As promised, last Wednesday was a revelatory experience. As promised, Jesus Makes the Shotgun Sound melted our collective face while gently drowning us in relentless waves of orgiastic cosmic joy. As promised, Health owned. If you haven’t already, you really ought to consider making it out these events. They’re kind of historical. Thanks to Matthew Yeung at the Highlander for the photos.

Coming up next Wednesday, Mula and Boogaloo Assassins. Wear your dancing shoes.

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=SAQLjzR-424[/youtube]

With any luck, we’ll be having a post a week or so covering international music. Here’s the first installment featuring Indian virtuoso, U. Srinivas, the first musician to play mandolin in Indian classical music.

Srinivas plays five string electric mandolin in Carnatic style–generally, the two major distinctions made in Indian classical music are between the North and South; the North producing the Hindustani style and the South, Carnatic. This composition is entitled Gananayakam and was written by the composer Muthuswami Dikshitar.

U. Srinivas has recorded a great deal of music over the course of his career, but I don’t recall ever seeing a performance as lucid as this one. Srinivas’ mandolin is amplified in such a fashion that the timbre has just the right amount of bite to it; not too much, but enough for average western ears to be able to make the connection to a guitar played above the twelfth fret (although few Western guitarist have ever managed to coax such expressiveness from their instruments) and the quickness of his fingers can fool the inattentive lister into thinking that the mandolin is running through a delay pedal. The tambura and the percussion provide the foundation for Srinivas to explore the composition, while violinist Delhi P. Sunderarajan provides only occasional input. This is clearly Srinivas’ show.

By the time this recording was made, the west had long ago been introduced to Indian music via Ravi Shankar and George Harrison. In fact Srinivas, who was born in 1969, missed the heyday of Indian influence on British and American psychedelic rock, a period ripe for cross pollination of cultural products (or cultural imperialism, depending on your perspective). Taking the Beatles as the sole example, George Harrison adopted the sitar and took lessons from Ravi Shankar, while Bollywood composer Mohd. Rafi did an arrangement of the Beatles “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” for song and dance. After the 60s and early 70s, efforts at fusion continued with occasionally stunning results, but often fell victim to embarrassing failure. This video, recorded in the 80s, takes all the efforts of rock musicians to make their western instruments sound more Indian and very humbly, politely, and perhaps not even consciously hands them their collective ass. Not even John McLaughlin at the height of Shakti’s prowess had anything on this guy.

If anybody is interested in seeing more recordings from this sessions, there are also longer recordings of the compositions Venkataramana and Tiruvadi Saranam available on Youtube, both of which are equally revelatory.

As the title should imply, this is a list of some of the better music videos that debuted this year; one which was apparently marked by an efflorescence of color not felt in music for a long time. We could get used to this, though. The list starts out, appropriately enough, with the video for the new Daedelus single, Fairweather Friends. It begins in an animated world which has gone “101 Days Without Color” before sprouting into an extravagant spectrum. The colorful trend transcended genre boundaries, gracing everything from hip hop to indie rock with some much needed happiness. Let’s hope we haven’t seen the last of this.

Daedelus – Fair Weather Friends

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRJ2YvRv3N4[/youtube]

Daedelus’ catchiest song yet is an expression of joy unlike anything he’s offered up before.

Abe Vigoda – All Night And Day

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9Mcj4UXIyY[/youtube]

This year saw the emergence of several important releases from the LA underground scene. Bands like No Age and Silver Daggers (who are also included on this list) released albums on Fat Cat and Load. Abe Vigoda, originally from Chino and frequent Smell performers, are in the midst of recording a full length this very minute. All Night and Day is a track culled from the Animal Ghosts 7″, out on PPM. The video makes the list partially because it’s built on such an amazing song, but also because the video itself is so much fun. What face paint, fake blood, catholic iconography, and food have to do with each other I don’t know, but I’m not sure it really matters. Check out Abe Vigoda’s new songs.

Escort – All Through the Night

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqRDct1IDI8[/youtube]

You probably didn’t know that you needed to witness the entire extended cast of the Muppets take part in what might be the greatest disco extravaganza of our era, but until you do you couldn’t possibly understand.

Black Dice – Kokomo

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9WSNMKf_Vw[/youtube]

Black Dice are easily the most abstract band on the list and it comes as no surprise that their video is its most abstract contribution. The video for Kokomo, one of the more accessible tracks on the new Load Blown album, is comprised of collaged found footage from Saturday morning kids commercials and any number of other sources. The whole thing ends up looking like what you might expect to find if you stumbled in on a kindergarten class stuck in a transdimensional feedback loop.

Gia Janashvili – Favorite Georgian Pop

Dan Deacon – Crystal Cat

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFlBJ1xZK10[/youtube]

Dan Deacon became a household name this year (well, maybe not in everybody’s house) based on his spastic performances of a style of music which is entirely his own. He’s been often quoted describing his music as “the kind of music really cool six year-olds would make” and I couldn’t pin it any closer that. This video is all neon and as ADD as any kid who’s grown up on Firefox tabbed browsing. You should also see this video in which Dan Deacon improbably manages to perform a song of his on the Savannah, Georgia NBC affiliate morning news program. With his zipper down.

M.I.A – Boyz

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZv-G7IISgs&feature=related[/youtube]

Pretty much anything that can be said about M.I.A has already been said, so anything here would more than likely be superfluous pixel space. Suffice to say that Boyz is an amazing track with an amazing video. Ms. Arulpragasm is also the only artist to have more than one entry on this list.

Who needs a guitar when cheap keyboards will do the trick? In a scene largely dominated by guitars, it’s nice to see some bands eschewing string instruments for their keyed counterparts.

No Paws No Lions waste no time crafting the catchiest, most propulsive tunes to emanate from the Riverside area with nothing more than voice, keyboard, and drums. “I’ve Always Been Content Laughing and Lying in the Fields of Banning” is easily one of the best pop songs to take place over a mere minute and a half in my memory, distilling some of the best moments of The Unicorns and fellow progenitors of equatorial funcore. If the wastelands of Banning can produce such joyous sounds as these, then maybe Stagecoach Town USA isn’t so bad after all.

Download “I’ve Always Been Content Laughing and Lying in the Fields of Banning” at No Paws Myspace page (myspace.com/nopaws) and listen in to KUCR to hear future material from these local wunderkinds.