Episode 017
New Arrivals
The Episode
Our home renovation is just about complete, and we have moved back into the apartment. The big news is that The Guest Room is about to become The Nursery. Still not sure where the stuffed animals are going to fit amongst all the records though. You can email us for the registry but it is mostly infant-sized Velvet Underground t-shirts.
We may have been away from the record shelves the last two months, but the records have still been coming in. So in honor of the incoming newest member of our family, the main set this month is an eclectic mix of new arrivals. These are not new releases necessarily, just songs from records that we have acquired relatively recently. Later on in the show there’s also a set of Yo La Tengo covers and some really cool cuts from a few Japanese jazz comps we recently picked up.
The set list is a few sections down. The Guest Room is spoiler-free.
MITGR live at Skinner’s Loft
Sunday March 19, 4-8pm
We’ll be behind the decks at Skinner’s Loft on March 19 from 4-8, bringing our usual brand of elegantly controlled chaos to one of the best spots in Jersey City. Four hours of sweet soul, French electronic, trippy psych, indie fuzz and New York scuzz, all mixed from vinyl sources. Probably gonna throw some De La on (RIP Trugoy). This will be the last live show before we take a few months off to hang with our new baby, so if you’ve been meaning to make it out to one of these, this is the one! There will be New Order.
It has been so much fun getting to do these shows the last few months. Skinner’s is such an amazing spot and part of some old-school Jersey City lineage. Chef Juan has been crushing it. Come out and join us for a night of great food, drinks, and music.
The last few we have done have gotten pretty busy so reservations are suggested but not required. We’ll be spinning in the loft upstairs but you can also hear us downstairs at the bar if you just want to pop in for a drink. If you’re making reservations and want to be seated upstairs just put “MITGR” or “with the DJ” or “I want to eat the best meal I’ve had all month while listening to Rockaway Beach on wax” in the note.
146 Newark Avenue Jersey City, NJ 07302
212-915-0600
Elsewhere on the Interweb
We have been posting our #MorningListens over on our Instagram page, like this amazing record from Misha Panfilov which was one of our favorite releases from last year:
Or this one from Margo Price, who we are seeing at Webster Hall TONIGHT:
If you are looking for something new to listen to and have exhausted every episode of MITGR, scroll through our page and pick something to cue up on your streaming service of choice. Or better yet, buy a copy from your local record store.
We are also on Twitter, where we have been very occasionally posting, and slightly more frequently curating our feed with carefully selected retweets of only the very coolest of things to waste your life reading or watching.
In all honesty, nothing in the intervening twenty-five years has better replicated the specific feeling of doing nothing that MTV once provided to our particular adolescent era (approx ‘93-’97) than a well-curated Twitter feed does. For instance, where else can you find this VHS tour of John Waters’ Baltimore apartment circa 1986?
Just sittin’ on our Twitter feed, watching our lives roll away. Just sittin’ on our Twitter feed, wasting time.
If by some chance you are a regular listener who has been thinking to yourself “Midnight in the Guest Room is great, but what it really needs is the host endlessly ranting about the films and television work of cinematic stylist Michael Mann,” have we got a surprise for you! Eric recently appeared as a guest on The Pink Smoke Podcast, ostensibly to discuss the pilot to Michael Mann’s mid-eighties procedural/serial Crime Story, but he and host John Cribbs quickly digress into all things Mann.
That episode can be found here.
And if that’s not enough, Eric and John can also be heard discussing the soundtrack work of Tangerine Dream here. That one is from a few years ago, and it goes deep. You have been warned.
The Setlist 017
*Set 1* Purple Mountains - Margaritas at the Mall *Set 2* Royal Trux - Stop // Double O’s Demingo’s - Color One Tear Black Part 2 // Isabelle Antenna - Seaside Weekend // The Flies - I’m Not Your Stepping Stone // Brown Spirits - Space Race Part 1 // The Parliaments - All Your Goodies Are Gone // John Cale feat. Laurel Halo - Mercy *Set 3* Yo La Tengo - Cast a Shadow (Beat Happening cover) // Yo La Tengo - Tried So Hard (Flying Burrito Brothers cover) // Yo La Tengo - I’m Your Puppet (Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham/James and Bobby Purify cover) // Yo La Tengo - Somebody’s Baby (Jackson Browne cover) // *Set 4* Soul Media - Breeze // Yasuko Nagamine and Yasuaki Shimizu - Summer Wind // Count Buffalo and the Jazz Rock Band - Mago-Uta *Set 5* Silver Jews - Honk If You’re Lonely
Word of Mouth
In the event you are reading this, like what you hear, and are not yet a subscriber, please consider subscribing. A new mix along with a newsletter will appear in your inbox at midnight on the first Friday of each month.
If you are active on social media and feel so inclined, you could always share this month’s episode. Spread the good word throughout the twittersphere or the instaglobe or the faceworld using this handy button:
And if you know someone specific who might enjoy some mixes curated from vinyl delivered to their inbox each month, let them know about us. Not sure who to send it to? If you were going to pull a Bowie and move to Berlin in the mid-to-late seventies in order to escape the witches that may or may not be hunting you in Los Angeles, straighten your life out, get off drugs, and create a trilogy of records that reinvented rock and roll from the inside out, who would be your Iggy Pop that you bring with you so that you have someone to hang out with and produce a few records for? Send it to them.
We appreciate it.
MITGR Classic
If you haven’t gotten enough after this month’s ep, check out this episode from last May. Some Memphis soul, some Hungarian psych, some non-album Radiohead, and the original version of one of the Yo La Tengo covers we played this month.
Footnotes
Assorted ephemera related to Episode 017
017.01 (00:05) Always seems insane to me that a band as weird as Royal Trux were swept up in the post-Nirvana major label shopping craze. A band this weird belongs nowhere near the mainstream, yet there they were with a million dollar contract sitting next to Smashing Pumpkins on Virgin Records. Wild times. Anyway, they’re right up our alley. Pretty great history of the band here.
017.02 (11:16) This is from the album En Cavale by Isabelle Antenna. The Numero Group just did a deluxe re-release, and it is a revelation. It’s gonna be in regular dinner party rotation for at least a year. It’s like if Madonna and Sade recorded a city pop record in Paris. MITGR recommends.
017.03 (20:05) Early George Clinton cut with The Parliaments, before everyone lost their mind in the best possible way and emerged as Funkadelic. This is more of a straight funk/soul number. Pretty great.
017.04 (43:30) As promised, here is the link for the WaJazz series. Both volumes are sick and we recommend picking them up immediately.
