

Let me backtrack for a moment. Back in the old days (when I wore an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time), music was mostly available in the form of vinyl or plastic discs produced by evil record companies, and you had to search through notoriously incomplete and unreliable record guides to find out what had been released when. More than likely, though, you acquired your knowledge of musical history first-hand, either by working in record stores, hanging around record stores, cozying up to older music fans with absurdly deep record collections, and perusing flea markets, yard sales, and thrift shops.

No matter how diligent a record hound you were, though, you were unlikely to know what artists to even look for, should you want to venture outside of the most obvious musical categories. Late-60’s moog synthesizer records, 70’s novelty songs, and locally released punk singles from the early 80’s were items that you were likely to be particularly cautious about when you encountered them, simply because you had no way of knowing by sight what was a real find and what was a waste of money. After flipping through a bin of hundreds of albums and singles by artists you’d never heard of, you could easily buy something that looked fantastic, but that led to utter disappointment once you’d got it home.

But in our new, bright, shiny, post-everything, world wide web era, where nothing is forbidden and everything is permitted, collectors of obscure musical gems from fringe musical genres suddenly have an audience beyond like-minded collector scum. They’ve done the sifting for us, and now they just want to turn us on to the diamonds in the musical rough that they’ve happened upon. Imagine - instead of haranguing their long-suffering romantic partners with the “news” of their latest musical “finds,” these vinyl aficionados can now unleash their obsessions on all and sundry (which must improve their relationships with their significant others dramatically).

There are scores of excellent blogspot sites out there devoted to just such enterprises, but I want to concentrate on one this time around that is particularly noteworthy: Crud Crud (www.crudcrud.blogspot.com). Created by the musical polymath Scott Soriano, who also runs the Sacramento, CA indie record label S-S Records, this site is “a tour through the stacks of records, demo tapes, etc. that surround me. No recycled MP3s, CD tracks, or reissues here. Average price paid for the records below is $3. Very few I have spent more than $5 on.” However, the MP3s on Crud Crud are not just examples of records that Soriano snapped-up for bargain basement prices, but showcases of one man’s impeccable taste in trash. Soriano revels in irony: his site specializes in artists who either didn’t realize how untalented they were and got by on energy and attitude alone, or who believed they were producing masterpieces but ended up creating music that’s just plain weird.

One brilliant example is an album that Soriano found “at the local public radio record sale” by Polish jazz-electronic experimenters Michael Urbaniak & Urzula Dudziak, and partially uploaded for our enjoyment. Taken from the 1976 LP Tribute to Komeda (which Soriano proudly tells us “cost me a buck”), the pair’s version of soundtrack composer Krzysztof Komeda’s “Crazy Girl from Knife In the Water” is a series of echoed whooping and wailing vocalizations, overlayed on a looped violin, guitar, and horns rhythm section that sounds, at first, like free jazz sung by whales. Midway through, the track becomes a standard jazz-rock fusion tune that really cooks, until it then descends into a violin-on-violin skronk excursion, before our unhinged vocalist finally returns to take us home. The effect on the listener, after a brief period of confusion, is wonder: how on earth did these people even think that this should be recorded, much less released? Who did they think would buy it? But then, excitement sets in. “My God,” you think, “were Urbaniak and Dudziak utter incompetents who should never have been allowed near a recording studio, or am I not advanced enough to contend with the sublimity of their musical vision?”

A lot of the artists on Crud Crud are like that, with tunes that are equal parts laughably horrendous musical tastelessness and idiot savant slabs of audio genius. Of course, this is not all the site gives us; Soriano also posts vinyl rips from his collection of obscure rock, surf, soul, and psychedelia records that are in no way cringe-worthy (a post of Ricky Nelson’s version of “Summertime” is especially worthy of note). But the site’s best tracks remain the oddest: selections from the soundtrack to the 1975 Adriano Celetano film Yuppi Du (which sounds, to Soriano’s ears, like “a great rip off of [soundtrack composers] Deodato, Morricone, and Nelson Riddle”), or wacked-out synth excursions from forgotten 70’s funk organist Rudy Rosa’s Computerized, Synthesized, Organized, which simply have to be heard to be believed.

Best of all are Soriano’s detailed stories of finding and first experiencing these records himself, as well as his editorializing on the sounds therein. Commenting on the studio-concocted funk aggregate The Eleventh Hour (whose Greatest Hits 1974 AD is represented by three MP3 files here), he tells us: “Gotta wonder what inspired this creature! The Eleventh Hour is a studio job, the product of legendary producer Bob Crewe (”Music to Watch Girls By”) and songwriter Kenny Nolan. Its inspiration? Other than money? Man, I have no idea. Perhaps the Jimmy Caster Bunch’s “Troglodyte.” Or maybe Parliament-Funkadelic. Hell, maybe Cheech & Chong.”

But as snarky as Soriano’s editorializing sounds, a listen to Eleventh Hour’s actual tracks reveals a steady funk pulse, although the lyrics and arrangements are indeed about as corny as one can imagine. As silly and mercenary as the project might have been, the tunes are more than worthy of any funk fan’s attention. And the listener’s mixed reaction to the music - an inability to know whether to condemn these artists or worship them - is what Crud Crud’s frequently updated posts tend to leave us with. Although the site is dedicated to, well, crud, it’s also about showing us the gold hidden in that crud, and making us feel the joy of finding the best in the worst.

Like all the most committed record collectors turned blogspot jockeys, Soriano believes himself to be on a mission to spread the good news about his musical obsessions to all the children of the world. And we need to follow his lead; listening to his dusty groove discoveries forces us to adjust our musical categories and question our standards of sonic worth. I’m not saying that a trip to this site will change your life, mind you—but it might just make your weekend.