Malavita – Odeon Disco
There’ll come a moment when, perhaps, you’ll grow to regret this particular time and the way that you spent it. But, certainly, there will be a moment when you will regret not having invested even more energy in whatever you were doing, not taking more risks, not taking the time to enjoy your pastimes even more. They do say that nobody regrets not spending more time doing work. And while that’s true, nearly everyone regrets not actively seeking out more fun.
That prowl for some entertainment and stimulation, usually, has a soundtrack and certainly has a venue. Both the sounds and the place, eventually, end up being mythologised in the person trying to recall all the details of those evenings spent trying to lose themselves. Discotheques become ancient temples, and the beats bouncing off the walls turn into ceremonial music.
That’s what Malavita honours with their psych-soul single “Odeon Disco.” The band’s crafting a sound and the images of a place that can’t possibly have existed. If you take the band’s musicians at their word, “Odeon Disco” was the place where the best, most innovative Italian dance music was first played and the people who heard it were richer for hearing it than royalty. But that’s the power of myths and well-told stories. And, using those great grooves and the retro production, Malavita has found an impressive way of telling those stories.
Tim Richmond – Do You Like The Cake?
There’s always some kind of magical fairground that appears in all folk tales. Just read, for example, through old stories from the Middle Europe, and it’s filled with tricksters, magical figures and artists who pop out at the edge of some city without notice, dazzle wth their gifts and make onlookers question their lives before the circus even arrives and who, without warning, disappear.
What the hell could the entrance fee for such a show be? Who was the manager in charge, and what talent agency was supplying all of the characters that were needed for the shows? As with the music of Tim Richmond, these sorts of details are ones that you preoccupy yourself with only if you’re in the wrong business. The trickster that shows up in Bohemian folk tales always disappears without asking for compensation.
In some ways, of course, modern artists are rarely compensated in the way that they should be. In other, frankly, more important ways, they are spoiled by fate with the privilege of getting to perform magic for dazzled audiences. Tim Richmond’s psych-blues of “Do You Like The Cake?” sound like the closing ceremony of a surreal circus show in which the man in the top hat dares to mention the effort it took to make this all happen. Once he’s done, it befits his role to simply vanish in thin air.
