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On The List: Odawas

The Spark That Lit The Prairie Fire

The following list is compiled by my cohort, Isaac Edwards, and myself. The thing I like best about Isaac is his blind enthusiasm for the things he loves, which can sometimes embarrass my inner record nerd. He was raised in a strict, Midwest Nazarene home, and didn’t hear secular music till around his sophomore year in college. One time I was playing a Creedence Clearwater song out in the country home we shared by State Road 46 in Elletsville, and Isaac came running out of his room saying he had been looking for this sound for about 10 years! He had originally heard a snippet of CCR on some auto commercial...

It’s a different life that we’ve lead, and are leading still, I love the guy…

- Michael Tapscott

1-10 by Michael Tapscott, 11-20 by Isaac Edwards

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Tracks

1. Ennio Morricone - Man With the Harmonica

This is almost a perfect composition, the theme music for Charles Bronson’s character. Clint Eastwood said on the Oscars recently that the first time he heard an Ennio Morricone score he thought, “you know what’s great, is that I’m in this movie.” Yeah, I can imagine feeling that way.

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2. Charles Ives - The Unanswered Question

One of the most startling and moving pieces and still avant garde pieces of classical music. I remember hearing that Ives grew up hearing two different marching bands practice on either side of his house, the clash of their sound is fairly evident in this.

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3. Jack Nitzsche - I'm the Lonliest Fool

It ends too soon, disintegrating into this free form, minimalist piano ditty, but for about a minute and twenty seconds, it’s the most glorious music ever.

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4. Leonard Cohen - Stranger Song

Recently I watched McCabe and Mrs. Miller and I was overtaken by how far a movie could go when borrowing its mood from Warren Beatty’s beard and Leonard Cohen’s music.

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5. Isaac Albeniz - Mallorca

When I went to the school of music at Columbia College in Chicago, a guy came in and played some classical guitar to us in this class, he played “Mallorca” by Albeniz and it immediately opened up the possibilities within me for mood and melody and music’s ability to create that pastoral feeling.

6. Melvin Van Peebles - Love, That's America

The most uninhibited and joyous piece of soul, Van Peebles sounds out of his mind or drunk. I love all of his records, especially this one and Brer Soul.

7. Phil Collins - In The Air Tonight

Isaac bought the whole Face Value album, had it special ordered by this local record store. He was horrified by just how bad it was, but this, the most famous song off of it, is completely priceless. The drum break, the darkness that surrounds, imagining Miami Vice...

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8. Dion - Your Own Back Yard

A great, middle-aged anti-drug song. Mott the Hoople did a spot on cover of this that is almost as good, but I prefer Dion’s version. His voice is just so rich and velvety, and I have a special place in my heart for that. I wish Dean Martin would have done this as well.

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9. Popol Vuh - Brothers Of Darkness - Sons Of Light

Popol Vuh is a recent obsession, I had liked the Werner Herzog soundtracks for some time, but Florian Fricke’s back catalog is really great. This is a long piece that had been used a bit in Herzog’s movies, but the full 16 and half minutes evolves out of a Nosferatu haze into an elegiac piano and guitar call and response.

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10. Vangelis - Blade Runner Blues

Can’t get enough of this—so moody, so cheesy, why does it seem to dig into the pit of my heart?

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11. Sunn O))) & Boris - Sinking Belle (Blue Sheep)

Featuring the sandpaper-laced smokey throat of Jesse Sykes, this is absolutely transcendent doom metal, like Floyd Cramer in the final death throes of the most beautifully wicked acid trip.

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12. Indian Jewelry - Going South

Think The Rapture getting an internal overhaul by early Butthole Surfers, and you've got an idea. The skeeziest, best psycho-sexual electro-thrash since the Burt Bacharach/GG Allen collaboration.

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13. Liars - It Fit When I Was A Kid

This concept album from some of NYC's finest will kick your dancing ass back to the stone age, where you can get your primitive groove on just before catching the spaceship to the end of space.

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14. Xiu Xiu - Bishop, CA

Jamie Stewart's typically quivering angst-driven vocals are even more suppressed by something seething at the surface, when the song opens up like a great black egg that's cracked, resignation to the abyss seeping over and through your skin, freezing your heart, melting your mind.

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15. TV On The Radio - Staring At The Sun

Like Glam-Rock from Neptune, there is an other-worldly desperation and sadness in this song that is only perpetuated by the sheer lose-yourself-to-the-moment danceability of it all. Michael absolutely does not get this...

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16. Talking Heads - Listening Wind

An especially appropriate song, considering the times, Eno's production on this album is impeccable with David Byrne at the top of his game, making this song one of the most haunting things the Heads ever recorded.

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17. Franco Battiato - Fetus

This 70's Italian troubadour picked up a synthesizer like a six-shooter in a Sergio Leone film, blasting through the experimental pop world in a blaze of glory, and the rest is history, according to Jim O'Rourke.

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18. Scott Walker - It's Raining Today

Using a live orchestra to create a shimmering, ethereal atmosphere that would usually be relegated to synthesizers, Walker moves through some of his most poetic lyrics as if he walks on water. One time, I saw Scott Walker turn a man's face into velvet and then it melted...

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19. Julee Cruise - Into The Night

The musical lovechild of Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. 'Nuff said.

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20. Arvo Part - Fur Alina

Demonstrating the sheer volume of emotion that can be captured with minimalism at it's finest, Arvo Pärt's quietly scintillating piano glitters through the twilight to create an atmosphere similar to what Eno and Harold Budd would master later in their careers.

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On The List: Odawas

The Spark That Lit The Prairie Fire

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