1974: Charlemagne Palestine - Four Manifestations on Six Elements by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 05-11-2012 For aficionados of the modern minimalist movement, a small handful of works have achieved mythic status, often warping their creators into mysterious, nearly other worldly gurus of drone. The Black Record by La Monte Young comes to mind, as does Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air , Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians , and possibly Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach . Each of these works, with the exception of La Monte Young, who is an enigma of his own ...

1991: Pixies - "Trompe Le Monde" by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 05-01-2012 Somehow I’ve been a latecomer to my required duty as a college educated white guy to love the Pixies. But in the last year I sucked it up, bought all their records, and decided there was definitely something to this humble four-piece band that just happened to invent 90s music with their first two albums. And yes, these two albums are definitely my favorites. Surfer Rosa is the epitome of rocking out with reckless abandon and the first side of Doolittle is packed with ...

1988: Dinosaur Jr. - Bug by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 04-18-2012 Sonic Youth, Black Flag, Minutemen, Meat Puppets, Hüsker Dü. It’s safe to say that SST Records had the strongest lineup of the late 80s. These bands pushed the volume and intensity of guitar-rock to earsplitting heights, but none of them could quite pull of the face-melting, fuzz-drenched guitar freak-outs of SST label mates Dinosaur Jr.’s own J Mascis. After rising to the pinnacle of slacker apathy early in life, Mascis rounded up his high school buddies Lou Barlow and Murph to form Dinosaur Jr ...

1999: Toumani Diabaté with Ballaké Sissoko - New Ancient Strings by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 04-06-2012 I wish I could say I was some sort of expert on world music, but the sad truth is I’m not. Every time I roll into a record store feeling awesome about picking up an album by some obscure sitar player, I inevitably walk out with literally dozens of new artists added to my future-purchases list that I’ve never heard of. The long and short of it: this isn’t going to be an article on the ethnomusicology of ...

1980: Dead Kennedys - "Pull My Strings" by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 04-04-2012 As far as flipping a massive middle finger to the music industry goes, The Dead Kennedys might have locked up best “fuck you” of all time during the 1980 Bay Area Music Awards. After being asked to play their underground single “California Über Alles” at the show, singer Jello Biafra and drummer Ted (flashy name right?) took it upon themselves to pen a tune railing against the shitty state of popular music at the turn of the decade. The result was the one-off “Pull ...

1977: David Bowie - "Heroes" by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 03-23-2012 Once upon a time, David Bowie moved to Berlin, snorted epic amounts of cocaine, and recorded some killer tunes. So killer, in fact, that what has come to be know as the “Berlin trilogy” – Low , Heroes , and Lodger – have been universally recognized as some of the most groundbreaking and influential pop music ever recorded by a strung out ninety-pound drug addict (though John Frusciante certainly gave him a run for his money). But in all seriousness, these albums kick ass like few have before or after ...

1985: Dariush Dolat-Shahi - Electronic Music, Tar and Sehtar by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 03-13-2012 Iranian-American composer Dariush Dolat-Shahi’s music occupies a unique and timeless place among the countless albums from the last half-century that mixed acoustic performances with electronic manipulations. Dolat-Shahi stands above his peers as a master of both crafts, able to weave together lush melodies from his tar, a traditional Persian lute, and spacey analog synth lines – which sound like they could have been recorded anytime between the sixties and now – into a complete whole that doesn’t feel stuck in one genre ...

1979: Frippertronics 101 by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 03-09-2012 Though Robert Fripp’s name will be forever associated with the bloated titan of prog-rock, King Crimson, his most fruitful work was arguably done in a series of collaborations with everyone’s favorite electro-whiz, Brian Eno. Fripp & Eno released a few alums in the early 70s that paired Fripp’s laser beam guitar melodies with Eno’s penchant for quite reflection and treated pianos to mixed results. The records weren’t terrible, far from it, but inconsistency was the name of the game with Eno’s contributions feeling a bit color-by-numbers and never living up to the massive potential Fripp’s playing brought to the table. But this meeting wasn’t a total wash; the sessions gave birth to what was later dubbed “Frippertronics,” a system of reel-to-reel tape recorders that Fripp used to weave guitar lines into dense webs of sound. With this setup, Fripp was able craft improvised ambient experiments in real time and finally give full voice to the ideas only ...

1977-1980: Joy Division - Substance by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 02-28-2012 I don’t feel like counting right now, so I’ll go ahead and guesstimate that since Joy Division’s dissolution in 1980 there have been around a dozen compilation albums scraped together and shoved at fans. For those keeping score, that’s six times more releases than the band put out themselves, trumping even The Smiths’ fondness for repackaging their goodies every five or so years. These anthologies aren’t all bad by any means, but what baffles me is why after the near perfect ...

1988: Galaxie 500 - Today by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 02-16-2012 For reasons I can’t really fathom, Galaxie 500’s first album Today is usually overlooked in discussion of the band. Writers often point to On Fire as the band’s most cohesive album-length statement and to tracks like “Fourth of July” and “Listen, the Snow is Falling” from This is Our Music as their strongest individual outings. And yes, it is true that Today doesn’t have the “one big haze” feel that comes from a listen through On Fire , but the incredibly strong song ...

1993-97: Yo La Tengo Kick Out the Jams, Motherfucker! by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 02-07-2012 Life must be busy for Yo La Tengo. Between being one of the quintessential bands of the 90s, a walking encyclopedia of cover tunes, and the group your friends have been billing as the only “mature” indie rock band that matters for the last two decades, its hard to believe they’ve had time to act out Seinfeld episodes on stage (seriously, look it up). So maybe that’s why they sound their best when things are slowed down and dragged ...

1983: Hüsker Dü - Metal Circus by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 02-02-2012 Anarchy in punk rock is bullshit. It doesn’t take much to rail against governments, institutions, or even that asshole who roughed you up for looking like a freak when, at then end of the day, you can go home and count the money you got from that fat major label check. Yell, scream, cut yourself onstage; none of it means anything when you don’t follow through on the outrageous shit everyone is so willing to spout for a moment in the spotlight. That ...

1987: Sonic Youth - "Schizophrenia" by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 01-24-2012 This is where Sonic Youth finally delivered on all the promise their early work hinted at. Don’t get me wrong, almost everything they did before their 1987 masterpiece Sister was pretty damn good, but the noise-pop gem “Schizophrenia” that kicks off the album is the band’s single greatest accomplishment. Sonic Youth had been experimenting with alternately tuned guitar workouts for years and they were no strangers to mutilating a pop song or two live, but “Schizophrenia” was the first instance where they injected an ...

1994: Pavement - Stuff Up The Cracks by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 01-11-2012 It must be some sort of divine stroke of comedy that made Malkums’ reflection on the cover of Pavement’s bootleg compilation Stuff up the Cracks looks exactly like Steve Perry (or maybe I’m just seeing things). There’s a hilarious contrast between the hyper-produced, nauseatingly glossy soft rock that an image of Perry conjures up and the truth of the snarlingly ugly music hidden within. This is Pavement unhinged, captured in a way even their celebrated lo-fi masterpiece Slanted and Enchanted couldn ...

1971: Franca Sacchi - "Danza, Mia Cara" by Winston O'Boogie">Dr. Winston O'Boogie on 01-06-2012 Franca Sacchi, one of the few female electronic composers of the 60s and 70s, was born in Milan in 1940. Along with her contemporaries like Pietro Grossi and Teresa Rampazzi, Sacchi defined the sound of the Italian experimental scene, a genre that is just now seeing the light of day thanks to some incredible reissues from the Italian label Die Schachtel. I first found Sacchi though recent CD reissues of her unreleased material from the late 60s and early 70s called En , and while ...