The Cast of Characters:

Speakers: Marantz HD-770
Amp: Fisher CA-2310
Turntable: Marantz 6100
Reel to Reel: Ampex 960

The first thing I’ll say about this album is that it genuinely surprised me. Neon Indian’s previous album Era Extrana was, let’s be honest, a complete flop for me. It had zero tracks on it with staying power. I listened to it several times when I got it, wanting to like it, hoping that it would ramp up in appeal but it flat-lined for me and never jumped up. I have not gone back to it since.

There’s tons and tons of artists out there in all mediums who create something magnificent, something worthy of attention, but then seem unable to ever reignite that level of greatness again. Coming away from Era Extrana, I was convinced that this was Neon Indian. Something lined up for them during the creation of their first album Psychic Chasms and it was magic. All the right elements came together and awesome, memorable music resulted. But in their sophmore effort it was obvious that whatever had ‘clicked’ that first time around simply wasn’t there anymore. I thought hmph, so that’s it then. My expectation was set: LOW.

So it’s super, super inspiring as an artist to hear what happened on “Night School.” After listening to it many times over, I feel that it’s an even stronger album than Psychic Chasms. It’s still brand new so that’s a bold statement because music needs to age a little bit for the proper context to settle in. Time tells you how often you come back to it, how much lasting appeal it has in the panoloply of everything you might want to put on. Most of the time good music occurs as a slow realization along the lines of “hey, this is pretty good > ooh, actually this is really good > oh man, this is a cut above > yeah this is classic material” Night School is the rare exception where the very first time I listened I knew immediately, yep, this is fire.

What separates an “album” from a playlist of songs is cohesiveness. To me an album is a set of songs that creates a mood or takes you on a journey, something that’s complete and self-contained. The mark of a good album is when you create a playlist of random stuff and you insert one of these tracks, hearing it makes you want to hear the next song from the original album instead of whatever’s next on your playlist. With Night School, Neon Indian has achieved that style of continuity.

Okay okay, what makes it so good?! Let’s break it down:

Outrageous palette: the overarching theme is a cheezy late 80s/early 90s shopping mall pop sound deconstructed and rebuilt with modern sensibilities. That’s the core. But a better question is, what doesn’t this album have? I hear hand percussion of many varieties, acoustic guitar, japanese flute, old-school rebirth synthesizer, a sax solo, old TV samples, female backing vocals, detroit techno, chiptunes arppegios, and all manner of odd-sounding effects/processing. There’s a little bit of eastern European flavor going on in there, and definitely homage to Depeche Mode style guitar. The whole thing is very electronic and processed but they manage to throw in something organic a lot of the time too. There’s simply an absurd amount of different sounds to chew on.

Catchy hooks: the main chorus on nearly all tunes is very hummable. There’s a lot of anthems built around simplistic (read: accessible) phrases and Neon Indian dishes that out with proper buildup around them. Often they present a simple melody which repeats again with an extension to the phrase the second time. It’s a tested forumla that works.

Songwriting: The album has a 1 minute intro track. There’s pre-choruses. Breakdowns. Bridges with chord changes. Unexpected basslines. Nothing gets me quite like an unexpected bassline does. After listening to music your whole life you get a pretty good idea of where a particular bassline should lead. When it doesn’t do what your ear expects it to do, that kills me in the best way. If you were to try to cover any of these songs, you’d have to sit down and write out all the sections that are going on.

Production value: There’s a million little touches. Every tune is jam packed with little nooks and crannies. Add a funky synth here that only comes in once and never again. Okay, this tune gets a weird telephone-sounding breakdown at the end. This one has a free-form cadenza intro. There’s a six bar interlude here. The big single from the album gets a seperate part II reprise track that takes it to a mean big-room dancefloor feel. And the whole thing is caked in delay/reverb fader-riding that shoves all the right nuances in your face.

So yeah, I’m blown away by this one. It’s a masterpiece of nostalgia-mining, pop-glitz, thoughtful production, and selective exploitation of dated sound palettes. I still say Beck is the king of taking elements that would sound stupid by themselves and mashing them into a bafflingly awesome whole but damn, Neon Indian has shown up to the record store with a gauntlet to throw. Night School is an album with something to prove and it does it relentlessly. As a musician myself I am inspired by just how severly this blows their previous record straight out of the water. Neon Indian’s style may not be for everyone but wow, what a record.

First thing wrong with it was that only one channel worked. Yikes, that’s a showstopper! Step one was to diagnose: swap the L/R channels as they were connected to my amp to make sure it was the turntable at fault and not the amplifier. It was the turntable. I took the bottom off and used the “beep”/continuity test setting on my multimeter to see where the signal was getting lost. Note that on older turntables like this, with no internal pre-amps, the four connecting pins off your turntable needle/cartridge are, electrically, connected directly to your receiver/amplifier. That means if you’re missing a channel, it’s a continuity problem: The guts of the turntable are simply wires.

First, I checked the continuity between the connections right at the needle and the solder joints on the inside of the deck. All beeped, so they’re good. Then I checked the solder connections to the end of the RCA ring/tip connectors. Sure enough, one was bad! I was surprised that old RCA jacks would actually fail like that. Hmph. I took a spare RCA cable, and cut off one end. Then I stripped the wires, revealing four different wire paths. I unsoldered the old one and soldered in the new one, making sure to leave a stress-relief knot, so the cable couldn’t be yanked out by accident.

Second thing I noticed was that the speed of this turntable is slightly slow. I searched around online and found that this is a well-chronicled issue with the model 6100 turntable. It’s driven by an AC motor, so a simple adjustment of the input voltage to the motor won’t remedy this issue. Somewhere online in a forum I saw someone recommend getting a slightly shorter belt. I called a few hi-fi stores and came to the conclusion that 25″ belts are common but 24.9″ belts, in fact, do not exist.

Then I got the idea of adding something to make the motor shaft very slightly larger in diameter, since that would effectively make it turn the belt faster. Scotch tape, maybe?? Sure enough, it works! At first I added two layers of tape and now my speed went from like 5% slow to like 5% too fast–a thin layer sure goes a long way. I took off one layer of the scotch tape so now it’s just a single loop around the motor shaft. With only one loop, now the turntable runs very, very slightly fast; maybe like 1-2% faster than normal. It’s the kind of thing where, if you’re listening hard for it, you could pick it out with effort, but if you sat down not knowing that the table was ever so slightly fast, you’d probably never notice.

At first I wondered if it would annoy me (5% too slow DEFINITELY annoyed me!) but after listening to a whole bunch of albums, I think I actually enjoy everything sped up by an almost imperceptible amount. It’s not enough to affect the pitch of familiar records; or if it is, being slightly sharp is less offensive to my ear than being flat. It does add a subtle extra ‘kick’ or energy, having that increase in tempo–an extra bpm or two. I’m digging it!

Lastly, I was getting distortion in the sound, like the signal was being overdriven or something. I figured since the turntable is nothing more than wires and mechanical support for the stylus, it was probably the stylus. Spoiler alert: it was. The old stylus was a Pickering VX-15 with a dust brush on the front. That dust brush seems like a great idea in theory, but it sort of sucks in reality: seems like it makes the record skip more, and you need lots more tracking force to prevent that. I’m not sure how old that needle was, but from the looks of it… OLD.

The Pickering was swapped out with a Grado “Green 1” cartridge. Ka-BAM! This baby breathed a whole new life into the 6100. The anti-skate weight was missing from my deck, so I improvised with a couple zinc washers and some thread. I kept getting skips at the very start of every record, even when I had a lot of tracking force on the arm. Adding the anti-skate weight got rid of those skips at the beginning and allowed me to dial back the amount of tracking force needed. It’s still probably too much right now, but it is nice not getting any skips at all even on records which have known spots prone to it. I’ll keep dialing it back in the weeks to come.

The 6100 has two simple but nice features that I’ve enjoyed: auto-return and auto-shutdown, and buttons to toggle between 33/45 rpm. My other deck, the venerable Pro-Ject Debut III doesn’t have either of these. Auto return/shutdown means that you don’t have to worry about accidentally letting the turntable skip on the last groove all night because you forgot to shut it off, which I’ve totally done. The 33/45 buttons are a very basic feature the Pro-Ject lacks–you actually have to remove the platter and move the belt by hand, which gets old. Maybe that sounds lazy, but you end up yanking on the spindle too much to get the platter off, and I worry about long-term wear that might be causing. It just makes me nervous doing it, so I listened to less 45s on that deck. No longer!

But oh man, this Grado Green cartridge is awesome. The Pro-Ject Debut III has an Ortofon OM 5E cartridge, and that turntable sounds excellent. For the Marantz, I wanted to get a different brand, for the sake of sonic variety. Since I love my Grado headphones, it was a logical choice to try out their cartridge line. I’d describe the Ortofon as the “cleaner” of the two, and the Grado as the “warmer” of the two. That said, it’s not a jaw-dropping difference between them.

I hooked up the headphone extension cable and put on my Grado SR-225 headphones for a long listening session this last weekend… now that was really enjoyable!! Laying on the carpet with my eyes closed, blasting familiar recordings and oh yes, hearing a bunch of new details within them, thanks to yet another different listening setup. It’s chicken soup for the soul, just doing nothing but soaking in the awesome sounds of your favorite albums. After the soldering, reassembly, and tweaking this is the reward; not critical listening but blissful listening. I’m going to make it a point to just hang out and listen to records over the next few weeks, reaquainting myself with the collection again and enjoying the tunes. That’s what it’s all about!

Visit Venus is a duo of German composers Mario Cullmann and Mario con Hacht. In the liner notes for the album it tells a story about how the source material for this was a forgotten 96-track NASA-commissioned musical space odyssey from the 60s, made by the fathers of the two composers responsible for this album. I’m not sure whether or not to believe that. I’m like 70% sure that’s just an awesome fish-tale, but then again, there’s really something about these tracks.

I discovered this gem a couple years ago courtesy of the DJs on Groove Salad radio from soma.fm but the album originally came out in 1995. Let me say that again: this album came out in NINETEEN NINETY FIVE. That’s just… man. Head-exploding. I look back and think about whatever I was listening to in ’95 and I can safely say that it wasn’t half as hip as this. It’s pretty rare to find an album that you can listen to from start to finish and feel like every single track fits right in, with zero fluff to fill in spaces between the juicy bits. This is one of those albums. And not only that–the sound of this record is so ahead of its time, that if I hadn’t said it twice, there’s no way anyone would guess this came from the 90s. Really the feeling captured on here is some perfect slice of the 60s, mashed up with a very tasteful downtempo production from maybe a few years ago. That doesn’t do it justice either. It’s more like music from an alternate universe, an alternate historical timeline where the space race never ended, men still wore hats, women dressed classy but sexy, and everyone hung out in Eames-designed swank pads that orbited the moon sipping cocktails and looking svelte. But with modern drum machines and samplers too. It truly sounds like the name, Music For Space Tourism.

What do I mean by that? Well the recipe here is start with a bountiful heaping of buttery-smooth rhodes piano, pour on a diverse mix of mellow flutes, horns, vibraphone and xylophone that are smooth but never cheesy, fold in some sophisticated basslines, twist it up in a series of retrogasmic instrumental samples, and then bump things up a couple notches with deftly tasteful electronic drums. It’s genuinely sexy. Oh and it grooves. Overall It’s the retro sonic-palette that ‘sells’ it. That said, I will comment that the drums are as well-selected as you could ask for; they don’t sound dated in the least, and I know that in 10 more years, these tracks will seen just as fresh to anyone hearing them for the first time. Similar to say, Mushroom Jazz, I don’t think it’s something you’d really dance to in your living room, although at club volumes, I do wonder if it wouldn’t magically transform the same way Farina’s music did when I saw him live. Unquestionably though, you can/will feel like a total badass mackzin & relaxzin to this.

In short, this is an utterly genius masterpiece of laid-back. This album is ‘the vibe’ that someone envisioned when the genre of smooth jazz was born (and before it went horribly, ghastly wrong), ‘the groove’ that downtempo/lounge producers strive to achieve, and through its samples, invokes the ghost of an era when mankind was doing incredible things. And as you can see from the images, I’m a very very lucky boy to have my very own copy of this archetype on vinyl. It’s instantly one of my most prized pieces in the collection. This copy came from the UK and I believe it’s a German pressing, across a trio of 33RPM LPs. It even includes a bonus track which is not present on the CD version! A bonus track which does, in fact, not suck, and is worthy of this master class in chill. I cannot recommend this work enough. The downtempo genre simply does not get any better than this.

Rating: 10/10

This record is part of the Ernest Thibodeaux collection
(a man who certainly had sophisticated tastes in music)

Open up to the inside and check out this badass picture of these guys! The eponymous track of this album can be heard as the second tune in my previously posted Cactus Vinyl Funk Mix. This is some smokin hot 70’s funk right here!

I’ve been hitting up this really awesome record store in Houston called Cactus Music, where they have maybe 20-30 crates of used vinyl which is up for grabs at 97¢ per LP. Yes, $0.97. It’s completely unsorted and a good deal of the records are scratched and dirty, but still, for under a dollar per LP, this place is a total gold mine. This mixtape is the cream of the funky crop I found while diggin through those crates down at Cactus this summer.

As you’ll hear immediately from the start, there’s plenty of crackle and vinyl “dirtyness” in here. I did pick up a record cleaner soon after I started buying LPs, but listening back to two recorded versions of the opening track which I dubbed before and after using the record cleaner, I actually decided to use the dirty one on purpose. I dig the raw, unkempt vibe that record crackle gives. There’s even a minor skip in the second track; see if you can catch it. I left if raw intentionally so it’s exactly like you’d hear if a buddy came over to your house and you were excited to play that hot LP you just found earlier this week–we’re not going to waste time cleaning this thing, throw it on the platter and go, man!

That’s pretty much the spirit of this mix–it’s a bunch of weird 70’s funk that I’d never known of before, mostly from bands I’d never heard of before either. I compiled it to share my favorite finds with fellow funk fanatics. The mix is 30 minutes long so it would fit perfectly onto a cassette tape as part of the Bill’s Boat Cassette Project. Since I was putting extra care into the track selection and mastering of this mix, moreso than any of the other tapes, I got on eBay and picked up a sweet looking reel-to-reel style tape for it, as you can see above. The vinyl was digitized to FLAC through my Pro-Ject Debut III USB turntable, arranged in Sony ACID, compressed and mastered with T-Racks tube emulation software, rendered back to FLAC again, and then put to tape on my NAD 6130 cassette deck. I was very pleased with the end result!

Since I did spend time obsessing about the sound quality, I’ll offer this one in FLAC in addition to the usual 160kbs mp3. Right click those links to download. Click the cassette above to stream it now (flash required).

Track Listing:

1. Cosmic Truth – Earthquake Shake
2. B.T. Express – Do It ‘Til You’re Satisfied
3. Brass Connection – Movin’
4. The Commodores – Patch It Up
5. Cosmic Truth – UFO’s
6. Ronnie Laws – Mis’ Mary’s Place
7. Steve Miller Band – Fly Like an Eagle (psychedelic intro only)
Playtime: 30 minutes

And the proverbial Side B to The 70’s Cactus Vinyl Funk Mixtape: “BOATCHASE!” (you can stream this too, by clicking the previous cassette and going to the next track. Since these mixes were created together, I’m grouping them in their own playlist together)

Track Listing:

1. Brass Connection – Sambo (progression)
2. Curtis Mayfield – Junkie Chase
3. Ohio Players – Fight Me, Chase Me
4. Ohio Players – The Big Score
5. Mandrill – Silk
Playtime: 24 minutes

As with the A-Side, this mix was gathered exclusively from 97¢ vinyl I bought at Cactus Records and built/mastered the same way, only this time I picked these particular cuts to emulate the soundtrack for a 1970s style boat chase scene, probably from a movie about people smuggling illicit goods from tropical locations. There’d be a lot of exposed chest hair and mustaches involved. And brown avaiator sunglasses. You’ll notice the last tune is a change of pace–this is the triumphant part of the boat chase where you’ve eluded the pursuers and are chillin out in the sunshine, smooth sailin.

As above, we got FLAC format available for you audiophiles with the Grado headphones, and we’ve got 160kbs mp3 available for the iPod listeners on the move. Click the top cassette to launch em right now in the player, playa. Also available in the Music section.

Awwwwwwww GIT IT!