Ladytron

 Electropop band Ladytron goes record shopping at Amoeba Hollywood in this "What's In My Bag?" episode. Helen Marnie, Daniel Hunt & Mia Arroyo dig through the bins and share some of their favorite music, from Brazilian composer Rogério Duprat and Lana Del Rey to Bulgarian throat singers and Bobbie Gentry. Ladytron's eighth studio album Paradises is out now via Nettwerk Records.

Ladytron's picks:
• William Onyeabor - Atomic Bomb (LP) 
• Massive Attack - Mezzanine (LP) 
• Rogério Duprat - A Banda Tropicalista Do Duprat (LP) 
• Neil Young - Trans (LP) 
• Bobbie Gentry - The Windows Of The World (CD) 
• Milton Nascimento - Clube Da Esquina (LP) 
• Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares - Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares (LP) 
• Lana Del Rey - Ultraviolence (LP) 
• Gal Costa - Profana (LP) 
• Andrei Tarkovsky - Stalker (BLU-RAY) 
• Alex Cox - Repo Man (BLU-RAY) 
• Ladytron - Light & Magic (LP) 

Featured Artist: Ladytron

Editor: Brendt Rioux
Executive Producer: Rachael McGovern
Producer/Director: Craig Miller
Assistant Director: Aaron Araki
Cameras: Jacob Gray, Aaron Araki
Audio Recorded by: Patrick Emswiler
Assistant Editor: Patrick Emswiler

Watch Ladytron's "What's In My Bag?" episode on Amoeba.com

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Helen. Hi, I'm Mira.

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Hi, I'm Daniel.

SPEAKER_00 0:03

And we're Lady Tron. We're at Amoeba for what's in my bag.

SPEAKER_02 0:26

I went straight for the African section, which is where a lot of music that I like kind of lives. This one is by an artist called William Omnipor, who is a Nigerian artist about who not much is known because he just doesn't say much about himself. An album called Atomic Bomb, and it's the first record of his that I came across. It's an incredibly funky electronic record and it's just like nothing else. And it falls under the guise of outsider music, which I tend to like, but I don't think it's right to call it outsider music. He very much knows what he's doing, he just hasn't had the industry around him his whole life. I have no idea where he gets his synths from. The percussion he uses is amazing as well. Yeah, he's a wizard.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

I've chosen mezzanine by massive attack. It kind of played quite a big part in my life when I was at university. Um I think that's a lot to do with Elizabeth Fraser signing on it. It was like me and my like bestie at university. I'm just used to stick this on all the time. Teacher.

SPEAKER_01 2:02

The first thing I found was this by Rogelio Du Prat. He was a Brazilian composer arranger and he's kind of like the on-song sound of Tropicalia. All those amazing arrangements, all these incredible strings, all the kind of the electronic experimentation and everything. It was him. I only realized this relatively recently. I was listening to Constitução by Chico Boaki. The strings on it just dive out at you and it just kind of like, oh wait, is that the same guy who does all the others?

SPEAKER_06 2:47

Morreu na contramão atrapalhando sabatu.

SPEAKER_01 2:52

So this is the first time I've seen one of his own records, actually, even though I live in Brazil. It's always the way, yeah, go to the US, go to Japan to get Brazilian records.

SPEAKER_02 3:03

I think you're kind of starting to look a little bit like him as well.

SPEAKER_01 3:06

Yeah, I'm basically modeling myself on him now.

SPEAKER_02 3:16

A record called Trance by Neil Young. I was completely obsessed with Neil Young growing up. Learned to play guitar, learned kind of his songs. On the beach was my favourite record. And then I came across this, and it was just completely otherworldly. It's his electronic record, which he made because he had an autistic son and he wanted to communicate with him, and this was kind of a way for him to kind of process how he communicates with his son. I think it really, really pissed off his record label, and they ended up suing him because this is not what he was signed to do, really. Because he just still really sounds like Neil Young. There's so much soul. It kind of encapsulates this thing of like, how do you put soul into electronic music? That guy managed to put a whole lot of soul into electronic music.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

So this is Bobby Gentry. I listen to Bobby Gentry quite a lot because I have an old um Gemini Jeep and it's got a CD player, and like I can't get any radio stations in the car. So basically, Bobby Gentry is on there like pretty much all the time. I want you to love.

SPEAKER_02 5:21

And I love Southern Soul kind of country, like the muscle show sound and swamp country. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 5:29

Tell everybody that the man made a woman out of me. Howdy made a woman out of me.

SPEAKER_01 5:38

I'm staying in Brazil. I didn't get much further than the Brazil Brazilian section. This is Clubby the Esquina, a record made in 1972, Milton Nascimento and Los Borges, and it contains one of my favourite songs of all time in any genre. Tudo que você pode ser. Anything that you can beat.

SPEAKER_04 5:54

Tudo que você pode hacer.

SPEAKER_01 6:04

This record, my friend described it to me and he was a bit bit older than me, and he said that in the 70s this was like a kind of melancholic indie record, how it fitted into things at the time. It sounds modernistic to me in a way with the passing of time. I've actually obviously these are not the artists, these are kids representing them, but I've um I've met them both. I met Milton Nascimento. He was, I mean, it it sounds preposterous, but he was meditating on a rock. And he just happened to be there. It's the closest point of Brazil to Angola, and he used to go there and uh and meditate. Los Borges, I was at dinner with him, but I didn't know it was him because no one told me until he'd left. And I was like, but that's one of my favourite records. You know, why didn't anyone say? A bit of a name-dropy choice, but uh a genuine choice.

SPEAKER_00 6:51

It really was. You were like, I went to dinner with him, and I went to dinner with her.

SPEAKER_02 6:55

The fact that you saw him meditating on a rock that he always used to, you're just like you were walking, and then there he was meditating around a rock.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

These Brazilian artists, all of my encounters with Brazilian artists are like this.

SPEAKER_02 7:16

This is, I've never been able to pronounce this. The mysteries de voie bulgari. In Bulgarian, it's triu Bulgarke. When I was a kid in Bulgaria, there was a whole lot of folk music, you know, communist country sort of celebrating sort of national stuff. And I was really averse to it. Apart from the Bulgarian throat singers who recorded with Kate Bush. This was a record that 48 put out, so this is kind of how they became famous. And then Kate Bush kind of you know approached them and started recording with them. It is otherworldly and it gets used in schools like a lot. I heard it last on Oh, the Banshees of Venezuela. The Banshees of Vinacharin, yeah. It kind of opened up with this scene like of you know, sort of Ireland and kind of fields. Then I was like, hang on a second. This kind of sounds a bit incongruous. It's really transcendent in every way.

SPEAKER_01 8:27

Are they polyphonic?

SPEAKER_02 8:29

So they're throat, so they're throat singers, so they harmonize with themselves. So they do this circular breathing where they basically can hold a note forever. They breathe whilst they keep singing. They're drones, and I really like drones. I think I'm really drawn to drones in music.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

Something a bit more mainstream, uh Lana's delay ultraviolence. I like how she's navigated herself in the pop industry, and she doesn't really submit to the machine whilst she's still like this epic giant pop star. She came out with her like huge album, which made her super famous, and then she just kind of went off and did whatever she wanted. Like, really explored like her voice. It's unlike most modern artists where it's all like project and like ah, look what an amazing singer I am. I can hit all these notes, and she's just like, whatever. I would rather like layer it and keep it soft, more like how I like to sing. This album is one of my favourites of hers, and I saw her in Glasgow and I took my dad. He's a massive Lana fan, basically because I've bought him all her albums.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

So you won't believe this, but I've got another Brazilian record. And another name drop. So Gal Gal Gal Costa. So I I picked out this record particular. It was like a sort of mid-late 80s album. I mean, she was obviously came to prominence in the 60s, but it's got a song called um Faca Profana, which was written by Caetano Veloso, like a lot of her earlier stuff. But the name drop is that she lived around the corner from me. And again, I didn't know it was her. I just saw this this woman with like kind of big big hair walking around, going to the supermarket, you know, getting picked up by Ubers and whatnot. And then uh my friend, he was the same thing. He lived, actually lived in a building. He just realized one day that this woman he passed every day was Gal Costa. But you know, beyond my name drop, I played a lot of her 60s stuff in particular to my daughter when she was very young.

unknown 11:14

Baby! Baby!

SPEAKER_02 11:22

This is a movie called Stalker by probably my favourite director, Andrei Tarkovsky. It's a dystopian kind of uh sci-fi, the ultimate dystopian sci-fi film, and it's absolutely gorgeous. But what I really like about him is that he's got that very Eastern European sort of Russian poeticism about him. So even when he makes sci-fi, he just really makes it about memory and kind of uses it as a sort of device to kind of cut to what makes us human, and that's what all his films are basically a reflection on kind of humanity and memory.

SPEAKER_01 12:04

Repo Man, Alex Cox, the director, went to my school. So when I was at school, this came out then and it was a kind of cult thing in my school. People were, you know, very into the idea of this cool underground hip director had gone there, and it was also very influential, you know, musically, you know, it's where we first heard Iggy pop and things like that.

SPEAKER_04 12:23

I was a teenager that I saw. I didn't get fucked and I didn't get killed. I got so fucking dead.

SPEAKER_01 12:34

It's fair to say it's a cult film. Uh Alex Cox used to present a show on the BBC actually on Friday nights. He used to present a cult film every week. It was called Movie Drome. It was very educational, kind of late 80s. We saw loads of things that way. Repo Man, some of Harry Dean Stanton's best one-liners in his whole career. Like one, he's driving along in his car and he looks out the window and goes, over there.

SPEAKER_03 12:58

Ordinary fucking people, I hate them. See, an ordinary person spends his life avoiding tense situations. Repo man spends his life getting into tense situations.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

I think it's basically where I got my concept of what Los Angeles and California looked like. When I first arrived in LA like 26 years ago, this was basically what I expected to see.

SPEAKER_02 13:16

It's way sunnier than that.

SPEAKER_01 13:18

It's overcast, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it's also radioactive, highly radioactive.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

We have collectively chosen Light and Magic by Lady Tron. A lot of people don't know, but it was recorded here in LA.

SPEAKER_01 13:50

It was like basically a pool house, wasn't it? The studio was a pool house.

SPEAKER_00 13:53

We would go out and sit by the pool and sun ourselves and then go back and get back to work.

SPEAKER_01 13:58

And we were out here for about a month or so. A lot of stories, a lot of name drops as well.

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Yeah, we had a like really fun night, the most Hollywood night that I've still had in my life ever. That I've kind of thought this is it, you know, this is what my life's gonna be like. Harvey Kaitel at one table, you know, Owen Wilson at another, who do I focus on? And yeah, Owen Wilson did try and kind of strike up a conversation. And I was like, I'm really sorry, it's just like Harvey Kaitel's over there. This was really lovely having you guys in today. Cool. Thank you so much, really appreciate it. Thanks.