World Mix Tape Vol. V

Dada Swing - Oversize

Boredoms - Synthesizer Guide Book on Fire

Manu Chao - La Chinita

Transmissions From Wintermute’s week of volcanic blog-tivity continues with the 5th installment of the ohmygodimmike world mix tape (thanks to OMGIMike’s kind willingness to extend tape mixing duties to his co-bloggers). Put them all together on one CD (along with Laz’s hopefully upcoming contribution) and be the hit of the bakesale!

The first track is by Italian “yes” wave post-punkers Dada Swing, who describe their sound as "italiano-"yes"wave-electro-punk-pop-twitch-attack!" I love the idea that nowave and noise rock doesn’t have to be gloomy or negative, but can in fact be cheerful, even cute, without sacrificing any of its disturbing or confrontational sound or sonic experimentation. According to them, “They don't wanna learn to play music correctly even if, by playing, it gets harder and harder not to learn. They did it. Till today!”

Dada Swing recently finished recording their new album Grand Hotel, and are currently looking for a label to distribute it. Oversize is off an Art Rocker compilation, but you can listen to tracks off their first LP Cut, Cut, Cut... and their two most recent splits on their myspace page.

The next track is by one of my all time favorite bands, Japan’s Boredoms. They’ve changed their sound a lot over the 2+ decades since their formation (and have pioneered a sound that was from the beginning pretty impossible to nail down), but this song is one of the more, er, relaxed cuts from the 1995 album Chocolate Synthesizer. I’m not gonna say any more about them because there’s a fuckload of stuff on Boredoms out there in the vast stretches of the intra-net, written by people far more knowledgeable than me. For example, This Site, which is a good place to start mainly because it has links to a zillion other Boredoms’ sites.

The 3rd and final track is by politically minded songwriter Manu Chao, who currently resides in Paris (but as a general nomad, born to Spanish parents, has spent time all over the globe, bringing many diverse cultural and geographic sounds into his music and singing in French, Spanish, Arabic, Galician, Portuguese, English, and Wolof, sometimes within the same song). This is a lovely little track off of 2001’s Proxima Estacion: Esperanza, the follow up to his solo debut Clandestino.