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All-you-can-eat brain mulch. The creative process stripped open and the wires fiddled with. Free chunks of media: animal, vegetable, musical, printed and tangible.
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Posts Tagged ‘Music’
John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Just months shy of 30 years ago, John Foxx released his groundbreaking album Metamatic. After a hiatus from the mid-1980’s until 1998 he disappeared from the music radar. These videos are from his recent album Tiny Colour Movies. For this album Foxx scored several almost forgotten home videos from the collection of Arnold Weizcs-Bryant of Baltimore. The effect is haunting.
Underwater Automobiles
As Foxx explains in the liner notes:
. . . Robert Rouncefield acquired an underwater super 8mm camera from his parents on his 17th birthday in 1972. He and his friends would often swim in the lakes near his home in Montana. One part of a lake was used to dump old automobiles. They would be disposed of by simply letting off the brakes and allowing them to roll quietly down a slight incline into the lake. Swimming there one summer, Rouncefield discovered what resembled an underwater car-park and decided to film it. He also took his girlfriend along and persuaded her to swim underwater. This juxtaposition produces a strange and beautiful film – the submerged cars, the classically beautiful young swimmer, the moving light from the sunlit surface. The rich colour of the super 8mm film and its grain lend the brief sequences a luscious, impressionistic appearance . . .
Smokescreen
As Foxx explains in the liner notes:
Several short sequences made by an unknown film student in the 1950’s and discovered in the film school vaults. All depict a man in a suit walking through a series of smoke laden rooms. This was the first film that Arnold obtained and the one that began his collection. “This particular film is very dear to me,” he says. “Because it precipitated my understanding of what film actually is. I was looking for stock footage in the school film library when I found an unlabelled canister. I was curious about pieces of unknown film even then, so took it to the viewing room. I saw these marvelouslly lit sequences which seemed to have a very definite story, yet there is no explanation or development or resolution. We can have no idea what the filmmaker had in mind. Because of this lack of resolution, they seem strangely suspended. You begin to make connections, you feel compelled to write a story. But there is none. There can be none. The effect is tantalising, like a damaged and incomplete fragment of memory.”
Tags: hauntology, john foxx, Motion Design, Music, music videos, video
Posted in Saturday Morning Video Club | No Comments »
The ‘Louie Louie’ song: “Unintelligible at Any Speed” (says FBI)
Thursday, February 25th, 2010
Regarded (by me) as the most annoying song in the world, the FBI spent over two years investigating this song. If there’s a worse case of needless government spending, I don’t know.
In 1965, a concerned parent believed the lyrics contained obscenity and somehow got then attorney general Robert Kennedy to launch an FBI investigation. Agents tried to decypher the lyrics, filling the 140 pages with their attempts at interpretation:
Fine little girl waits for me get your thrills
across the way girl I dream about is all alone
she never could get away from homeEvery night and every day I play with my thing I
fuck your girl all kinds of ways. In all
night now meet me there I feel her low I giver
her hellHey you bitch. Hey lovemaker now bald my
some it won’t take long so [illegible]
Hey Senorita I’m hot as hell I told I’d
never lay here again.
I’m sure someone could spend hours psychoanalyzing why that agent “heard” that.
Their only conclusion is its “unintelligible at any speed.”
You can purchase the FBI report online. Or see excerpts on The Smoking Gun.
Tags: annoying, fbi, government, Music
Posted in Asides | No Comments »
Sounds of ‘joujou’… Whatever That Is
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
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:
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Tags: digital wreckage, found sound, joujou, mp3, Music
Posted in Music | 2 Comments »
Boris Rose, King of the Bootleggers
Friday, January 29th, 2010
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
Tags: bootleg, boris rose, Bronx, fake foreign, history, jazz, LPs, Music, piracy, radio, red vinyl
Posted in Music, Uncategorized | No Comments »
[Walking/Writing]
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
Songs for productivity or observing, in winter.
Tags: instumental, Music, productivity, walking, winter
Posted in Music | No Comments »
[Noise Interlude]
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010
I spent the weekend trying to catch up on what’s new but really, it all kind of sounds like there’s nothing coming out that’s not on a continuum marked “Surf-Fuzz” on one end and “Neo-Harry Chapin” on the other. Putting canned orchestration behind one or the other doesn’t count. I guess it’s just back to thrash metal for me…
Tags: Bear in Heaven, Boards of Canada, British Sea Power, Bukowski, Califone, Clem Snide, Joy Division, Music, Of Montreal, Peter Bjorn and John, Scotty, streaming, The Robot Ate Me
Posted in Music, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Hit Instrumental Songs
Thursday, January 7th, 2010
Regularly, instrumental songs became a #1 hit from Billboard’s inception in 1950. That is, until 1985. It has been 25 years since an instrumental charted that high. The last time an instrumental made the top 20 was 1996. What does this say about our culture today?
Tags: culture, Entertainment, Music
Posted in culture | No Comments »
MK1 MIDI Controller at ITP NIME 2009
Friday, December 18th, 2009
MK 1 MIDI Guitar at ITP NIME 2009 from Aaron Cael on Vimeo.
Headed out to the NIME (New Interfaces for Musical Expression) show this past Tuesday to do a little fitful start of the actual journalism thing. Shot a lot of blurry video so there’s more to come.
Above’s a little number that got mentioned on the Make blog this week: the MK 1 MIDI controller. Ain’t that sweet looking? The blurb on the show flyer sez:
The MK 1 is a programmable MIDI controller in a familiar form factor. Comprised of 32 LED pushbuttons and six touch-sensitive copper plates, the MK 1 allows the user to control music synthesizers by means other than a traditional keyboard.
Finally an upgrade to enable the keytar player to actually get laid after the show. Excellent. We need those guys breeding.
More on this later as I slice things up and ask some questions. Musical sewing machines! A dodecahedron sequencer! Badly recorded audio! In the meantime, here’s a flickr gallery one of the performers shot
Tags: brooklyn, controller, DIY, fridgebuzzz, guitar, ITP, MIDI, Music, NIME, NYU, southpaw
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Gristleism. December.
Wednesday, October 7th, 2009
Oh man, old man Veer is gonna be livid when he sees I scooped him on this but this is too good not to share immediately: there’s a Throbbing Gristle version of the Buddha Machine on its way. It’s called Gristleism
Yes, that’s right. Gristly loops of audio-gnashing goodness will be emitted from handheld devices across the land come December when this new iteration of the Buddha Machine drops with more loops and a wider range of pitches than the original versions.
Now, I had plans to hook my iPod up to a homemade ring mod wired into a mic outside and pipe it all through some pliers-prepared dollar store speakers to get my dissonance fix but now there’s a handy consumer device to wipe the sinful bland audio of the world around me from my brainpan. About. Bloody. Time.
The website for the thing looks like they have a commitment to doing it right to boot. There’s scant info at the hacks section right now but the fact that they’re acknowledging and encouraging such behavior is an excellent step forward.
So the next two months the center of my cerebrum is gonna have the mental equivalent of feeling like I have to pee until the hour I can switch one of these on and bask in its loops. Whee! Can’t wait.
Track List:
01 – Persuasion
02 – Hamburger Lady
03 – Twenty Jazz Funk Greats
04 – Thank You Brian
05 – Maggot Death
06 – Rabbit Snare
07 – Lyre Liar
08 – Wimpy bar
09 – Sex String Theory
10 – Heathen Earth
11 – Industrial Intro
12 – R & D
13 – After After Cease To Exist
Disquiet’s got a loop up for your listening pleasure. Thanks to Warren Ellis for noting this fact.
As an aside, why don’t we see more of this? Yes, there’s bands with iPhone apps out there but if you’re trying to make a dime off the physical object association with music (which CDs have always been terrible for) mixed with the extended experience, what better than making a little esoteric device that lets your audience modify your sounds and play the best bits endlessly? I find this to be a brilliant cross between fetishism and utility, two things that can loosen the purse strings of even us jerks who’ve been trained to expect our entertainment free and unromanticized.
Tags: artifact, Buddha Machine, consumer behavior, device, fetish, loops, Music, technology, Throbbing Gristle
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »
Free Band Names
Tuesday, August 4th, 2009
Teenagers Are Idiots
The Sex
Nipples On Your Shirt
Exercise Science
Progesterone Frontiers
Bowling League
A Tradition of Cirrhosis
Legacy of Estrogen
HMS Ladyfriend
Church of Jesus Christ, Detective
Assumed Celibate
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YOU’RE WELCOME
Tags: band names, Mulch, Music
Posted in Junk File, Music, Raw Materials | No Comments »