Interesting stuff. More jazzy than I expected. Excellent production. Great to listen to whilst typing madly.

Semillama, I grow to respect your taste more every time you post. Were you listening to "Halucination Engine" "Seven Souls" or that P-Funk cover album? (the title escapes me right now...).

Hallucination Engine...hey, there's a fly on my keyboard. I need to go pop something new in right now... It shall be the Indestructable Beat Of Soweto! Excuse me while I turn it up.

point and click

my friend v and i always get into the same argument whenever bill laswell comes up. v thinks laswell is nothing more than a culture pirate with limited talent who rides on the coat-tails of the revered. i, on the other hand, don't much give a shit. i'm just glad someone is releasing this stuff so i can get a hold of it.

I actually think both P.O.V.'s are acurate- he is a culture pirate. But he has excellent taste and KNOWS who the revered are. Which is cool as the revered rarely have very effective p.r. machines.

true. i just hope he's paying those folks right cuz i *know* he's getting his.

If you're going to be a culture pirate, might as well be the best culture pirate you can be. (it was Clapton's cover of I shot the sheriff that brought MArley into the Western spotlight (though he would've made it on his own eventually), and Clapton is strickly third-rate as far as culture pirates go). I think that if you go and work with musicians from different cultures, if you have respect for the music, you get something new and wonderful, like Japanese punk bands. I can't ever knock laswell, cause his Dreams of Freedom marley album was the soundtrack to my final acid trip. I remember standing at the window watching teh sun set over the hills and lake, completely awestruck, when I became aware of this incredible beautiful sound, and it was coming from outside my head. It was a religious moment.

Eric Clapton is not entirely a cultural pirate. I say this, and I loathe him. He works better collaboratively: he is less derivative then. I would also hazard a guess that he is at his finest on a huge depressing nod. He did some excellent work with Cream and as Derek and the Dominos. It's only after "Lay Down Sally" that he began irredeemably sucking. I like Laswell fine. There is no originality, there is only exceptional style in arrangement.

Well, he's a producer more than a musician. I would argue for originality in his production, though. His re-arrangments of Miles Davis are amazing.

Sem, I didn't mean Laswell lacked originality. I meant originality at all for anyone is illusory, that genius resides in the arrangement of pre-existing bits. It's all about nuance. Check out the B-52s' "52 Girls." There's a song with nuance.

That's funny. I used to know a V. It was short for Viola, I think. She was swell.