Morricone jawdropper.

On a trip round the shops in Birmingham I was becoming more and more frustrated at not finding any clothes I liked that weren't horribly expensive, until this came on my iPod and I remembered that good music is the only thing truly worth spending your money on.

"Come Maddalena" is taken from the soundtrack to the 1971 Italian drama Maddalena. The film concerns a nymphomaniac who, desperate for a solid relationship, confides in a priest; the priest is also full of moral and spiritual doubt and finds himself confiding in her. Sounds like some hot and heavy Italian confiding, though I wouldn't know as it's very obscure and unavailable on DVD. We do have Morricone's score though, and this is the dizzying highlight (it also features the more famous "Chi Mai"). Beginning with some restless jazz drums (representing Maddalena, we presume) against some keening church organ (you guessed it), it builds and builds, gathering breathy sighs, dramatic harpsichords and urging cellos, until it reaches its chorus motif, a stunningly strange blend of traditionally filmic string landscapes and an incoherant babbling female choir. The strings are the laser-guided soul massage you get with the likes of Scott 4 or Agaetis Byrjun, and the vocals sound like Julie Andrews communing with the spirit world.

Ennio Morricone - Come Maddalena

Needless to say, the prospect of trawling through Gap for jeans after that aural daisy-cutter seemed like very small beer, and so I drifted home and blew money on records online, some of which I'll no doubt post in the coming days.

And if life for you is merely inert space punctuated by the fleeting joy of reading my words, you'll be glad to know I've written something for the "Death Issue" of Sheffield's premier intellectual fold-out fanzine NON. It's a piece about Joan Didion's The Year Of Magical Thinking; Didion's novel Play It As It Lays is where we got the name for our blog, fact fans. Pick up NON for free at the Showroom, Rare And Racy, Syd and Mallory's, lots of other places.

It's his tears that turn you on...

News of Edwyn Collins's recovery from a life-threatening stroke/superbug combo was warmly received chez play it as it lays, and he's continued to shun the gates of Hades by recording a new album despite having only recently learnt to speak again, and without having regained the use of his right arm. His new single "You'll Never Know" is a charming wee number, effortless white soul crooning utop elderflower backing; like Jack Johnson but with a sage, bruised vulnerability that add crucial drops of bitter to the sweetness. Guaranteed to softly uplight a corner of a late summer's day. I sadly don't have the skills to give you an mp3, but listen to it with the video over at Partizan.

Don't turn in disgust at an mp3-less post just yet though, as I've got this overlooked little gem from Collins's 2002 album Doctor Syntax. "Jonny Teardrop" is full of the kind of sassiness usually meted out upon society by the Pussycat Dolls, the Latin shuffle bringing to mind moustachioed guitarists lustfully gazing at tango dancers crazed by rhythm. Collins goes one further and sets his twisted love story in a dusky mermaid's cocktail bar - the echoes and muffled, clanking piano combined with the liquid vocal and coral guitar make for unique underwater R'n'B. I'm still holding out on the heavenly J-Lo/Collins collabo that will make my musical year.

Edwyn Collins - Jonny Teardrop

"You'll Never Know" is out on 9th September, and his new album Home Again follows on the 17th.

White Noise : Electric Dreams

An Electric Storm was originally released on Island in 1969 by ex Unit Delta Plus members and BBC Radiophonic workshop supremos Tony Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire (composer of Dr.Who theme tune) and Brian Hodgson. Island have finally got around to reissuing it on CD for the lazy crate-diggers (me). It's a lesson in the beginnings of electronic music - the commercial side; the TV soundtrack side - the other end of the spectrum from the minimalism of composers like Terry Riley.

The album is a gloriously off-kilter, a squiffy mixture of pulsing heartbeats, hollow tappings of triffids and exotica instrumentation: bamboo sticks, marimbas and bongos. Glittering synths and warped vocal echoes are dripping in reverb, yet it retains the hooks of melodies whilst the whole album swells with guttural groans and orgasmic moaning.

It's difficult to choose what to post, "Here Come The Fleas" has a sense of humour; "Firebird" is pure 60s pop with some clever tape tricks; "My Game Of Loving" has a full 2 minutes of orgasmic moaning; "The Visitations" is fantastically frightening but 11 minutes long. After around 15 minutes of deliberation, I've decided to fall on a middle ground. Anybody who wants to hear John Whitman, Annie Bird and Val Shaw climax properly can pay to perv and buy a copy. It's really quite unfortunate that I can't post the whole album.

White Noise - Love Without Sound
White Noise - Firebird

Geek Post: (for people who will have the oppurtunity to use such fascinating anecdotes)

• Final track "The Black Mass: An Electric Storm In Hell" was used in Hammer horror Dracula AD 1972 (Thanks Hodgson)
• The BBC Radiophonic Workshop were among the first to implent a British synth called the EM Synthi VCS3, a portable analog synth (doesnt actually look that portable), which was also used by Eno in his Roxy Music days, King Crimson and...wait for it...Hawkwind.

Deerhunter: Fluorescent - Not Grey

Deerhunters recent album on Kranky, Cryptograms, floated around on le blogosphere quite conspicuously for a while, and now seems to have vanished into relative obscurity. The vinyl version of the album I waited a good few months for comes packaged in flourescent pink hypnotic sleeve, along with the EP, Fluorescent Grey (not so exciting artwork above). Boy, were those few months worth it for the trippy artwork in 12". This should not have been overlooked...

Flourescent Grey is much more off the radar than the full-length Cryptograms, but both stand up to as much scrutiny as you can muster. Cryptograms is part intense slurred post-rock, part raw guitar songs, due to the two-part recording time: the first attempt was abandoned because of frustration over the way the mikes were capturing the sound. The second bout - taken up months later - is more controlled, less agitated withedges more defined; sharper. Fluorescent Grey swings somewhere in the middle of these two, four tracks of scuffed lines carrying a decided structure.

This is the title track from said EP. It spirals around a cyclic sagging melody, guitars that fall a little behind the pack, giving a wonderful drawl to the whole track. Layers build and levels rise; lucid - patiently, patiently...

Deerhunter - Fluorescent Grey

Check out the artwork and the pitchfork review here and their blog here, which has mp3s of other people and stuff, including a Psychic TV cover of a Neil Young track, something that only induces confusion in me.

Glass Candy - Cold But Sweet.

The words "icy electro" usually fill me with dread - probably going to be some dead-eyed coked-out tunelessness in thrall to the worst things about the 80's. And italo-disco, I've tried to love you, I really have, but most of you is just shit. The Cheese-String basslines, the serious ethereal vocals, the bongo/twinkle percussion - it all sounds like the soundtrack to a gay John Carpenter film. So Glass Candy, equipped with icy electro lead singer and italo-disco trumpet sounds were prodding my "bullshit" knee-jerk.

But they've actually nailed one of the hardest conundrums in pop, namely to imbue tundra-like sonics with humid soul. It takes alchemical genius to fuse such base matter into gold. Ida No's vocals are perhaps the best thing about "Candy Castle" - her tone is reminiscent of Miss Kittin's still-breathtaking performance on "Madame Hollywood", showing a flickering vulnerability behind an impassive cocaine screen. It's a very traditionally cool performance, but its yearning, unironic vocals and teary-eyed diva edge elevate it above mere hipster posturing. Her backing is Moroder-grade purity, keening strings layered above syncopated pulses and prowling low-end. It's apt that they've covered Kraftwerk's "Computer Love", which is pretty much the benchmark for this kind of velveteen-mercury electropop.

Glass Candy - Candy Castle

If you want more Candy then you can visit their myspace which has three more new tracks to download for free. And fansite Crystal Migraine has some older tracks to download as well.

Pan Sonic - Bass Explosion

I finally got hold of a copy the most recent Pan Sonic album, Katodivaihe in a music video exchange in London a week ago, it was pretty cheap too, so I was pleased. After copying said album to my ipod, it didnt get listenend to for at least two days, until I remembered it was there on a rather busy rush hour train. The passengers had no idea that I was stuck in some super-urban Orwelian world of doom, everything turned concrete grey, the skyline jagged, the sky forboding. The bass on this thing is just mental. It sounds like the apocalypse.

"Lahetys/Transmission" sounds, literally, like atom bombs equipped with subwoofers, dropping and mushroom-clouding into an industrial wasteland of grinding beats and metal against metal. "Koneistaja/Machinist" flips out a chainsaw to an early Warp-ish beat. For the whole length of its fourteen tracks alien insects swarm around industrial grooves, offset to a crushing bass. Sick.

If you have decent speakers it works just as well, but coccooning yourself in the swelling sub bass of Katodivaihe via the medium of headphones is preferable. Also, walking round dark city centres alone at night will enhance the experience. If you can do neither, turn it up and shut your eyes.

Pan Sonic - Lähetys/Transmission

(I also apologise for the terrible metaphors used in this piece, mostly the one about sub woofers and atom bombs, they are however, entirely appropriate.)

Blue Monday: Electric Blues Exception

Electric blues I believe to be generally soulless, the opposite of blues. Generally I find it to be blues for the masses, the pain and suffering removed from its heart and played without involvement - cheery almost - so that folks don't have to be moved. They can sit and clap along in their comfy seats, sat boozing in comfy bars.

However, Howlin' Wolf (a big exception I know) gets away with it. He doesn't sing with the aching and the poverty that the Delta blues men do, he doesn't sing with every inch of his being dragging him to hope for something; he sings with gall and grit, choking on the rasping anger trapped at the back of his throat. Boy, is he angry; he's angry at the women folk - just cant find a decent lady, and that sure makes a feller mad. So leave the late John Lee Hooker stuff alone, put down that BB King. The Wolf spits it, spits it evil...

There's books written and waiting to be written on The Wolf, he'll crop up here again in an earlier guise, but for now, we'll see what he can do with an electric.

The first track is from Alan Lomax's Blues Songbook. Alan Lomax was a Harry Smith type figure in a way, he recorded and catalogued a lot of blues men - he was the first person ever to record last weeks blues man (Mississippi Fred McDowell). The track featuress a backing band, Hubert Sumlin, Eddie Shaw, and an unknown bassist and drummer. Check...

Howlin' Wolf - Dust My Broom
Howlin' Wolf - Evil

Blue Monday: Mississippi Fred McDowell

Blue Monday will be a (hopefully) weekly post, focused solely on blues, but may spread and leak into including other related genres - calypso, soul, jazz- anything I feel owes a great debt to the work of early bluesmen and women or is directly between genres. anybody who can "sing the shit out of the blues" (Fred Neil on Karen Dalton)

As mentioned in the opening post, Mississippi Fred McDowell marked a turning point in the way I listened to music. Amazing Grace - an album with the Hunters Chapel Singers - made me listen to the gaps in music, the unfilled spaces left to linger, and the canyons of emptiness left between instruments, vocals and electronics.

Aside from all that, this album is utterly impossible to dislike, it is heartbreakingly beautiful, just a group of gospel voices, singing together and apart, each one with their own inflections; the undulating male voice lingers on final phrases and the heavy female voice flies to the top notes like it's ascending into heaven, leaving the twang of Fred's guitar far behind.

The quality is good, having only been recorded in the mid-60s in the Blues Revival of that time. The songs are all religious; plain folk songs from the Mississippi brought to life in exquisite relief. When I hear the slow opening refrain of Amazing Grace I smell the golden dust of the Mississippi, the dirty river and the whitewashed wooden houses strewn along its banks, yet I've never set foot inside the US.

The only accompaniment is McDowell's bottleneck guitar, the gospel slant to Amazing Grace stands in contrast to much of McDowell's other work, where he sang as a delta blues man, alone on a guitar with a sharp lilt to his voice. Lots of people have tried and failed to cover McDowell, most notably the Stones, who covered Fred's signature song 'You Got To Move' on Sticky Fingers, they had no souls, they weren't worthy of playing the blues proper, and so couldn't.

Watch his crinkled old face here

Listen:

Mississippi Fred McDowell - You Got To Move


Mississippi Fred McDowell - Amazing Grace