Back with some funk and soul for the fall. Just made this mix below with some stuff I’ve been spinning over the last few months (including these guys). The full tracklist, along with links to listen and download, are after the jump.
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Watch to the end: trust me, it’s worth it

It’s been a tough year for campaign advertisements, and money’s corroding influence on democracy has become crystal clear. The debate has focused on the Democrat’s forthcoming fall from grace. You know it’s a tough year when candidates are running ads against the incumbent Speaker of the House, mocking her liberal Bay Area ways. It’s an historically tough year when those ads are being run by another Democrat.

It’s the increase in dirty donations, a result of the Citizens United decision, and the endless attack ads being run by shadowy 501(c)4 organizations, right? The current season of political advertising, where seeing back-to-back scare ads from rival candidates isn’t a rarity and media companies are raking it in, may seem like part of the continuing escalation of partisan bickering. But a recent On the Media episode made a strong argument that truly corrupt political advertising came of age a long time ago.

In 1934, novelist and socialist Upton Sinclair ran for Governor of California as a Democrat, and the thought of the progressive writer attaining state office drove business interests mad. They attacked him like locusts — newspaper editors ran editorials against him, consultants coordinated ad strategy and Hollywood studios not only helped produce callous attack ads, they actually docked a day of employee pay and donated it to Sinclair’s opponent.

Sinclair’s Campaign and historically accurate harmonica

Though Sinclair, who had lost running as a Socialist for legislative office before, won 879,000 votes, he was still soundly defeated and
and his platform, Ending Poverty in California (EPIC), never came to pass. The stakes — a wildly popular progressive writer running for office in the New Deal era, in Tom Joad country, no less — created the first modern political campaign and the subsequent dependence on outside cash and influence. Some things never change.

Mobile music applications have come of age over the last few years. In the recent past, the conversation was mostly about streaming services such as Pandora and that app on the iPhone commercial that allows you to avoid feeling embarrassed when you can’t name that tune. I’ve tried many variations on music discovery or streaming apps, including the visually rich Ghostly International Discovery, and see it as a logical extension of cloud computing and the desire to grab music fans increasingly fragmented attention.

But the release of the iPad, a rush for more tablet-style devices and increasingly more powerful smartphones means mobile music creation will be just as accessible and democratized. Billboard recently hosted its first Music App Summit in San Francisco earlier this month, and the focus was squarely on branded interactivity, from the Gibson Learn & Master Guitar app (a combination tuner/teacher/metronome) to the I Am T-Pain app by Smule, a company that has had amazing success with its Glee Karaoke and Magic Piano app (according to a recent press release, the Magic Piano app has been played for 23.2 years of time by users). It’s always refreshing to see creative success stories involving big brands in music, since the major labels have demonstrated the folly of a mistrustful and myopic view of technology.

I’m more interested in the music creation category, which was won by MorphWiz, a synth program created by Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess which made $40,000 in its first month. I haven’t tried that out yet, but I’ve recently become obsessed with the Reactable Mobile app, another new entry to the app world. The interface — which was developed by a research team at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona — is a table that activates a variety of different modular synthesizer elements, including sound sources, oscillators, sequencers and filters, placed on its surface. Users can position these elements, colored plastic shaped corresponding to their function, to interact with each other to build unique rhythms and sounds, a process that lets users discover their own visual vocabulary while creating. Bjork, no stranger to forward-thinking electronics and sharp visual presentation, utilized Reactable on tour a few years ago.

The app basically shrinks that table onto your phone or iPad; even on a phone, there’s plenty of room to modify and rearrange. You can save tracks and import samples, and it makes for a good crash course on synthesizers, despite the $9.99 price tag. I’ve interviewed some artists in the past who have modular synth set-ups, and after a few hours of playing with this app, I can see why they can radically expand your music vocabulary and overwhelm you with choices. All those options made me feel simultaneously adrift and excited, convinced I could make some brilliant, Warp-worthy synth line if I only tweaked the LFO just right (not surprisingly, that has not happened yet). I can see Reactable being a big part of my train trips to work.

The potential for mobile devices to expand access to composition, recast music notation and create interactive performances has barely been scratched. But in the meantime, it’ll be interesting to see fans a little more engaged with their iPhones during the morning commute.

That delightful image is, of course, a parody of the famous cover of Herb Alpert’s 1965 album Whipped Cream & Other Delights. I didn’t realize the extent to which that dairy product-derived fantasy had been mocked until I saw a display at a nearby bar of numerous cover parodies, Sauerkraut, Wurst and Other Delights, Spaghetti Sauce & Other Delights and countless other food-based scenarios that are probably a fetish to someone. In honor of that display, here’s a gallery of some great cover art parodies, satires and homages:

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1. There is a footloose, dance-happy Thom Yorke hiding behind the gloom. He should play more shows.

2. Flea is the Steve Martin of bass guitar (that isn’t conversely true — Steve Martin isn’t the Flea of banjo)

3. Mauro Refosco is one in a long-line of hyperactive percussionists. I still can’t explain the Dr. Seussian drum tower-thing he was playing, but that’s besides the point.

4. If you’re selling $40 T-shirts, they better be providing a sustainable economic model to indigenous tribes and be made via a process that removes carbon from the atmosphere, Or, you know, glow in the dark….

I’ve yet to see the new Bill Withers documentary, Still Bill, that’s getting lots of great press, but I really want to check it out. I just picked up Still Bill on vinyl last weekend and I’ve played it a dozen times. He has a gift for making the simple things and the hardest things in songwriting seem effortless.

Jason Gross, editor of Perfect Sound Forever, taped parts of a Q&A Withers participated in after a screening of the new film in New York. One clip featuring Withers discussing the Ali-Foreman fight, is below. The rest can be found here.