TITLEOFMAGAZINE

An elegantly simple fan video to one of the greatest, simplest songs.

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I’ve been looking for this track for about six years now and I just found it on an old data CD I just dug up out of an eternally unpacked cardboard box.  It stuck in my head for a few reasons:

1. About damn time there was a good honest anthem about preferring ‘em promiscuous, nicely under two minutes.  Know thyself, said that famous Greek.
2. The heart of this band was Johnny Heff, a NYC firefighter who died when the Twin Towers collapsed.

The spring of 2001 was my first headlong dive into punk rock appreciation, coming to it from the nerdier side of things (being a long-time Sonic Youth fan, going through that awkward ska face in high school and then, finally, wolfing down Greil Marcus’ Lipstick Traces in about three days).  This being the heady early days of file sharing, I took what came along over the token-ring network (yes, token ring).  The one lone random track from the Bullys that made it’s way to me was this one.

Scroll forward a few months  to October 2001 and for whatever reason I decide to look up this band who so eloquently warns off the decent women from their animal lusts.  I was listening to his voice when I found out Heff had died in the rubble.  Real strange to encounter that, a sort of missing feeling, knowing that someone you appreciate is someone you’ll absolutely never meet.

Apparently his band mates are still soldiering on.  Going to have to see if I can track down a show this summer.  I  you dig what you hear above, they’ve got three albums out, available here.

Tristan Perich is releasing a live performance that creates itself within the confines of a CD jewel case.

Though housed in a CD jewel case like his first circuit album (1-Bit Music 2004-05), 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally “performs” its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit—programmed by the artist and assembled by hand—plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself.

Reminds me of of the Loud Objects Noise Toy, albeit in somewhat more elegant packaging¹.  It’s available on pre-order for $29.  Would love a kit or an Instructable to make my own.

Saw this over at notcot.

¹Edit: That’d likely be because Tristan Perich is a member of Loud Objects.  How foolish am I?

Just had my theremin lust reignited by this 3 minute history/build video from G4′s Attack of the Show, via Create Digital Music.  Oh man.  I’ve been planning to build one of these since a random reference on the Slanky-L* to a theremin sample sent me off in search of just what this weird musical instrument could do.

Turns out the history is just as fascinating as the ghost sound machine’s electronic guts.  Here’s an excerpt from the first interview with the Theremin’s inventor, Leon Theremin, after he first emerged from the U.S.S.R. after 51 years of state arrest:

Mattis: When did you first conceive of your instrument?

Theremin: The idea first came to me right after our Revolution, at the beginning of the Bolshevik state. I wanted to invent some kind of an instrument that would not operate mechanically, as does the piano, or the cello and the violin, whose bow movements can be compared to those of a saw. I conceived of an instrument that would created sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry [of the orchestra].

Mattis: Why did you make this instrument?

Theremin: I became interested in effectuating progress in music, so that there would be more [musical] resources. I was not satisfied with the mechanical instruments in existence, of which there were many. They were all built using elementary principles and were not physically well done. I was interested in making a different kind of instrument. And I wanted, of course, to make an apparatus that would be controlled in space, exploiting electrical fields, and that would use little energy. Therefore I transformed electronic [equipment] into a musical instrument that would provide greater resources.

Mattis: What did Lenin think of it, and why did you show it to him?

Theremin: In the Soviet Union at that time everyone was interested in new things, in particular all the new uses of electricity: for agriculture, for mechanical uses, for transport, for communication. And so then, at that time, when everyone was interested in these fields, I decided to create a musical use for electricity. I made a few first apparatuses that were made [based on principles of] the human interference of radio waves in space, at first used in [electronic] security systems, then applied to musical purposes. I made it, and I showed it at that time to the leaders. There was a big electronics conference in Moscow, and I showed my instruments there. It made a big splash. It was written up in the literature and the newspapers, of which we had many at that time, and many doors were opened [for me then] in the Soviet Union. And so Vladimir Il’yich Lenin, the leader of our state, learned that I had shown an interested thing at this conference, and he wanted to get acquainted with it himself. So they asked me to come with my apparatus, with my musical instrument, to his office, to show him. And I did so.

Mattis: What did Lenin think of it?

Theremin: I brought my apparatus and set it up in his large office in the Kremlin. He was not yet there because he was in a meeting. I waited with Fotiva, his secretary, who was a good pianist, a graduate of the conservatory. She said that a little piano would be brought into the office, and that she would accompany me on the music that I would play. So we prepared, and about an hour and a half later Vladimir Il’yich Lenin came with those people with whom he had been in conference in the Kremlin. He was very gracious; I was very pleased to meet him, and then I showed him the signaling system of my instrument, which I played by moving my hands in the air, and which was called at that time the thereminvox. I played a piece [of music]. After I played the piece they applauded, including Vladimir Il’yich [Lenin], who had been watching very attentively during my playing. I played Glinka’s “Skylark”, which he loved very much, and Vladimir Il’yich said, after all this applause, that I should show him, and he would try himself to play it. He stood up, moved to the instrument, stretched his hands out, left and right: right to the pitch and left to the volume. I took his hands from behind and helped him. He started to play “Skylark”. He had a very good ear, and he felt where to move his hands to get the sound: to lower them or to raise them. In the middle of this piece I thought that he could himself, independently, move his hands. So I took my hands off of his, and he completed the whole thing independently, by himself, with great success and with great applause following. He was very happy that he could play on this instrument all by himself.

Read the whole interview here.

A more thorough history can be had in the 1995 documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey.  Oddly, I can’t find any video clips of it online, but if you’re dying to see it, I’ll gladly mail you my VHS copy.  Just leave a comment and I’ll email you for mailing details.

* remember listservs?  remember Soul Coughing?  that’s ok.

Listen dicks, the new crack is making fake drugs to promote your band. I know it, you know it, these guys have managed a force multiplier on their fairly middle of the road alt. rock by hitting on a concept we all wish we’d thought of before: a how-to video for making drugs from easily obtainable ingredients.  Drugs that don’t really exist, that is.

Yeah, hate to be captain bring-down here, Beavis McTweakerson but Egyptian meth and Hillbilly Quaaludes only exist in the realm of fiction.  Still, how genius is it to piggyback on the how-to format, mixing up your band’s image with an engaging supermarket to kitchen alchemist walkthrough? The way they dump the vinegar gives me a little flashback to the soap making montage in Fight Club.  Which is never a bad thing.

Yeah, I know, shoulda saved this for Saturday Morning Movie Club but this is too hot to wait 6 hours.  Why isn’t this a damn genre?  Fake drugs instructional videos are the new British people trying to talk with American accents.  Do it.

(found this over at Dose Nation)

If the endless culture mining of the Internet were an RPG, discovering the music and performances of Die Tödliche Doris would surely be a leveling up milestone.  80s German post-unk that constantly subverts expectations, taking the term “experimental” at it’s word and seeking to create something truly new and ugly-beautiful.

And just to show that they’re still relevant and know the way the game is played, they’ll send you all their music if you ask them nicely.  How cool is that?

The Die Tödliche Doris website politely indicates that it would cost them a number of scarce ducats to actually make things available for free due to some sort of quirk of German law, directing you to instead email them for their complete discography.  I did so Friday night and the very next morning, the above email arrived from a Mr. Wolfgang Müller.

The email explains where the tracks are on the server and, not one to be precious about such a thing, he provides a link to a handier method of downloading the tracks.  That’d be this fan page here.

How refreshing to be greeted by such unabashed love for fans and above and beyond service.  Go forth, download, and enjoy, friends.

Cheers to Dangerous Minds for turning me on to Die Tödliche Doris in the first place.

And here’s the track that got me hooked:

So. In the course of getting hopelessly lost on wikipedia’s Esotericism category, I got thinking about what superstitious beliefs I hold or held when I was younger. Specifically, what suburban folk wisdom got chucked around before the advent of the internet and we all became part of the same hive mind of captioned photos and bad advice. That is, what was my natural religious practice before I started worshipping the Intertubes?

Like you, I spent a lot of time blowing into Nintendo cartridges when the damn things stopped working. We weren’t sure exactly why (invisible dust?) but somehow if you blew on the cart right or you blew in the slot right, you fixed the game and got to play. There’s an obvious sexual metaphor here but that’s not where my mind wandered to. Instead I started thinking about how cool it would be if all that blowing actually did something.

Hence, why not tear the guts out of an old NES cart and make it into some sort of screwed up digital pan flute? Conceptually, it seems like it’d work. 3-5 mics or piezos installed in the bottom of the cart, each one routed to a threshold gate that only sends a signal on if it is strong enough (ie: mic directly blown on). This signal would go on to trigger a sample or send a MIDI signal determined by which button is pushed.

Breath -> Mic -> Gate +Button Input -> Signal to Tone Generator/Sample Player -> Amp

To keep it simple, maybe the notes would not be a simple progression (A, B, C, etc) but would be notes in a desired scale or chords, thereby reducing the pan-flutish tendencies of such an instrument. What the world truly does not need is an electrified pan flute. Eff that.

A more ambitious build would split off the original mic input, amp it and mix it back in to the resulting audio to give it presence/distortion. But I have no clear idea how to do this simply, let alone ambitiously.

What’s up top is the 5 minute Photoshop mockup. I sketched it out on a post-it and on half an index card in a pub after work but I’m too lazy to scan it in right now.

Any idea what a threshold gate would correspond to in actual electronic parts? I figure it’d be some kind of capacitor that would only send on a current if it reached a certain value. If you’re reading this and you’re smarter than me, feel free to build it and hog all the sweaty geek admiration for yourself.  Just tell me how you did it.

Edit: Now I’m thinking Arduino in the middle to send MIDI from data gathered by a breath sensor (piezo).  Stay tuned.

Like many other globally mobile, digitally acquisitive hungry ghosts, I gather up a lot of crap, video, audio and text. It’s never enough because hard drives keep getting bigger and there just might be a diamond somewhere in that vast slushpile of mp3s.  And who knows, maybe some day you’ll find exactly the right situation in which to play that En Vogue album.

One of those diamonds came back around on the ol’ iTunes shuffle and much to my chagrin, I can’t seem to remember the origin of it.  Internet, help a brother out?

The only info on these tracks is the alleged band name: joujou.  What it sounds like is… well, at first some sort of ethnographic field recordings.  A few tracks later, things segue into droning sitar and psychedelic guitar.  Any ideas?  Listen and download below:

Track 2 - Track 3 – Track 4 – Track 5

Sucker for buried treasure that I am, the story of Boris Rose, jazz bootlegger supreme caught my attention as I perused Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays [preview]

Around 1940, Boris began dubbing 78RPM records to 10-inch red vinyl disks with hand-written white labels.  He would sell these dubs of Jelly Roll Morton, King Oliver, Louis Armstrong, and other great early jazz musicians to anyone interested in buying them….

Over the years Boris captured thousands of hours of recordings that likely did not exist anywhere else — his was easily the largest private collection of its kind anywhere in the world.  Eventually Boris began recording every sort of broadcast imaginable — he even recorded the soundtracks of entire movies as they were broadcast over television.

What Rose became known for is the bootleg LPs of these recordings from old 78s and live jazz radio broadcasts.  He sold these records commercially, complete with liner notes and illustrated covers, under the names of invented “foreign” record labels like Alto and Radiex.  Despite being fairly prolific for a unauthorized distributor, the vast majority of his recordings have never been released.

Boris Rose died on the last day of the 20th century, leaving his collection to his daughter Elaine.  The recordings remain in storage, largely unheard by anyone other than Rose himself an presently unavailable anywhere else.  That’s thousands of hours of unheard sounds sitting in a storage shed in the Bronx, an archive that’s hard to fathom.

r a n d o m g o o g l i n g p r o d u c e d l i t t l e m o r e i n f o on Mr. Rose.

illustration by Brendan Burford

Songs for productivity or observing, in winter.