music - others

earcon's "Minto (Tom Moody Remix)"

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funkiller front

funkiller back

earcon's Funkiller CD is now available at at CD Baby.

These are great solo, art brut electro tracks made with the Elektron Monomachine synth.

One of the tracks on the CD is my drum and bass remix of the song "Minto." Twas posted here previously but this is earcon's new-and-improved remix of my mix:

"Minto (Tom Moody Remix)" [2.9 MB .mp3]

Also check out a re-release of an earlier earcon disc The Noise of Experiments (under his jenghizkhan alias). More doomy and ambient, with late night TV field recordings layered with crackling static and digital drones.

Adrien75 - New Songs

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Some new tunes up by a favorite musician, Adrien75. Two albums, am still mainly listening to End of an Error, from 2005. I recommend loading the mp3s and letting them loop as a group; the hooks and subtleties reveal themselves gradually and the vibe is very pleasant and innovative. "School for Mew" has a sublime middle section of looping guitar that becomes a kind of dreamy techno-bluegrass; I thought of The Grid for some reason, a mix of "Swamp Thing" (without the kitsch factor) and the spaciness of "Crystal Clear," but with added, unexpected key modulations. Another grabber is "Starlight Gleaming," with jazzy piano stabs intertwining with p-funk bass and smeared vocal (and orchestral) science. In all the songs the sound palette is constantly being critically tweaked in a lab funk kind of way; an interesting "urban beats" twist on what otherwise might be described as a lush electro-acoustic pastorale.

Marcin Ramocki's Torcito Project (Belated Thoughts)

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torcito project

Just came across a passage in Daniel Albright's book Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and the Other Arts that rang a bell: "...John Cage, a painter-in-sound...could refigure a Japanese garden as a trombone piece--or take the outline of Marcel Duchamp's profile, turn it ninety degrees, and instruct a performer to interpret the profile as a continuously varying musical line." (see Solos for Voice nos. 65 and 70)

The bell was Marcin Ramocki's Torcito Project, which digitally updates the Cage piece. Here's how Neural.it described it:

This work is composed of seven portraits made...in the summer of 2005 using Virtual Drummer, an "old" Macintosh software. A 48x64 grid is the canvas used by Ramocki. In this grid the bitmap image of a human face becomes the score of an endless sound loop. Each horizontal line corresponds to an instrument (for a total of 48 instruments) which is activated each time the cathode ray beam hits one of the portrait's pixels. Ramocki's work brings to mind Jacquard's punched cards, but also the pianola and the automatic piano.

To clarify somewhat, imagine a vertical line sweeping the face above. Each time it encounters a darkened pixel, a note from the "general MIDI" list (shown below the portrait) is played. The sweep begins quietly and is cacophonous by the time the cursor reaches the middle of the face. The general MIDI spec is heavy on percussion, so that's a lot of timbales, cowbells, etc., firing at once. The Albright book credits George Antheil, composer of Ballet Mecanique, as a forerunner of Cage in abstracting musical notes from their normal background and function. Ramocki injects the element of kitsch through the use of outmoded software and the somewhat rigid and dated MIDI assignments of notes to sounds. He has found a way to "play" an entire face, as opposed to just a profile.

No Kiddie Techno, Please

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Darwin Chamber (Mark G.) on KDGE-FM, Dallas, ca. '93: [7.6 MB .mp3]

On the tape:

During an on-air interview on the dance mix show Edge Club 94, breakbeat pioneer Mark G., visiting from San Francisco, plays a song with a burbling TB303 synth and a high-pitched Elmer Fudd-like voice saying "OK, here I go! 1, 2, 3, 6.... 12.... uh.... nuh...."

Jeff K, host of the show, interrupts the song and tells Mark G. to "Change it right now. This is that damn kiddie techno you said you weren't gonna be doing any more."

Mark G. takes it off and plays an amusingly frantic 303 workout with hyperactive drum loops (this was during the 'ardkore era).

The track ends, followed by several seconds of dead air, then some rather horrible digitized fed-back guitar chops.

Despite Mark G.'s defense that the music is "ambient," Jeff K once again tells him to take it off, saying "This is giving me a bad trip. I want a good trip, Mark."

This exchange haunted me and in 1997 I emailed Jeff K to ask him what the heck "kiddie techno" was. He replied, "kiddie-techno is the opposite of intelligent techno, y'know those songs that just put a beat behind some nursery rhyme or the theme from Sesame Street, etc."

Regardless, I kind of wanted to hear the rest of it.