music - others

lazy YT-jaying

Comments Off on lazy YT-jaying

Am organizing my "record collection" (with many nerdy visits to Discogs to see which pricy versions I was fortunate to have picked up back in the day for $4.99). As I do this I find songs to "share" -- much as I hate contributing to the YT monoculture (yawn let's get on with it)

Tuxedomoon "Grand Hotel" [YouTube] Blaine is kind of sawing away here but I love the vocoderized Garbo loop and how it comes back in at the end

Tuxedomoon "Conquest" [YouTube] "What do I care for your orders? You can't frighten me." more vocoderized Garbo - nice

Tuxedomoon "Queen Christina" [YouTube] "...Oh, this great joy I feel now. This is how the Lord must have felt when he first beheld a finished world, with all his creatures breathing and living..." (Not vocoderized. Need to watch these Garbo films)

Tonto's Expanding Head Band "Jetsex" [YouTube] Just realized how much this anticipated the trippy "road" section of Kraftwerk's "Autobahn" (long version)

Atomic Robo Kid "Googlex" [YouTube] Some crazy techno sh*t

David Van Tieghem "All Safe" [YouTube] Heavy on the Fairlight; this was right on the cusp, pre-808 State and "Techno! The New Dance Sound Of Detroit," where '80s beats went from crunchy/static to fluid/sexy

Harley & Muscle "Friends and Enemies" [YouTube] Deep house, and the confusion between friends and enemies.

MIDI Users' Group performance

Comments Off on MIDI Users' Group performance

MIDI Users' Group performs at an electronic music event, Oscillate:Pittsburgh 2017 [YouTube]

Travis Hallenbeck tweeted: "my set in Pittsburgh was described by the organizer as like being stuck in an office"

On the other hand, it was kind of refreshing not seeing an Apple laptop or a rack of modular gear. These not-quite-ancient MIDI devices have their own unique sound and seem to have their own mind. Hallenbeck treats them like a flock of erratic sheep, letting them go where they will and savoring their little bleeps and hums as events in themselves. The caretaker approach to (dis)organized sound.

Christopher Knowles: "Popular Songs A" (cassette tape)

Comments Off on Christopher Knowles: "Popular Songs A" (cassette tape)

The website Lateral Addition, edited by Eric Laska, specializes in sound art works. An entry that stuck in my head is "Popular Songs A," a cassette tape by NY artist Christopher Knowles. As writer Lauren DiGiulio explains it,

...in “Popular Songs A,” Knowles introduces a series of short excerpts from Billboard’s Top 20 songs of fourteen different years from 1957 to 1971. The songs are recorded from the Top 20 countdown series on WCBS-FM, an oldies radio station in New York City that offered a programmed countdown of classic hits in the early 1980s. He made this work on fourteen different days throughout the winter and spring of 1984, and each of the recordings is comprised of songs that were popular on the same day of the referenced year. This temporal layering, in which we hear Knowles in 1984 introducing songs from the previous decades, creates a folding effect that draws sonic connections across moments in mid-twentieth century popular music. Here, Knowles takes us on a tour of this formative period in music history, showing us the differences between the smooth soul lyricism of the late ‘50s, the funk-rock beats of the ‘60s, and the psychedelic poetry of the early ‘70s as we hear cropped excerpts of “Pretty Girls Everywhere” by Eugene Church & the Fellows from 1958, “Dance to the Music” by Sly & the Family Stone from 1968, and “Toast and Marmalade for Tea” by Tin Tin from 1971. As listeners, we are invited to tune in to the soundtrack of Knowles’s everyday world, and to shift effortlessly with him across these carefully measured distances.

The song snippets are no more than a few seconds each and punctuated by generous amounts of crackling tape noise. What stays with you, however, are Knowles' amateurish yet incantatory introductions to each group of songs. He is speaking into his cassette recorder in 1984 as if he had an actual audience, which he does, now, 32 years later. Here's an example of one of his spiels, that I transcribed, delivered in an accent that my Southern-born ears can't place to any particular NY borough:

Well now, ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for listening to the popular songs of 1965, 19 years ago today. So, Wednesday, March thirty-first, 1965, 19 years ago today. So thank you very much for listening to the popular songs of 1965, 19 years ago today. So Wednesday March thirty-first, 1965, 19 years ago today, so thank you very much for enjoining it [sic]. [Tape noise] So, that was 1965. [Tape pause] Well, now, ladies and gentlemen, now you listen to the popular songs of 1962, 22 years ago today. So, Sunday, April first, 1962, 22 years ago today. So now listen to the popular songs of 1962, 22 years ago today. So, Sunday, April first, 1962, 22 years ago today. So now, you listen up!

These Beckett-like intros, and the time folding effect of listening in 2016 to a crunchy tape made in 1984 of aggressively-spliced musical madeleines from 1957-1971, put the "art" into this sound experiment.

autograph

Comments Off on autograph

vanvliet

Something I bet you don't have -- a Captain Beefheart signature.
A bunch of us youths mobbed him after a concert; he was signing "Love Over Gold" on whatever scraps of paper we had handy.
This authentic Don Van Vliet signature is on the back of a receipt for a car battery from a store called Memco.
Priceless.

Destiny Clock demo at Eyebeam

Comments Off on Destiny Clock demo at Eyebeam

destiny_clock_brendan_byrne660

Last night at Eyebeam, resident Brendan Byrne gave a talk on his project Destiny Clock (formerly, Theseus), a music interface/installation/environment that sends MIDI notes to Ableton and triggers sounds. Essentially this is a modular, patchable computer, with components (sequencer, multiplexer, clock divider, logic gates) that the user connects in various ways by means of patch cables of ordinary thin wire. The design is extremely elegant but the output is bottlenecked by being limited to a stream of on-off notes. Patching changes the sequence, speed and volume, but the device is not sending MIDI CC commands to affect timbre, envelopes, effects, or other typical aspects of electronic music. Also, because the computer components are unlabeled, you aren't really learning much about computation.

Byrne might be cut slack for these limitations except that, in his slide talk, he posed the interface as a challenge, or alternative, to Eurorack-style modular synthesis. He showed examples of "Eurocrack" addicts whose homes have been taken over by their gear purchases, by way of contrast to his modest circuitboard (about 8 x 12 inches). This was kind of unfair -- there might be some middle ground between those lost souls and what he's doing.