HALL OF KINGS

All the Kings on my iPod (not including Elvis):

King Ayisoba Feat. Kontihene, Kwabena Kwabena & Kwaku-T
King Crimson
King Culture
King Curtis
King Everald
King Jammy
King Kong
King Nando
King Stitt & The Dynamites
King Sunny Ade
King Tee
King Tubby

THIS MONTH IN RELIX

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Nigeria Rock Special: Psychedelic Afro-Rock & Fuzz Funk In 1970s Nigeria
Soundway

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Nigeria 70: Lagos Jump - Original Heavyweight Afrobeat Highlife & Afro-Funk
!K7

There's more new music being produced now than at any time in the past, but most of it sucks. So the hip and jaded are forced to dig through the dustbin of history for long-forgotten hunks of awesomeness. This has led to a sizable reissue-and-compilation industry, and lately the Nigerian music scene of the mid-'70s is the hot zone of choice. If you're only familiar with Fela Kuti and King Sunny Ade, get ready for an avalanche. Between 1970 and '75, Nigeria came out of a war with Biafra and enjoyed a boom in its oil industry - consequently, people wanted to dance, party and rock out, and bands all across the country sprang up to soundtrack the revels.

As its title implies, Nigeria Rock Special is loaded with fuzzed-out guitars, cracking snare drums and Westernized rhythms - "Another Man's Thing," by Joe King Kologbo & His Black Sound, is practically garage punk, and Ofo The Black Company was Nigeria's answer to Funkadelic circa 1972. Nigeria 70, a sequel to an out-of-print 2001 set, is funkier and more focused on lilting highlife grooves (plus some reggae on Chief Checker's "Africa Irie"), but tracks like Eric (Showboy) Akaeze & His Royal Ericos' 10-minute "Wetin De Watch Goat, Goat Dey Watcham" will put you in a hip-swiveling joy-trance. These sets' compilers deserve a Nobel prize.

THIS MONTH IN THE WIRE

PAN SONIC
Kuvapukti DVD
Blast First Petite
I remember being underwhelmed by Pan Sonic back when their name still had two 'a's in it. Their chilly Finnish art students' version of techno had little of the kick of the stuff actually played in clubs, nor was it noisy enough to satisfy the Merzbow-loving side of me.

I saw them live in May 2000, opening a Wire reunion show at New York's Irving Plaza. I recall two silent men onstage with a tabletop's worth of electronics that looked hand-built (as advertised in rapturous press clippings from the time of Kulma, the album I'd bought and which had so disappointed me). They flipped this, twisted that, fiddled with something else, and the club was filled with a roar that seemed almost visible - and had it been visible, it would have been gunmetal gray and solid as a wall. The sound changed tremendously over the course of their time onstage ('performance' seems a wildly exaggerated description of what they did up there), with waves of click and swoosh and zap running over an audience equally divided between the rapt and the jaded.

At first, I didn't think I was getting the point of it all; the austerity felt a little forced and a little contemptuous. Were these somber Finns just having us all on? When Wire took the stage, though, the double bill's complementary nature revealed itself. Wire stood frozen in place with near-Kraftwerkian impassivity, cranking out mechanistic run-throughs of the old songs - as aloof as their Finnish tourmates, but in the service of arty punk rather than artsy techno.

The raw material for this DVD was filmed on a Pan Sonic world tour, one year before I saw them in New York. Presumably the Irving Plaza show wasn't a fluke, because there's almost no actual performance footage offered here; instead, it's a continuous flow of staticky swirls and zooming electronic clusters, all in lush black and white, strobing and pulsing (there's a warning to epileptics on the package) in time with the music and occasionally adding an element to it. But iTunes' Visualizer function already does this, so the only real selling point of this is the ability it offers to view portions of the program from multiple angles. That's nice, though I couldn't find the correct button on my remote control to make it work.

Ultimately, what I took away from Kuvapukti (Finnish for cathode ray tube) was a greatly increased appreciation for their music, which is much funkier and more compelling than I recall it being in a live context, eight years ago. The rhythms made my head nod, the squelching, staticky synth riffs and forceful zaps held my attention, and the droning hums that provided a foundation were sustaining rather than soporific. Perhaps, then, this DVD's audio content will sell some CDs. Its visual content, though, feels almost like an afterthought - ignorable, at any rate.

From here, not surprisingly.

FULL

I've reached something I'm gonna call, for lack of a better phrase, "iPod critical mass": I now have so much music in my 160GB iPod (and with 17GB or so left to fill) that I can no longer keep track of it in my head. With all my previous iPods (I've had a 30GB, a 40GB, and a 60GB before this one), I was able to more or less remember what I had. But this one has so much storage capacity, and I've done so much Rapidshare downloading - where the previous three were filled entirely from my CD collection/hard drive - that I find myself flipping through it on a semi-regular basis and being confronted by stuff I totally forgot I had in there. Just today I realized I have albums by Nortt and the Wipers that I obtained in the last month or two, stuffed into the iPod like papers into a drawer, and promptly forgot about. How it happens is, I download stuff on impulse, frequently late at night - "Hey, I always wanted to listen to that album...wonder if it's on some blog somewhere." It sure is. So I grab it, put it in there, and then go to sleep, and by the next morning I've got a dozen CDs arriving in the morning's mail that I import into the iPod for work-related listening (gotta review 'em, gotta assign reviews to others, whatever). The stuff I thought I just had to hear a mere 24 hours earlier vanishes into the background, and I never think about it again until I'm scanning for something to listen to and say to myself, "Oh, fuck, wow, I have the first four Jon Spencer Blues Explosion albums (or the first five Curtis Mayfield albums, or the entire Cannibal Corpse discography, or five discs by Bong-Ra) in here! I forgot all about that!" And then I can't remember what I thought I wanted to listen to when I first started scanning through the "Artists" menu in the first place, mere moments earlier. My iPod is damaging my brain, and fundamentally altering the way I think about music...not for the better.

Am I alone? I doubt it.