MOG - spaceling's Posts

An introduction and archive for Piyutim (sacred Jewish musical poetry and song)

spaceling — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 08:08:38 GMT

An introduction to Piyutim (piyut.org.il)

A piyut (piyutim, pl. hebrew) is a sacred musical poem, sung as part of a communal prayer service but just as often after a good meal with friends and family. I was raised with these songs and tunes, learning a new one occasionally while eating as a guest at someone's house, or at a weekend gathering, or in Israel at Yeshiva. I always hoped there was some archive because I was hearing quite a few of the common melodies and worried that there were likely thousands more that were fading into obscurity or limited by geography. (Ever wonder what shabbat tunes are kept in the piyutim of Kurdish Jews?) Then I stumbled on this site, piyut.org, which is just such an archive. I am so thankful. They even have something like a comprehensive collection of musical scales... I'm not certain what is meant by "musical scales" on this page, but I chose one at random and I found some musical expression that was completely new to me. I suspect that the music found on this site would also be appreciated by audionauts of sufi sacred music such as the Qawallis of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. But this archive is so diverse, I am still plumbing its depths of ancient sounds and their contemporary echoes.

I don't know when this website was founded but from their about page it seems quite active with a passionate group of musicians, academics, and other scholars working on something they know is unique and essential to preserve and promote. This statement on that page summed it up nicely:

The vast majority of the poetic and musical creativity of the Jews emerged in various Diaspora communities during the past two millennia. Since the founding of the State of Israel and the immigration of the majority of these ancient Diaspora communities to Israel, large sections of the great tradition of piyut have been lost or forgotten. Finding access to the remnants that remain is not easy. The brief history of the modern period created, in many cases, a gap between the tradition of the past and the modern society and culture that developed in Israel. Tradition generally, and the legacy of piyut in particular, has stayed alive and meaningful only among a small portion of the Israeli population. As time has passed, the need for people to connect with these roots has grown greatly. It is a need to access the voices calling from the depths of time, absorbed in emotion and wisdom of the many generations that sang these piyutim. We will widen and deepen our language and understand ourselves and our nation better as part of understanding our ancestors and their traditions better.

Shuffle Album : Album Shuffle advice for 1.0.3 ipod firmware updaters

spaceling — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:41:56 GMT

This is an informational post for ipod classic owners out there. The recent firmware update 1.0.3 changed the functionality of the shuffle songs feature. Until you follow the following steps, the menu setting for "Shuffle" will have no effect.

To change the ipod from shuffling songs to shuffling albums follow these steps:

1) Go ahead and shuffle your songs 2) Press the center button three times 3) select the shuffle setting you want ("songs", "albums", or "off")

Once you have done this you will once again be able to change the shuffle setting via the ipod classic Settings.

For regular readers of this blog curious whatever happened to my 100gb Archos Jukebox/Rockbox player (blogged of here) a short note. The Archos is ok but (since soon after the periodic completion of this spaceling's ambient solar orbit) the Archos took to rocking it with the Junkions on Planet Junk (at the bottom of my junk pile).

But looking back all nostalgia like for my tech-Gomi, the Archos Jukebox was an energy whore, that required me to lug around an AC adapter to service it's unquenchable thirst for electrons. And it couldn't shuffle albums.

"Shuffle Albums" was the killer feature I pined for in an mp3 player so when I discovered the ipods were capable of that (and the newer archos' and cowons still could not) I shelled out for my little slice of Apple. (iTunes free thanks to Ubuntu Linux + Floola, I should add).

Why is shuffle albums so important? For the same reason that "Album List 2" is an essential plugin for winamp -- it provides for the ability to listen to a random album (just like those old giant 100 CD jukeboxes could). Industry folks talk about how the revolution of the mp3 was that it liberated tracks from the medium of "Albums." Tracks could be listened to individually, mixed and shuffled at random, and most importantly, sold individually. But the medium of albums is still important for much of the music I listen to, whether it be Beethoven's 9th Symphony or Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians: I want to listen to my tracks sequentially in the order suggested by the composer artist's imagination. Or said differently: context matters, provenance matters, and please don't use tech to manipulate art as a commodity.

The Archos is still accessible and usable and I'll find a place for it in some future project. But aside from random firmware scares (see above shuffle surprise), I'm pretty damn pleased with this little apple unit. Wish Apple'd be more open with their firmware though and less jerky about opening up their tech to 3rd party itunes alternative ipod managers.

A quick short, sharp shock

spaceling — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 00:15:40 GMT

Pink Floyd fans may know of this series of discs that make available a plethora of rare recordings: radio adverts, interviews, mono edits, alternate versions, etcetera. On disc three, track 20, a very special track, and one which gave me the shivers. You'll understand when you listen to it.

From wikipedia:

Snippets of dialogue between and over the top of the songs are also featured on the recording [of Dark Side of the Moon]. Roger Waters devised a method of interviewing people, whereby questions were printed on flashcards in sequential order and the subject's responses were recorded uninterrupted. The questions related to central themes of the album such as madness, violence, and death. Participants were commandeered from around Abbey Road, placed in the darkened studio in front of a microphone, and told to answer the questions in the order which they were presented. This provoked some surprising responses to subsequent questions. For example, the question "When was the last time you were violent?" was immediately followed by "Were you in the right?" (Henderson, Peter; Surcliffe, Phil; and Bungey, John (1998). The First Men on the Moon Part 2 (html). REG. MOJO Magazine. Retrieved on 2006-12-23.)
Recordings of road manager Roger "The Hat" Manifold were the only ones obtained through a conventional sit-down interview because the band members could not find him at the time and his responses (including "give 'em a quick, short, sharp shock..." and "live for today, gone tomorrow, that's me...") had to be taped later when the flashcards had been lost.

From the liner notes of A Tree Full of Secrets (disc 3):

Roger the Hat interview (07:30) Recorded : 1972 Primary source : Capital Radio broadcast ("Pink Floyd Story"), December 1976 - January 1977 Source for the tree : unknown gen from Capital Radio broadcast
All through "The Dark Side of the Moon" album, you can hear the voices of people interviewed by the band. Here, Roger the Hat (who was a roadie for various rock bands) is interviewed by Roger Waters. On the album, you can hear his voice during "On the Run" ("Live for today, gone tomorrow, that's me, hahaha…") and during "Us And Them" ("Short, sharp shock …").

(UPDATE: Very difficult to find more information on Roger Manifold on the web. The above picture came from this webpage about another band he was a roadie with, The Third World War. Apparently, the Hat monicker derived from Mr. Monicker's recognizable top hat, sported in his daily roadie ministrations. Wish I could find a picture of it. I love top hats, too.)

Philip K. Dick on Kurt Vonnegut

spaceling — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 18:20:06 GMT

Far be it for me to add another to the blossoming forest of eulogies for Kurt Vonnegut, a man who I loved -- I'm just thankful I've been alive at a time when I could read his writings (Mark Twain, never got the chance). I do have something to share though: some audio of Philip K. Dick expressing his insight into Kurt Vonnegut, an author which arguably, I think, he shared much in common with. Both Vonnegut and Dick used speculative fiction to explore a relationship between author and character and the hopes and tragedies of individuals within narrated realities outside their control (see Breakfast of Champions and Man in the High Castle). Vonnegut's Player Piano was also one of Philip K. Dick's favorite books.

Interviewer: Did you read Breakfast of Champions?
PKD: Yes.
Interviewer: What did you think of Vonnegut's attitude towards his characters?
PKD: Disgusting and an abomination. I think that that book is an incredible drying up of the liquid -sack- sap of life in the veins of a person like a dead tree...that's what I think. I also love Kurt Vonnegut.

You can listen to it below in the mog player, or download the mp3, here. The audio comes from a cassette rip of an interview with Philip K. Dick, circa 1981, by persons unknown for a PKD newsletter. The cassettes came from a collection of tapes loaned by a friend to David Roel, who in turn made them available on the Internet a few years ago. You can hear more of these recordings here.

Click here, for a post on Vonnegut's Calypsos of Bokonon.

Belated International Women's Day Blogging

spaceling — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 07:30:59 GMT

Yes, International Women's Day was a week and two days ago, but I promised Lola the Car Chick I would blog for the gentle women and men for whom the gospel of feminism has not yet reached. This past March 8th I was traveling all day and being computer-less, left my MOG sullen and blogless for the day. Now I'm back in Baton Rouge after a particularly amazing retreat to the wilderness in upstate New York, and ready to write something. This comes from Zach, a smashing gender queer friend I made on said retreat. Somehow, as happens on road trips, the subject of Ms. Pac-Man arose -- in this case because BZ (another friend) was describing how he had purchased one of those 64-in-1 game controllers with built in NES emulator chip. Apparently, this included Pac Man but, alas, not Ms. Pac Man. The difference? Well, besides the level changes and the appearance of floating jumping, musical fruit, the orange ghost from Pac Man, also known as Clyde, in Ms. Pac Man, has been "replaced" by an identical orange ghost named Sue. This was news to me, but Zach was adamant, authoritative, and of course, correct. Zach calls Sue a feminist pioneer. I think Clyde/Sue is gender queer, possibly transgendered but not transexual like Walter cum Wendy Carlos. It's obvious to me that what with my earlier posts on arcade and video game music, I have the subject of a blog post once I arrive back in civilization. I've always been a fan of Clyde/Sue, being orange, my favorite color.

This brings me to the musical subject of this essay: Conemelt -- or more specifically, the music of Ashley Marlowe. As with my previous post on Squarepusher's remix of "psultan" and "bedroom glow" by Kiyoshi Izumi's , "Under The Hood" by Conemelt has that break in rhythm and shift to new melody where everything becomes even more intense and delicious sounding. The track appeared on a 12", Rocker's Ruin E.P. (1997) I discovered at the 611 record store after much much browsing. And similar to "psultan" I needed to find my own pitch for the track to sound right. On the version you'll hear on the MOG player, it's been shifted down from 45 to about 42. (vinyl rip by yours truly.)

Ashley is an amazing drummer and listen for yourself below:

Pitch Control

spaceling — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 22:57:18 GMT

Kate is listening to Leo Kottke in her basement. She writes,

There is something so comforting about vinyl. I went to Goodwill a few days ago and found a live Leo Kottke record. Took it home and lavished loving care upon it. Cleaned it, set it reverently on my Technics, opened a beer and sat outside listening to the 12-string sounds float from the speakers.

This is not a post romanticizing vinyl -- there's already plenty of that. The trope of nostalgia is the conjuring of a half-forgotten past, a lost landscape, a castaway of obsolence, things of ponderous beauty set aside in the name of "progress." No, this post is not about romanticizing vinyl. It is about pitch control.

I wrote:

Is there a breeze in your apartment? That was my romance with the needle. Swinging back and forth, surfing up and down on the groove, despite the breeze. I could take a sit and enjoy both, but feeling the vulnerability of the medium to its environment made me feel some kinship.

But I forgot to add that the flip side to the vulnerability was the control the medium allowed, I mean, allows. You can put your hands on it and change it. I don't mean making perfectly horrible scratches on the record and I don't mean cutting up the record and splicing it back together like Christian Marclay might -- that's too obvious. I mean the casual control of the medium that I never had with my cd player. (Hell, that I never had with winamp!) With some records, they're just begging to change up, and not just slow from 45rpm to 33rpm or speed the Beatles up from 33 to Chipmunks territory at 78rpm. No... just a slight twist from say 33 to 39 or maybe 41rpm. You hear it on 33 and it just sounds wrong but its too fast on 45. But what can you do?

Well, that was what was so lovely about those turntables, the one's with the pitch shifting knobs or levels. There was no danger, no danger of scratching the precious record for the casual listener to make some important if subtle change to the music -- to really possess and take ownership of the music, like a dybbuk might hijack an aimless host. But that was what you could do, even what you could take for granted, with vinyl turntables with pitch controls.

Take a listen to the track "Psultan" by Tom Jenkinson. It's his Squarepusher remix of a heavier beat-laden track, "Psultan Part I," that he put out in 1998 under his Chaos A.D. alias. Like the previous track I posted about by Kiyoshi Izumi, it has a break in the middle where it shifts course and becomes an even more potent instrumental. (That was the original focus of this post). But the piece below, you won't be able to hear a version like it anywhere else. Ripped from vinyl it was, but at the speed that made sense to my ears somewhere between 38 and 39rpm. The official, "native" speed sounds just too fast for me... (if you like what you hear, go and find a copy of the original version for comparison -- mog only allows me one piece per post).

There are three other tracks on the Remixes 12" this appeared on, but the psultan remix sounds nothing like the others, and I think it's indicative of Jenkinson's best work. Can you hear the similarity between this piece and the one by Izumi?

Kiyoshi Izumi

spaceling — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 14:45:59 GMT

In 1997, Rephlex released an EP by Kiyoshi Izumi featuring the track below, "Bedroom Glow." A few years later he followed up with a full length album on Nobukazu Takemura's Childisc label pleasantly titled, Orange Sunshine, the tracks of which, while appealing enough, sound nothing like "Bedroom Glow." (Orange Sunshine is a nice little idm/ambient album). His most recent album, Protocol A was released in 2004 by Peace Records... and nothing has been heard from since.

There are these electo pieces which have something like a twist in it, that carries it forward creating an even more potent climax and sense of urgency. "Bedroom Glow" has it, as well as a piece by Conemelt and Squarepusher that I'll write about in future posts. I'm not sure what to call it -- kind of like the instrumental equivalent of a break but considering these pieces have plenty of breakbeat already that might be a misleading description. Like a break, the driving rhythm and melody is shunted, and a new melody picks up a little later. Eventually, the original rhythm and melody picks back up. The result I think is a much more sophisticated piece than one might be expecting. This piece mixes many familiar electro sounds along with a club whistle and what I think may be a Farfisa organ. I ripped it from vinyl, so I hope you also like the crackle and pops. Enjoy!

Izumi, like Doctor Y.S. is another musician I wish I knew more about, but alas, I can't even find Japanese websites about him that can be garbled in translation. Thus the MOG player and its audio content will have to stand surrogate for all the juicy bits I'd like to add here for you.

Hirokazu Tanaka's Metroid

spaceling — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 00:09:44 GMT

Currently the president of Pokémon card producing and game developing company, Creatures, Inc., Hirokazu "Hip" Tanaka in the 1980s was a sound engineer for the Japanese game developer, Famicom. There he produced the soundtrack for the NES game, Metroid (1986).

To say that Tanaka was just a sound engineer would completely understate the man's influence on video games and geek culture -- this is the hacker who designed the Game Boy camera and Game Boy printer, besides composing the music for Duck Hunt and Ballon Fight in assembly language. Here's some more background from wikipedia:

Nintendo began development of its Famicom home video game console in 1983 (known as the Nintendo Entertainment System in North America and Europe), and Tanaka worked on early titles including Duck Hunt and Kid Icarus. The new system had three tone generators and one pseudorandom noise generator, with which to produce melody, harmony, percussion, and sound effects (which would usually interrupt a note). Though a vast improvement over the simplistic sound of the arcade machines, the Nintendo hardware still left Tanaka and the other composers severely limited in the complexity of the music they could write. Even though sound tools had been written for the Famicom, Tanaka continued to write his music alongside his custom playback libraries written in assembly language, a fact he credits with helping to set his work apart from that of his colleagues. By 1986, Tanaka was writing over a third of the music for the Famicom's games.
This increase in sound technology, coupled with the composing talents of Tanaka and his coworkers such as Koji Kondo helped raise the popularity of game music in Japan. The increased attention spurred good-spirited rivalries between many game composers, a development that bothered Tanaka, since it forced composers to write in a way that he felt was contrary to the atmosphere of the games themselves.
It was this dislike that inspired him to compose the subdued themes of Metroid. In his words, he tried "to create the sound without any distinctions between music and sound effects." He composed the music so as to deny the player a simple melody to hum along with; only after completing the game is any "catchy" music played. [emphasis mine]

For a long while, if you wanted to hear Tanaka's score to Metroid, you had to play the game to its completion. However, by the late 1990s an underground of video game system emulation programmers were busy copying the data off of NES and other game cartridges for their precious ROM (games stored as Read Only Memory). And in a sub-basement of this underground, a small group concerned only with the soundtracks to the games was figuring out ways of directly copying the digital scores from NES games into NSF (Nintendo Sound Format) files. Plug-ins for listening to NSF files were written for winamp and until a few years ago the most popular plug-in was called Nosefart.

Even with these plugins, listening to NSF files as easily as other audio files remained difficult. Like midi files, NSF files were small files usually less than 50kb, and relied on synth chips in sound cards to reproduce the orchestration programmed into the file. A single NSF file would contain all the tracks for a game, but each track would usually lack an end-time signature. That meant that in order to listen to the next track in an NSF file you'd have to manually advance the track, otherwise it would play indefinitely. This made sense, because the soundtrack was engineered to be played in a game for a level which a user could take an indeterminate amount of time to pass through -- so the music would need to loop.

In 2004, a new plugin, NotSo Fatso, was released which offered the user the ability to set a fixed song length and set their own fade out length to the loop. This wasn't a complete solution but finally I could realize my dream of converting the entire soundtrack of Metroid to mp3 for the rest of the world to listen to. Unfortunately, the MOG player can only accept 15mb of file per post and my join of Metroid's constituent tracks into one mega-MOG-playable track came out at a too hefty 21mb. However, I've posted to the MOG player Metroid Parts I-V with the last track, Part XII (total length is about 9 min). I'm also hosting the entire album here for you to download if you like what you hear below (or would simply rather enjoy them in a ridiculously large audio format compared to the original NSF). My favorite piece is Part V which should start around the 4:40 mark.

Just one final point before I go. It really grieves me that there is this entire library of music which although now accessible in a sense, is still amazingly obscure despite important compositions such as Tanaka's Metroid. Search on the web and glance at any voluminous archive of NSF (and other game system sound files) and you'll gape at how many possibly brilliant works are almost completely unknown, often times without the composer's names even known. (spaceling raises his chalice in a toast). Here's to you aging monks of 8-bit, may your precious sounds sold over to corporate suits find their way to more anxious ears! (If you're interested a nice collection of links to NSF archives can be found at the bottom of this wikipedia article on NSF files.)

Arcade Video Game Music

spaceling — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 18:25:55 GMT

Video Game Music (1986), produced by Haruomi Hosono (Yellow Magic Orchestra, Swing Slow, et al) features music from the popular Namco arcade games from the early to mid 80s: Xevious, Pole Position, Galaga, Dig Dug, etc. The actual music having been written by other early musicians writing in pioneering 8-bit digital sound, Hosono's role as producer was in getting tracks meant for gameplay into a composed format that could be listened to without feeding a thousand Yen worth of quarters into Namco-Bandai's slot-jockeys. (Playing video games in order to reach levels with different musical scores was definitely a motivation for me to lose many quarters in the 80s). Hosono's hand can best be imagined on the mixing board for the first track "Xevious." Listen to the 6 minute album version in the MOG player below and I think you'll agree that it's an important pioneering track at the outset of many different forms of electronic music using digital sampling layered over found sound, producing ambient noise, melody, and rhythm. A careful ear can make out the sounds of other arcade game music in the background.

This was later re-released as a 12" single with liner notes and a short sci-fi story by Xevious game designer Masanobu Endoh. A 3.5 minute video of Hosono playing the club version can be had via youtube.

The rest of the album features shorter tracks with delightful kitschy hooks like the track "Little Rabble," an adaptation of many popular piano songbook classics into 8-bit. The other long-ish track is the 4 minute long "Galaga" which after listening to Hosono's other albums sounds just as whimsical. "Galaga" leaves the medium of 8-bit to include extra orchestration, and sounds very similar to the style Hosono expressed in his ambient-dream lounge albums of the early to mid-90s. The most experimental track is the 16 second long "Bosconian" (nice filler for any mix-cd). Really, the whole album is a treat. Although the album was re-released in 1999 as "The Best of Video Game Music" with non-Hosono produced tracks, this has been hard to locate as well (but seek and you shall find).

Doctor Y.S. & the Cosmic Drunkards

spaceling — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 07:15:05 GMT

So, there are these tracks which I love, the artists of which I don't know too well. I'm looking for them, I am, because I want to understand more myself and find more music by them... but should I wait until then to share my discoveries with you? (Fistula Spume is raising the bar here, since he's always posting amazing things and is teaching me all about his crazy wonderful music. Well, gloves off. He's inspired me and I'm ready to post. Even in my ignorance, you will at least hear what I'm talking about thanks to the MOG player, in all of its glam fabulosity.)

First up is Doctor Y.S. and the Cosmic Drunkards. I have three tracks by this artist/project/brainchild of Yoshihiro Sawasaki. I've tried to find out more information but I'm lacking some language ability here (and here), so help me out if you're in the know. Discogs tells me he has a number of other projects besides the Cosmic Drunkards. There's also Meditation Y.S., Mushroom Now!, Techno The Gong, and he's released music in collaboration with these other projects/groups: Transonic Jokers and Ultra Machine. Sawasaki seems like a really fun guy who'd be fun to tour with from the pictures I'm finding of his sushi eating antics and explorations of neglected steam baths and other fanciful places.

I first discovered Sawasaki by cosmic serendipity in a welcome moment of confirmed pronoia. His track "Secret Samba" was one side of some vinyl I found in an orphaned record sleeve in a Philly Record store (611). With little idea of what album it came from, and little help provided by the store dj/clerk, I had to settle for the pleasure of a good mystery. The other tracks on disc were also brilliant: "Matsuri" by dj Krush and "Paradise, version 2" by Swing Slow (the project of Miharu Koshi and Haruomi Hosono). I left the store without buying the disc -- a big mistake! At the time I was thinking it was only one of four discs and I'd rather get the complete album, and the orphan was selling for something outrageous, like $10. I mean, how much would you pay for an orphan?? The Internet was of no help to me in 1997 looking for more information. (I'd have to wait five more years before I learned it was off a compilation called Pacific State (1997, Devaint Records). You can now find it easy.). It dawned on me a week later that what I had heard was extraordinary and I had to find that disc. But Alas! it was nowhere to be found. I was really lucky when a year later, to the day, it reappeared in a section given over to happy hardcore. Really, there's no telling how stuff can sometimes be filed in some record stores.

Now for the music. First, is "Secret Samba."

Second, by Yoshihiro Sawasaki, is "Snow Coast" from the soundtrack to the anime show, Boogiepop Phantom. (You'll have to stream/download this into your favorite player for MOG is, for now, only allowing me to share one song at a time, not that I'm not appreciative.) I should mention that since I've been rather hooked by this "Snow Coast" track... I think I've listened to it about 20 times now!

Ivory Toad of Catalan

spaceling — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 00:26:01 GMT

Just happened to tune into National Public Radio this morning to hear listener letters sent in this week on a program segment that was broadcast last Sunday, January 21st, a promo spot for Double Banjo Bluegrass Spectacular (2007), a new album by Banjo master Tony Trischka. Along for the ride were fellow Banjo superstars Steve Martin and Bela Fleck. What a great show. You can listen to the NPR segment here.

A few studio only tracks presenting the licks and chops of Martin, Fleck, & Trischka (including one original Beatnick Banjo Poem) are also available from the NPR page, one of which I liberated from real media format, for sharing purposes below (via MOG player). Enjoy. (Ivory Toad of Catalan by Bela Fleck and Tony Trischka).

Tricycle Built for Two

spaceling — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 14:43:48 GMT

For the best mix cd ever, I've been searching for Haruomi Hosono's cover of "Daisy Bell" by Harry Dacre, which appeared in the 1984 film, Revenge of the Nerds, you know, in the scene of Takashi tricycling to victory for Tri-Lam against the Jocks. Why it doesn't appear on the soundtrack along with well-forgotten 80 pop exemplars, the Ya Yas and the Gleaming Spires, I don't know. I haven't found it yet. I may have to resort to an audio sample instead. (Hosono did release a version of "Daisy Bell" on his Daisy World Tour compilation, but it's not the same -- hat tip to Phonaut who graciously shared this copy with me for review).

(Above: the chemist, Aron Kuperman on his one-speed)

While researching though, I did discover the music of Haruomi Hosono, who I had only known from a track, Paradise v.2" that appeared on a Japanese compilation called Pacific State along with gems by Doctor YS and the Cosmic Drunkards ("Secret Samba") and DJ Krush ("Matsuri"). "Paradise, v.2" is credited to Swing Slow, the project/album of Hosono and Miharu Koshi. (Check that link on Koshi to discover another brilliant eccentric Japanese artist). I'm not a fan (yet) of Hosono's pop from the 70s and 80s, but his album, Video Game Music (1986), however, should be a must listen for all electronaudiophiles. I haven't heard enough of Yellow Magic Orchestra to say anything, but from the video I discovered below, I'm intrigued. See for yourself, kind of a minimalist Pee Wee Playhouse (?). Help me out, Nipponese translators, please.

Bernard Herrmann

spaceling — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 00:26:13 GMT

Someone, I think Daniel Clowes, once theorized that JFK was assasinated by hit men for the hat industry, payback for the President's disregard for men's hats and the subsequent decline in their fashion in the early 1960s. But in the days of Dwight Eisenhower, you could still drive around with Jimmy Stewart whilst wearing a hat about San Francisco, whistling. I've never been to the Bay Area myself but this is how I imagine it, with the score that Bernard Herrmann wrote for it in the film Vertigo (1958). The first time I saw this film when I was 16 or so I imagined what you can now view for yourself below. (It wasn't until much later that I had a computer and the free software to make the edits I needed.) Enjoy.

Help with Steve Miller

spaceling — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 01:02:25 GMT

I don't expect you're like me, but if you are or can sympathize, know that I detest Steve Miller Band's most popular album, Fly Like an Eagle. But it's complicated. As expressed so perfectly by the Butthole Surfers in their epic, "John E. Smoke":

It's about being in love and loving the love that's hating the love and the love and the hate that's loving with all it's around the love that's hate that's the hate that's the love and the love is the love that is the hate that's hating the love, it's loving the hate.

It's the beginning pieces, the "Space Intro" and the other instrumentals on the record: the beginnings of "Fly Like an Eagle" and then on side B, "Blue Odyssey" (an homage to the synthesizer?) and maybe even the wierd little track that comes afterward, "Sweet Maree." Are these the forgettable throway tracks on the record? Are these the tracks they dropped in to appeal to young stoners? Well, I am appealed, but the other tracks count for shite. Please forgive me if you love the Steve Miller Band... I still NEED you! I need to know about the other small but wonderful instrumental tracks hiding on all the other Steve Miller Band albums. I will adore them, I promise, like a stray kitten, I will take them home and feed and play with them and give them string to play with. And what about all those other awesome instrumental filler tracks on 70s pop albums I haven't heard of. Please tell me about them. And then I will thank you.

Love, spaceling.

Above: a visual representation of similar mid-70s space kitsch

Chanukah Choir Band circa 1980

spaceling — Fri, 22 Dec 2006 18:41:31 GMT

Tonight is the eighth night of chanukah, and to celebrate I want to share the cassette-to-mp3 transfer of my parents recording of me and my sister in our school's choir. We gave a performance with the U.S. Navy Band back in 1980 that I still think was rather excellent. From the back cover of another album I have, the choir director, "Leah Lipman, studied music at Brooklyn College and the University of Maryland where she earned her Bachelor's degree. She majored in voice and composition with piano her principal instrument. In New York, she sang with the Zamir Chorale, taught in public and private schools, and worked as a music specialist for Project Head Start."

Mrs. Lipman gave me my first chance at musical expression back in first grade. I lost track of her after second. I really appreciate her work back then and I think it still stands out, especially in comparison with the schlocky performances of other Day School Choirs from the 1980s like the god-awful Miami Boys Choir. Here's a streaming link for listening, and you can download the individual mp3s from this directory.

If you like this, definitely check out the album Leah Lipman released two years earlier (1978), one of the most beautiful Jewish records I own (and I've been questing for non-schlocky Jewish records a long time!).

UPDATE: I just got off the phone with Leah (thank you Internets!) and she shared with me some wonderful stories regarding the record. It was produced on a $3000 budget at a time during a very stressful period where had just recently given birth. Two of the song tunes were original "Ani Ma'amin" and "Mahtai Yihyeh Shalom" and composed by Leah. The accordionist was Pinchas Zahavi. Leah retired from the Hebrew Academy in 1997. She's still somewhat active in the music scene in Silver Spring, MD, organizing women's concerts within the Orthodox Jewish community and teaching her grandchildren piano.

Nottingham Lace

spaceling — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 20:12:48 GMT

Back when, when I was holed up in Terre Haute, Indiana for a month or so, I was rooming with a fellow whilst attending some classes on graphic design and such. This was about 1990 and he was very much into three musicians I had never heard of: Joe Satirani, Yngwie Malmsteen, and the band, Jane's Addiction. One righteous mixtape and a year later, I was dreaming of what Jane says, gypsy-klezmer-rock mashups, and macking it with that girl I met in Model U.N. It was also in 1991 that teenage Brian Carrol (later to be known as Buckethead) moved into the basement of Guitar Player Magazine's editor, Jas Obrecht, and thus began the artist's passage from strength to greater strength: huzzah! Carrol was brought to the attention of avant-improvisers, collaborators and producers Bill Laswell and John Zorn (which is how I heard of him). Just as I was beginning to learn about new ambient through the likes of Laswell's Axiom releases, astralwerks, Silent/Flask, and the FAX label, word of Buckethead was spreading across the ambient/noise genre through the metal community. Appearing as subliminal blips on Space Ghost Coast to Coast also helped, but I wasn't entirely aware of Buckethead until my computer was chronically ill recently and I was listening to KLSU 91.1 Baton Rouge full time in stead of my inaccessible musics. It was well worth the break for I heard Buckethead's rawk ballad, "Nottingham Lace" released on his 2005 album Enter the Chicken.

This is about the most heavy metal guitar I've heard in a long time that I've been willing to put up with. Something about this track is just putting me under a spell. Part of it is that Buckethead changes focus and his direction so often. I don't know why I like it so much. I lost interest in Joe Satriani pretty quickly, but maybe this means I should revisit him. What's happening to my ears?! Buckethead has attested that Satriani and Malmsteen were huge influences on him, so perhaps my ears have found a hook on patterns I hadn't heard in the last half of my waking life. Click on the link above (or on the picture below) to hear "Nottingham Lace"... I think, if you can get past the bluesey electirc guitar riffs (?) at the beginning, you'll hear what I'm talking about, and if you do, let me know what you think.

I'd also appreciate any further Buckethead related suggestions. Danke shöen!

The Calypsos of Bokonon

spaceling — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 00:35:55 GMT

Cat's Cradle is a story about the end of the world, related to us by a man who witnessed the destruction and could explain how it came to occur. It is also the only known record of the philosophy of Bokonon, sung and subsequently archived as calypsos by a prophet with profound insight into the events directly preceding said apocalypse. Cat's Cradle was written in 1963 by Kurt Vonnegut. Kurt Vonnegut was written in 1922 on blank parchment by a sudden confluence of DNA in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Open question to the denizens of MOG. Has anyone heard (or be willing to record) the Calypsos of Bokonon from Cat's Cradle? (Looking hopefully towards you, Spencer.)

image from science blog, Keat's Telescope see the cat? see the cradle?

mog on soulseek

spaceling — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 21:53:55 GMT

mog is on soulseek.

yes. (mog precedes MOG)

no. (Sir MOG is not on soulseek (as far as I know)... however other MOGgish rascals are verily ubiquitous).

mog is Polish and blogs here.

Easy as

spaceling — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 19:55:33 GMT

The Lady Horrible recently mogged about an aging musician who was resting heavily on laurels unfortunately propped up by a legion of credulous enabling boomers. I couldn't help but think of this when I was visiting the website of one of the most sampled electronic artists of all time, Jean-Jacques Perrey (wikipedia link which also talks about collaborator Gershon Kingsley here). See below for proof of Perrey's mastery. He also seems to be a sweet old man who doesn't mind inexplicably carrying around stuffed animals on stage. I have a new role model.

Below, Perrey's 2006 performance of "E.V.A." from Perrey's 1971 album, Moog Indigo with current collaborator Dana Countryman. Don't they make it look easy?

QED.

THX-1138

spaceling — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 00:36:35 GMT

I can forgive George Lucas for all of his late epic Star Wars prequels only because, only afterwards, did Lucas revisit his first film, the minimalist dystopia, THX-1138 (1971), correcting the audio artifacts that plagued the earlier video releases and making the soundtrack available on the DVD as a standalone special feature. (The soundtrack is also available independently on CD.)

If you've seen any of the original Mission Impossible episodes or seen Cool Hand Luke then you've heard Lalo Schifrin's incredible jazzy scores and sensitivity to the director's vision. For THX-1138, it is obvious that Schifrin was paying attention to the work of Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind, Carlos' teacher Vladimir Ussachevsky, and the plethora of sound explorers and music geeks pioneering the advent of electronic music and noise in the late 60s and 70s. Before this film, I had no idea Schifrin had dipped his toe in these (now) deep waters.

Nights of Carlotta

spaceling — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 17:07:15 GMT

Woke up to "Punk Rock" by Mogwai this morning, the first time I had heard their album Come On Die Young (1999). It opens with a quote from Iggy Pop, from an interview on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) television, March 11, 1977. In the interview he's talking to the "90 Minutes Live" show host Peter Gzowski.

I'll tell you about punk rock: punk rock is a word used by dilettantes and, uh... and, uh... heartless manipulators, about music... that takes up the energies, and the bodies, and the hearts and the souls and the time and the minds, of young men, who give what they have to it, and give everything they have to it. And it's a... it's a term that's based on contempt; it's a term that's based on fashion, style, elitism, satanism, and, everything that's rotten about rock 'n' roll...
I don't know Johnny Rotten... but I'm sure, I'm sure he puts as much blood and sweat into what he does as Sigmund Freud did. You see, what, what sounds to you like a big load of trashy old noise... is in fact... the brilliant music of a genius... myself. And that music is so powerful, that it's quite beyond my control. And, ah... when I'm in the grips of it, I don't feel pleasure and I don't feel pain, either physically or emotionally. Do you understand what I'm talking about? Have you ever, have you ever felt like that? When you just, when you just, you couldn't feel anything, and you didn't want to either. You know, like that? Do you understand what I'm saying, sir?

Last night I went to Carlotta Street near LSU to observe and possibly make myself part of the teeming youth and desperate insanity of a Halloween weekend in Baton Rouge. I'm a raver cowboy in my best duds, pearl buttoned shirt, Stetson, and orange cargo pants. Earlier, on the open porch scene of Spanishtown, I made some friends of some drifting youth here in Baton Rouge to work, go to rehab and eventually get custody back of their child, so the two of them are with me now. Just the three of us, two being on anti-depressants, and we're asked repeatedly to help buy vodka at the local Circle K for these three 17 year old girls, dressed as faeries, one with a cellphone tucked between her boobs. As what seems to be thousands of students dressed in their terrible and amazing costumes brush by me, I wonder how I can feel so dissociated in this overwhelming crowd. I don't know whether it's the consequence of over-stimulus, or whether I've just developed some mental barrier against joining into the fullness of this horde. I wonder whether this is a problem for the 17 year old girls too and maybe that's why they're asking me to help them get a fifth of Taaka from the Circle K to mix with their blue Powerade. I went to Carlotta in the hopes of finding in the mass the girl who told me to come out last night. "Hey Aharon, you should really come out to Carlotta, I'll be on Ivanhoe later on." Sweet crazy girl. I am loneliness in this mass.

The three of us make our way back to my car, and I play for my new friends "Philip Glass", the homage by Colourbox, as I speed us back to the nooks and crannies from which we came.

does your college radio station do this?

spaceling — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 00:48:07 GMT

I've been listening to a lot more radio this past month. This is a good thing. For a long while I felt like I needed to play catch up with my music collection. From the MOG-O-MATIC perspec, I've been MIA, but really I've been here all along. Baton Rouge has a fine student run radio station at Louisiana State University (KLSU) and I'm feeling nostalgic for the days of dj spaceling and the "Amplified Harmonic Resonance" program. Tonight, I discovered something wonderful. Student djs being student djs like I was back when I was a student dj, they're particularly lax at announcing the artists and trax of the music they be spinning. But I've found all sorts of neat music when the dj was kind enough to clue me in. Like when I heard "Cincinnati Riot Blues" by the Ghost Exits. This evening I heard two songs, one of which woke me up in the morning with a great wash of guitar noise, but alas, no identification was forthcoming. So I did something crazy and googled "song identification hoping I could find some software solution that might listen in on broadcasts and id the song for me like MOG's Gracenote service does. No such luck, but there, only four links from the top of the oogle was a link to KLSU! What fortune! To click on the link brought me to their page and behold, they plainly tell (for the Flash installed) what the last track was broadcast from their basement studio. And a service by yes.com will tell you what twenty tracks were played before that. I think that's lovely. So what was I kvelling about? Only "Wildcat" by Ratatat and then to "Wolves" by Jesu. Hope you're local college radio station is playing them.

there are Green Men here. (don't try looking for 'em)

spaceling — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 18:15:37 GMT

Robert Holdstock won the Newberry Fantasy Award in 1988 for his book, Mythago Wood, a novel which spun fantasy around the theories of Jung and Campbell, and delved deeply into the mythic world of the Finnish Kallevala. The tome is one of my favorites ever and changed the way I interact with myth, religious calendars, and role playing (as it relates to religious ritual). I'm reminded of all of this listening to Spatial Specific, the explosive first album of the Toronto duo, Legion of Green Men, whilst meditating on the cycle of earthly pleasures, regrets, and aspirations. Today is, after all, Jewish New Years, the Rosh (head) of the Shanah (year), and my thoughts are spinning in the whirlpool of conflicted and resolving intentions and prayers embracing my peeps today. So I am doing my best here in my humble shack to, like a young yoda, discover the force that pervades all, as any good panentheist mystic would. Years ago I took this pilgrimage by way of symbiosis with my fungal cousins. Today, I am alone with my music... the mushrooms outside being only of the common poisonous stripe. This album is a worthy surrogate though, and contains within it secrets worthy of any spark seeking its flame. The track listing alone will give some indication of the tangled roots within. Find the first 13 second track entitled "To kiss the hare's foot" and soon you'll find yourself at track 6, "Veneration of the Goddess." Such a lovely album. I can only point you to it... if only I could share it with all of you. But I can wish you all an outrageous new year full of beautiful discoveries, which with open ears and under sunshine filtered watery clouds and greenish leafery, many treasures will be shared. Huzzah and love to all fellow earthlings and spacelings. Love to all in this spinning orbiting, living world.

Gutting old mp3 players for 100gb goodness

spaceling — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 20:54:07 GMT

w00t! I now have a 100gb portable mp3 player after swapping the 2.5" standard laptop 20gb drive out of an old Archos Jukebox Studio. My music collection is now entirely portable, something currently impossible with today's 60gb limited (and über-expensive) ipods. This is not news really... folks have been doing this for years already, but I got tired of waiting for a capacity increase in 1.8" drives -- the kind most hard drive based mp3 players like the ipod, creative, and archos brands are using. Meanwhile, the capacity of 2.5" drives keeps on increasing.

With the new parallel 160gb tech rocking the laptop drive world, once pricey 100gb drives can now be found on sale and for rebate. The free and open source rockbox firmware will further extend the device features -- and flashing the rockbox firmware into the Jukebox Studio was doable (although reading through lots of documentation was a necessity). Rockbox is a very useful firmware replacement since it supports OGG-Vorbis encoded audio files and gapless playback. (UPDATE: gapless only works if your mp3s are encoded in LAME with the gapless switch. Rockbox does not support ogg-vorbis on archos jukebox studio/recorder models :( .

ebay seems ripe with the old Archos now, but I was not the only one shopping for them. Folks are bidding over $100 for the Jukebox Recorder's with USB 2.0. I relented and bid on the older Studio model with usb 1.1. (Hint: can be had cheaper than the Recorder).

Things I learned if you'd like to do something like this.

0. A jeweler's sized Philips head screwdriver will come in handy for removing the very tiny screws holding on the Jukebox faceplate. Otherwise, the directions for upgrading the drive at mctubster are fairly accurate.

1. To transfer your files over from your main computer to the new 2.5" drive, use a usb 2.0 portable enclosure or some other speedy connection. Connecting via a 3.5" to 2.5" ide converter is fraught with danger (bent pins and too high voltage in your new drive).

2. Move your files over to your new HD before you swap it. And don't forget to defragment it too, cause that will take a longish time over USB 1.

3. The rockbox manuals for flashing the Jukebox Studio and Recorder models are inaccurate. You might think that rockbox will create an id3 tag database on these models with rockbox's Tag Cache feature. No. The included RAM in these models is too small (2mb) to use Tag Cache.

4. id3browse is some very useful free and open source software to use in generating m3u playlists. (You'll need to generate playlists in lieu of an id3 tag database. Otherwise, you'll have to rely on playing files according to directories. This is limiting since without a playlist, Archos will only play one directory at a time without advancing to successive or nested directories).

5. Be patient. If you're confused don't blame yourself. Continue to read. Nerdy, zen like acceptance of tedium will be rewarded. Take a nap.

6. And, oh yeah, be patient bidding on eBay. It's not like there is a supply problem or anything and yet impatient demand is driving prices up. If everyone could just wait their turn, they'd get their obsolete but upgradeable old archos at a reasonably cheap price.

John E. Smoke

spaceling — Sat, 02 Sep 2006 22:28:50 GMT

Years ago af riend of mine gave me a mixtape filled with the Ventures, Dick and Dale, and this one incredible song by the Butthole Surfers called "John E. Smoke" from their album Hairway to Steven. Is there anything by this band that sounds remotely like this song? Is this the only surf rock performed by the Butthole Surfers?

Camper Van Beethoven

spaceling — Tue, 29 Aug 2006 02:43:38 GMT

Eugene Chadbourne makes a good impression of a Richard Scarry monster, especially all roly-poly during improv. Little did I realize he figured in one of my favorite albums evar, Camper Van Beethoven's Camper Van Beethoven (1986). I bought two cassettes from him wrapped in stray socks that he had shlepped from somewhere, possibly a laundromat, possibly from underneath his bed. Oh Camper. I lost you for a while, but now you're found again. I'll never leave you far away again amidst lonely vinyl, 6 states away in self-storage. Such is the destiny of found objects, and such is the libery of digital bits on a platter spinning at 7200 rotations per minute. Take that Edison. Did I mention this is my favorite album. It has saved me more than once. Why did I take you for granted? All the tracks here are gems, one after another, backtracked for sure, but there is something else too hidden within the narishkeit. You can tell from the rise and fall of Chadbourne's violin tonic. They're in the know, just listen to "Peace & Love" -- all I can do is recommend it, and beg you to listen. Bring this album to your next hoedown, and play "Hoe Yourself Down" and I promise you'll have the most psychedelic squaredance, possibly rhomboid even. Special treats, "The History of Utah" and a cover of "Interstellar Overdrive" which I could swear is better than the original. Trust me, I'm sitting in a sweltering apartment in Louisiana, warming a fesh bottle of cider, tripping to this album like a pea melting in soup.

Image copyright Frank Schindelbeck

Hooper Bay

spaceling — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 20:10:08 GMT

UPDATE: I was hoaxed. The track lengths were right on, but I was the victim of wishful thinking. On another listen, the tracks of this album are faded out in order to conform to the time length signatures for Hooper Bay songs (still very much obscure). I'll keep the text below in this archive of blog posts as a record of my credulity!

I'll reveal a secret to all y'alls. The best place to get your filez on is on USENET. That's where I just collected Hooper Bay, Boards Of Canada's ultrarare 1994 mini-cassette/12" extremely limited release. I've been burned before with non-BOC tracks tagged as BOC before (badly tagged, and mis-tagged Old Tunes mp3s are ubiquitous on soulseek), so I checked on over at Frederik Claes' BOC fan site for the authoritative track listing and song length duration. Sure enough, it is really Hooper Bay. This sort of file sharing is exactly what USENET and the file sharing networks are good for. Grabbing files of out-of-print and intolerably rare limited pressings. I have no idea why Warp hasn't re-released this material to the BOC craving (and crazed) masses. Until then, I will have to make do with my low-fi 128kpbs encoded, usenet downloaded, mp3s of Hooper Bay.

This short album really is lovely.

Terrapin Station

spaceling — Sun, 27 Aug 2006 18:52:32 GMT

There are some bands I really could not get into, but it wasn't because their music was so terrible... it was just because the community of its adherents and I couldn't find a common language to recommend music by taste. This is a perennial problem among fans who love one band or one genre almost exclusively. Enter into this sorry state, an American folk-prog band called the Grateful Dead. My older sister was a big fan and so was her boyfriend who considered my electronic music cold and heartless compared to the warm and fuzzy sounds of the Hammond Organ he was familiar hearing on his Dead albums. I had the hardest time finding Grateful Dead songs and albums I might be interested in, because I was talking to someone who was a collector who had to have every single live performance of the Dead, everything by them was golden and divine.

Well, I really liked Terrapin Station and quickly noticed that Dead music covered a number of flavors of prog: folk-psych, funky folk, and improvisational prog rock/space jams. This was all well and good, but I have no taste in funky folk, and little taste for the Dead's brand of space jams, no matter how hard I whirl like a Bektashi Dervish.

So I'm hoping that in the world of MOG, someone can turn me onto songs by the Grateful Dead that are not funky folk songs like "Samson and Delilah" and more like "Terrapin Station, Part 1."

Audentity

spaceling — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 18:24:12 GMT

I haven't used my MOGspace much to blog about Klaus Schulze, and it does reflect some personal bias on my part... I just have the hardest time separating out one of his albums musically from any of the others in his early discography. That's why the cover art is so important in identifying what's what. (Check out Urs Amann's art for Schulze in the 70s. Amann has an online gallery here). In 1983, Klaus Schulze released Audentity featuring cover art by Claus Cordes showing a young fellow wearing slit sunglasses and art deco headphones. I've become so used to earlier Schulze tracks plodding along endlessly with atmospheric synthscapes I had forgotten that schulze had a go at some energetic music. So listen to "Sebastian Im Traum" for what I'm talking about.

But I think the more significant thing about this album is the cover art. Check out those slit glasses. Remind you of anyone?

And speaking of slit glasses. How come I can't find them anywhere? Why if fashion repeats itself has it taken so long for these to make a comeback? From my blog to your ears, Soho fashion geeks. I mean, take a look at this young gangster from John Carpenter's whimsical 1986 synth-pop opera, Big Trouble in Little China.

I should also note that the soundtrack to Big Trouble in Little China by John Carpenter and Alan Howarth is excellent. Here's a quality review of it written back in 2003 by the fantastically named, Messrob Torikian. I don't have a copy of the soundtrack. It is rare! It is also expensive. If you have it, please share it with me. Also, if you know of a supplier for retro sunglasses, please pass on my request.

Emergency Broadcast Network

spaceling — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 01:15:18 GMT

Joshua L. Pearson, the most visible man behind Emergency Broadcast Network, has a website. Had I known this, I would've stopped praying every day for a new EBN tape to finally be released, cause Josh has graciously offered elevenses up for download. Not familiar with EBN? Throughout the 90s they pioneered the idea of VJing in complement to DJing. I last saw them in 1998 (soon before they dissolved) in Philly when DJ Spooky's tour came through. Salad days. Bloody Ears. (Those were loud shows!) Keep EBN in mind if you've ever seen the Avalanches' "Frontier Psychiatrist" video -- EBN was there first. (And Negativland and the Residents before them).

Below, "378" by EBN (courtesy of youtube and user electricmonk).

What is needed

spaceling — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 18:11:28 GMT

See how popular already youtube is on MOG for providing VIDEO content? What is really needed on MOG is a youtube like service for folks to easily share AUDIO that they're mogging on about.

Hiding Underneath the Skin

spaceling — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 03:21:47 GMT

My favorite country song. Yes, my favorite country song. It is by a man named Michael Stanton. It is a cover of the song "Skin" by Oingo Boingo. This song is deeply strange (lyrics), and sounds especially weird sung by a neo-tradionalist Country singer. I would love to hear more country songs like this.

I am sharing this with you because you would never come across this song. It is the final track at the end of Danny Elfman's score to the Clive Barker film, Nightbreed (1990). It doesn't appear in the film, not even in the end credits. But it made it to the cassette soundtrack. I'm thinking that Danny Elfman (formerly of Oingo Boingo) had wanted "Skin" covered by a country artist for years, but he had to wait through ten years of making soundtracks for Tim Burton films before one came along where he could sneak the cover of "Skin" into the budget.

Please take a listen. Here is "Country Skin" by Michael Stanton. And here, for comparison is the non-country original "Skin" by Oingo Boingo. And here is El*Argento's beautiful new skin for winamp. What is hiding underneath this skin? The boring old winamp skin. If you use windows and winamp, you can download this skin and make your winamp look more like a late 1990s Warp label album cover here.

Re-Entry to Mog

spaceling — Thu, 10 Aug 2006 03:11:33 GMT

Astro-Sounds from Beyond the Year 2000 (1968) is a terrible album if you're looking to hear "astro-sounds" as contemplated by a studio orchestra in 1968. Even as a lounge album it is unmemorable save for its delicious cover art and excellent track names. If you have high expectations for "A Dissapointed Love with A Desensitized Robot" (track 7) or "Trippin on Lunar 07" (track 9) then prepare yourself for "A Bad Trip Back to '69" (track 10). Awful. Unless you're drinking a martini and not paying any attention. Lounge. I've heard better.

Still, the album has its place, especially here on MOG, for track 2 is entitled "Re-Entry to Mog." Heh. Work that into your Story of MOG, collaborative fiction moggers.

MOG mathemagicians?

spaceling — Tue, 08 Aug 2006 02:51:24 GMT

I need some math/statistics help. I'm trying to figure out with some spreadsheet mojo whether math can give me an insight into who my favorite artist is. (I think I know the answer, but I'm open to being surprised by what statistics might reveal to me). If you've ever been interested in figuring out statistically who your favorite artist is, and you use last.fm (audioscrobbler) in addition to MOG, then read on. Mathemagicians welcome.

MOG has given me a list of the 50 most popular artists/bands in my collection according to the number of tracks I have for each of them. (There's a widget that indicates this if you haven't noticed) The "popularity" of this chart is skewed by artists who have many short tracks (such as J.S. Bach), or many tracks that I just don't listen to that often (such as John Williams).

Meanwhile, my charts at Last.fm\audioscrobbler provides a list of my 50 most popular artists/bands according to how often I listen to them. Since I listen to so much of my music using shuffle, the "popularity" of this chart is skewed again by those artists in my collection who have many tracks (i.e., J.S. Bach). My listening isn't entirely random however, since I often skip albums by artists I'm not interested in listening to.

If I can compare "artists with most tracks" with "most listened artists" I should be able to locate the outliers and get a true sense of who I really most like.

I set up two columns with the 50 most listened to artists (via last.fm) in one column, and the 50 artists with the most tracks in my collection (via MOG). After sorting the two columns and arranging the artists so that they appear alphabetically I have their two rankings side by side. (For example: J.S. Bach ranks 15th in most tracks I have, and 5th in most listened to. Other artists such as Legion of Green Men, are ranked in the popular listening column but don't even make MOG's cut in number of files).

Now I need to perform some equation on the two popularity values to determine a most popular score. Any ideas?

Assumptions: Artists that score high in listening but low in tracks should have their scores amplified.

Sur Le Theme De Bene Gesserit

spaceling — Sat, 05 Aug 2006 17:17:59 GMT

As a follow up to my last post on the origins of ambient music and cryptic homages left to Philip K. Dick, I thought I'd write a little something something on the theme of electronic music inspired by the fantastic in general. J. Horrible had commented/questioned on whether I had read Roger Zelazny which made me wonder whether she had known of any music inspired by the writer. And at that moment I noticed I was listening to Chronolyse (1976) by Richard Pinhas, an electonic album inspired by Frank Herbert's novel Dune (1965). This album predated the David Lynch film so set aside premonitions of an Angelo Badalamenti score... for all I know this could have been the score for the unrealized Alejandro Jadorowsky directed Dune film.

The album comes in three parts, really: "Sur Le Them De Bene Gesserit" (Parts I-VII), "Duncan Idaho," and a thrity minute Fripp-ish multi-track guitar improv jam with drums and accompanying synth sounds entitled "Paul Atreides."

The connection between science-fiction and the evolution of electronic music is deep. Just consider the influence of György Ligeti and Wendy Carlos' scores for Stanley Kurbrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C. Clark) and A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess). I'm wondering now what the musical accompaniment may have been for Karel Čapek's play Rossum's Universal Robots (and its numerous adaptations).

Please comment if you know of any other electronic music inspired by fantastic or fabulist literature.

Philip K. Dick and the Heavenly Music Corporation

spaceling — Thu, 03 Aug 2006 02:05:29 GMT

In Man in the High Castle (1962), Philip K. Dick's masterpiece novel written with jos sticks about a parallel world with its own parallel Philip K. Dick, i.e., the man in the high castle. This man in the high castle, who we never meet, is a man hidden by virtue of his being the Author, just as Dick is the hidden Author to the characters manifested in his story. The book, written through a process of interpreting the pattern of dropped joss sticks through the explanation of the I Ching, is something like channeling creativity, and thus similar to Italo Calvino's creative strategy with tarot cards in The Castle of Crossed Destinies or Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies card deck. Like God, the man in the high castle in this parallel world is the subject of considerable, hopeful rumour. In so many of the writings of Philip K. Dick, the beneficient God that must act through subversion to break through into the world hijacked by the Demiurge, a harmful dangerous world where we are all prisoners of the Demiurge's insane delusion that it is is the creator God.

And in the book, there is a subversion, and the illusion is broken for one character, at least briefly, through an intervention enabled by a character's meditation on a trinket. The thing, hidden by it's apparent worthlessness becomes the most valuable thing in the universe. The trinket was created by a man who smokes marijuana cigarettes sold under the brand name "Heavenly Music Corporation" (a Japanese brand sold in a parallel California where the Japanese won the Pacific front in World War II).

Brian Eno and Robert Fripp named side A of their 1974 proto-ambient album No Pussyfooting: "Heavenly Music Corporation." Two years earlier, Klause Schulze had composed "Study for Philip K. Dick." Was Klause Schulze meditating on what the Penfield Mood Organ might have sounded like, had its moods been conveyed by sound? It's worth a listen. But it is "Heavenly Music Corporation", by virtue of its homage to the inspiration of gnostic subversion, that can be listened to as a means of revealing for ourselves the illusion of the "Black Iron Prison."

It's significant to consider that Dick wrote this ten years before We Can build You (1972) where he introduces the idea of the Glock Frauenzimmer, electronic organ, six years before the "Penfield Mood Organ" in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968). Fripp & Eno chose an obscure prop name from an older PKD novel. I don't claim to understand why they chose it, just that the name is well suited on a number of levels to the concept and the potential of the composition and genre Fripp & Eno were helping to invent.

Later, in the 1990s, Kim Cascone of industrial project PGR and founder of the defunct Silent/Flask label (also out of San Francisco) and reviving ambient in America, named his newly christened ambient project, Heavenly Music Corporation. Kim produced four excellent ambient albums in the mid 90s under this name: anechoic (1996), consciousness iii (1994), in a garden of eden (1993), and lunar phase (1995).

Below, I am linking to a collection of cassette rips of what appears to be interviews with PKD in the early 1980s. I'm also adding to the stream some of the music I referenced in this post.

Gavotte

spaceling — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 23:45:22 GMT

So, like you, I've been loving me some embedded youtube on the MOGs of the MOG-O-SPHERE. There's no excuse for why I haven't lit up my own text with video stars, it's not like I haven't come across some fantastic vids while researching these posts. Actually, I came across this vid (see below) not while researching for MOG but for doing something much more tedious yet necessary: tagging all my J.S. Bach tracks with their appropriate BWV catalog numbers. Oh yes. (How else would I be able to easily tell the difference between Bach's Gavotte in E flat major (BWV 1012) from Bach's Gavotte in C Minor (BWV 1011) whilst tending to my pee-threes on a lazy Sunday?)

Well, mission accomplished and fontgoddess and my philatelist father will be so proud (stamp fiends know what I'm talking about). But said mission would not have been accomplished without referencing the great video library at youtube and listening to the master, Andres Segovia performing Gavotte BWV1012 in a tv performance recorded December 10, 1956. I am so pleased to share it with you!

Claude Bolling

spaceling — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 04:22:06 GMT

In an earlier post, I wrote about the influence of baroque on the development of progressive-electronic music (see "On the lookout for electro-baroque und beethoven"). After listening to some recommended albums by The Nice and Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, I realized that I had totally forgotten to mention Claude Bolling.

Beginning in the mid-70s when all of the rest of this was percolating, Bolling burst onto the classical and jazz scene with these incredible albums featuring classical melodies and instrumentation with jazz drum accompaniment and swinging rhythms.

Compare "Bourrée" by Jethro Tull side by side Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio (1975) and you'll hear the progressive connection immediately. (I despair to think the reason I hadn't sooner was because these genre classifications: classical, jazz, rock, have taken root.)

I'd especially recommend Picnic Suite (1981), Toot Suite (1981), Suite for Cello and Jazz Piano Trio (1984), and Suite for Violin and Jazz Piano Trio (1984). You can easily spot Bolling's albums in thrift and used record store bins. The airbrushed cover art is all by Roger Huyssen. See below for Huyssen's artwork for Suite for Flute and Jazz Piano Trio.

If you find you like Bolling's classical compositions, check out his catchy score to the Italian TV series Borsalino and Co. (1970) and his rags album Ragtime Boogie-Woogie (1970). (no shuggie).

Respecting Provenance with Metadata

spaceling — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 21:15:35 GMT

Fontgoddess has posted twice on her affection for metadata, providing examples of how others, even librarians, are tagging their files.

I started out tagging with the quiet and devout rigour of a monk gilding the dome of the basillica, but I eventually gave up with the genre field of id3 because it felt dishonest to tag entire albums according to a single genre style, and I was too lazy to tag different genres to individual tracks in an album. But isn't that what it comes down to, laziness? Not in the seven mortal sins concept of laziness, but more so in finding the balance between the strict control of information and the freedom of the music to wander into one's listening queue like a free-radical crying "Serendipity!"

All Music Guide does a nice job of identifying genres and flavors and styles of music, and I value the meaningful typology of genre classifications as useful and more than academic. However, for now I'm keeping my musical associations in my head and not in my tag, and using (the free and open source) Albumlist to listen to and shuffle my mp3s by album whilst listening through Winamp. It's enough (and actually necessary) for so many of my music files to remain associated with their respective (concept) albums when I listen to them.

mp3s may have liberated individual single tracks from their Albums, even leading some people to question whether Albums are now a quaint anachronism, and while this may be true for some short and sweet pop tracks, so many progressive, classical, and electronic pieces are lost without the provenance of their album. The whole, in these cases, is greater than the individual track, and that's what makes Albumlist and plug-ins like it (are there any others like it?) so useful.

Below, an image of LuigiHann's Adventure for Atari 2600 skin for winamp, with the Albumlist and Cover&TAG plugins.

Wherefrom come thou, Glock Frauenzimmer?

spaceling — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 01:04:06 GMT

The path into spooky kitsch is littered with the shelly husks of corroded tin robots, while a soundtrack is played in REAL STEREO by a Regina Music Box endlessly performing from a cylinder alternately spun by the three norns of Americanum Fantasticum: Ray Bradbury, Rod Serling, and Philip K. Dick. It's night time and the lighting from the Victorian chandeliers casts an odd glow on the often empty but now well populated Main Street . Suddenly, a parade pulls up, and Frank L. Baum takes you by the hand so you're not crushed when a horde of monkeys on roller skates carrying the icons of the founding fathers and Lincoln, and their attendant whistling marchers glide past.

From More from the Gay Nineties Village Audio Fidelity Records, 1957:

So, you've never heard of a Wurlitzer Fascinator! You've never been to a county fair, an amusement park, or a circus? You've never wandered around the side shows looking at bearded ladies, strong men, flame eaters, or girl-slicing magicians? You've never sat beneath a big top and watched lithe-bodied acrobats swing to and fro defying fear and gravity? You've never seen the elephants dance or thirsty clowns pile out of an exploding Model-T? You've never seen the lions jump through hoops, seals balance balls, or dare-devil riders do somersaults over the backs of galloping horses? No? Then you've probably missed the reedy piping of the good old Fascinator as it puffed its mechanical heart out in accompaniment to children's cries for popcorn and cotton candy.

On the other hand, if you're a kid from way back who took any and every opportunity to run off to the fair or carnival, the sounds you will hear in this album will immediately place you in the show grounds of your childhood and surround you with a milling crowd of calico dresses and wide-brimmed straw hats. Over there is a man selling balloons and plastic pinwheels on a stick to hold up to the wind. And as the pinwheel turns, the wind brings with it animal smells from the barred wagons holding the ever-prowling lions and tigers, and of course, the monkeys, competing with each other in their antics to gain favor and peanuts from the kids straining to reach the bars.

The old Wurlitzer was there, quickening the pulse, the very heartbeat of the circus. Or if it wasn't always a Wurlitzer, it was a Calliope or a Mortier Band Organ or a Regina Music Box or any one of the other nine mechanical music makers recorded in this album.

Like many things American, nickelodeons—and all these grand old instruments come under this definition—started in Europe. Perhaps the first was one built by Justinian Morse in England as early as 1731. Morse connected a rather complicated peg-studded board to the keys of an organ. It proved impractical and was abandoned. About the same time in Paris, however, a famous automaton maker named Vaucauson pierced a cylinder in such a way that when it was turned, it regulated the movement of needles to produce designs corresponding to the holes in the cylinder. No music came out of it, though some years later Jacquard incorporated Vaucauson's cylinder principle into his new invention, the silk loom. Vaucauson's contribution to what eventually evolved into music rolls were jointed pieces of cardboard folded in book form and pierced with holes which traced for the loom the pattern to be woven.

We hear next of nickelodeons being built in San Francisco and Chicago in the latter half of the nineteenth century, the period out of which came most of the instruments recorded in this album. They found homes in bars, saloons, cafes, railroad stations—anywhere that people congregated—as well as at fairs, carnivals, and circuses. Among them, the player piano became so popular that it found its way into private homes and many an evening was spent with the neighbors and friends standing 'round the piano, cranking ice cream freezers to make home-made ice cream, popping corn, pulling taffy, and bobbing for apples while the player rolled out Dark Town Strutters Ball just as you have it here.

From the player piano, we all know more or less how the nickelodeon evolved. Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, still on the revolving paper cylinder principle. Then the cylinder was replaced by a disk, changing the function of the machine from the mechanical production of sounds through triggered pipes and cymbals to one of reproduction of sounds originally made by instruments having no connection whatsoever with the machine doing the reproducing. People have plopped nickels into jukeboxes for the Charleston, Cake-walk, Turkeytrot, Shimmy, Rhumba, Jitterbug, Bop, Twist, and now, their quarters (economic inflation along with mechanical evolution) go into the Scopitone for the Fish and the Watusi. At the moment all of the songs are in French, since it was the Gauls who invented and manufacture the machine, but the "listeners" hardly feel cheated since in addition to hearing the song, they get to see it performed in color on a screen attached to the top of the "jukebox." What next?

In the meantime, It's a Long Way to Tipperary, Moonlight and Roses, I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now, Marching Through Georgia, Whistling Rag, and How Ya Gonna Keep 'em Down on the Farm will regress you back to the good old days of bare feet, faded jeans and freckles, when your idea of adventure was playing hooky to see the circus—and for much less than the cost of an analyst!

THIS RECORDING was made at Paul Eakins' Gay Nineties Village, one of the most unique amusement areas in the United States, in Sikeston, Missouri. The Village was built by Paul Eakins, a mechanical engineer who "retired" from the plumbing and heating business to devote himself to his hobby of collecting and repairing nickelodeons. The hobby grew from a preoccupation into a full-time occupation. The Village now houses the world's largest collection of nickelodeons from all parts of the United States and twenty foreign countries. The smallest instrument stands three feet wide and five feet high. The largest is eight feet high, weighs 1,800 pounds and contains a piano; mandolin; 17 viola pipes; 21 violin pipes; 38 flute pipes; xylophone, drums—kettle, bass, and snare; triangle, castanets, and cymbals.

[More information on Paul Eakins and the Gay 90s Village can be found here, at the site of his gradson Chris Carlisle. (Warning: javascript intense). My first Eakins album that I found whilst thrifting, is located here and is recommended.]

Robot Musics (for Fistula Spume)

spaceling — Mon, 17 Jul 2006 04:48:18 GMT

F. Spume inquires,

I’m looking for music from the seventies that are similar to Kraftwerk. I’m a sucker for robot music/old electronic and I thought I would throw this out there. I’ve already discovered Telex, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Jean-Michel Jarre, and more recently Roberto Cacciapaglia’s Anne Steel album. I’m even down with 80’s music like Klein & MBO and Alexander Robotnick. So that’s where I’m at. Do you know of something I’m missing or leaving out that would be along these lines? Please let me know if you have a suggestion. I would greatly appreciate it.

Like you I'm also looking for this music, and what I'm including below is a survey of what I've found so far. There are plenty of holes so maybe we can help each other fill in the gaps?

To find the robot musics you like from the 70s you'll need to start with the late 50s, oh yes. Start with "Cindy Electronium" (1959) by Raymond Scott, the fellow who inspired Robert Moog, of moog synthesizer fame. Listening to "Cindy Electronium" you'll swear you're listening to early Krafwerk. But it's over ten years earlier, truly remarkable -- Raymond Scott definitely comprises a good portion of the musty humus this music tree has its roots planted in. If you're digging "Cindy" then pick up Raymond Scott's 1962 trilogy, "Soothing Sounds for Baby." And there is also an incredible new album of Raymond Scott's compositions for TV commercials, Manhattan Research, Inc. see more info here. (I don't have this album but I've heard tracks... check out "Bufferin: Memories" if you can).

The revelation that Bell Telephone labs had succeeded in synthesizing speech was publicized in 1963. Bell Labs, electronic engineer Max Matthews had coaxed their computer into singing "Daisy Bell", aka "Bicycle Built for Two" back in 1961. ("Daisy Bell" later becomes fixed in the popular imagination with computers and computerized speech by appearing on the 1968 soundtrack to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey).

For a few years, work remained hidden in backroom labs and university music departments and then Robert Moog came out with his Moog synthesizer in 1964. I'm still searching for music from this critical period 1964-1967.

In 1967, Terry Riley reveals the A Rainbow in Curved Air. I've written about this album before. Yo, I get the chills every time I hear it. This is still pre-Wendy Carlos' moog music explosion, so keep this in mind in the train of music influence, just how awesome this album is. This sound was popularized by the sequencer opening to "Baba O'Riley" on the Who's 1968 album Who's Next.

Also in 1968, find Kenneth Gaburo's album Fat Millie’s Lament -- Music for Voices, Instruments and Electronic Sounds in the Nonesuch backcatalog (Nonesuch LP H-71199). When it comes to electronic composers in the Nonesuch backcatalog, don't look over Gaburo. Xennakis, Crumb, and Subotnick may be more famous but Gaburo is a joy to listen to! (Also to dj and mix with ;)

Significantly, 1968 also featured the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL9000 sings Daisy Bell. No electronic music here really (and this was important to Kubrick who was distancing the cliche sounds of the theremin from golden age sci-fi 50s films like The Forbidden Planet) but the concept I think of computer-human interaction becomes much more complete here than with the idea of computer speech in Star Trek.

More in 1968: Wendy Carlos came out with Switched-On Bach and followed up with The Well-Tempered Synthesizer in 1969. And due to the success of Carlos' album, the moog starts appearing all over the place, and not necessarily in a good way. Listen to The Byrds, "Moog Raga" instrumental (available on the 1989 album Never Before. But, as yet, no one has put these two sounds (synthesized speech and synthesized organ) together.

The robot sound you're looking for probably cannot be found on Ed Sander's 1972 song "Yodeling Robot" (although for fun, you should hear it). Rather, it's on Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind's interpretation of Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 by Ludwig Van Beethoven, on the A Clockwork Orange soundtrack. Listen to the "March from A Clockwork Orange." You can hear Kraftwerk give homage to Wendy Carlos on the first track of their live bootleg from 1982 "Virtu Ex Machina."

Lots to cover in the 1970s. Kraftwerk, was of course, not the only German band heavily experimenting with electronics. Make certain to check out Tangerine Dream -- Christopher Franke and Edgar Froese had been experimenting with sequencers for years before Peter Baumann came on board in 1972. Listen to their 1974 and 1975 albums, Phaedra and Rubycon before picking up their live album Ricohet. (Also from 1975).

Steve Reich and Philip Glass are also busy during this period. Listen to Philip Glass' 1971 composition Music with Changing Parts and Steve Reich's 1976 masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians." You can hear the influence of the latter directly on Michael Hoenig's 1977 opus Departure for the Northern Wasteland. (In a future post, I would like to chronicle all the music pieces that sought to emulate the sound of the railway or subway).

Other Germans to take note of are Cluster, and Ashra (the project of Manuel Göttsching after Klaus Schulze left). If you like Michael Hoenig's Departure then most certainly find his collaboration with Göttsching for the 1976 album Early Water. Peter Baumann and Edgar Froese from Tangerine Dream were also putting out great solo albums you'll be interested in: see Froese's Epsilon in Malaysian Pale (1974) and Macula Transfer (1976), and Baumann's Romance '76 and Trans Harmonic Nights (1979). More Berlin School space music can be found on Kitaro's early albums Astral Voyage (Tan Kai), Full Moon Story and Oasis.

Ok, so that's as much as I can write cause like you I'm still searching and I'm especially interested in new wave synth-pop and Kraftwerk inspired detroit techno. Below is the image of a flyer from my first ever ambient/space/chill-out/improv jazz/shoegazer show, Stupid Robot, almost ten years ago in Philadelphia.

François Bayle and Laurie Spiegel

spaceling — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 19:01:57 GMT

I picked up the compilation Ohm: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music from my local library a few years agoon the recommendation of a friend. I was prepared to be educated. I knew not to expect beautiful, haunting melodies as on Harold Budd and Brian Eno's Plateaux of Mirror as I had already experimented with the backcatalog of the Nonesuch label and done my time with Morton Subotnick and George Crumb. Yes; I was expecting discordance, primitive electronics emulating cubism, and experimenters doing their best with the limited and frustrating tools at their disposal. I did not want to be dissapointed by expecting wonderful and pretty music. This was gonna be pretty raw, with a heavy element of academic music school experimentation and composition. Karleheinz Stockhausen, Otto Luening, Oskar Sala, and Vladimir Ussachevsky were not easy to listen through, but I was learning and my ears were becoming well-tempered, like fine baroque organ pipes getting a workout in the blast factory.

But aside from the benefits of uneasy listening, I just wanted to share with you all a couple of the artists I found that actually were ear-opening if not outright enjoyable to listen to. Laurie Spiegel was perhaps the best find of all 42 artists. Listen to her 1974 composition "Appalachian Grove I". (If there is an "Appalachian Grove II" I... I really want to hear it too!) Short percussive notes moving into and out of phase, becoming longer and louder as the intertwining melodies reach various states of climax. Gorgeous. If you like it, check out her albums Obsolete Systems (compositions 1971-1983) and Unseen Worlds (compositions 1987-1990).

And then there was François Bayle. There is a mystery track on the Adam Douglas/Deeper than Space album Current (1996) which sounds like guitar peddle knobs modulating raw square tooth waves. But it sounds really neat! (I promise) Like the sound you might pick to molt your exoskeleton or change alter-egos and become a shaman. And it was this sound that I was reminded by when I heard "Rosace 3 from Vibrations Composees" by François Bayle. His albums weren't too easy to find when I was looking for them and they are not exploring melody at all. "Rosace 3" might actually be the nicest thing I've heard by him.

So there it is, from my ears to your point of reference via this M(usic bl)OG. Below is an image I found on a French site whilst searching for info on François Bayle. It's in French and there is more wierdness there also related in some way to another Musique Concrete composer on Ohm, Pierre Schaeffer.

Baba O'Riley and Peter Baumann

spaceling — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 01:28:57 GMT

I'm listening to Trans Harmonic Nights by Peter Baumann (1979) and it's hard to miss why Tangerine Dream sounded so much better before he left that seminal electronic-space jam band in 1977. The artist knew how to sequence baroque melodies and sing lullabies into vocoders. Baumann must have been an incredible catalyst for Tangerine Dream because even veteran TDreamer Edgar Froese's solo albums from this period sound lovely. (They do not after Baumann's exit).

Anyways, I'm posting about Baumann because the first track "This day" has a sequence that reminds me of the very influential (and embarrasingly [for me] sentimental teenage anthem) "Baba O'Riley" by the Who, Pete Townsend's homage to Terry Riley, on the album Who's Next (1969). If you love the organ sequence in "Baba O'Riley" but can't handle the memories that "Teenage Wastleand" exhumes from the long (or recently) buried grave of your adolescence, then you can listen instead to a 9:49 only instrumental version of the song on Pete Townshend's Lifehouse Chronicles: Disc 1 -- Lifehouse Demos (1999). Unfortunately, this instrumental version excludes the riveting klezmer fiddle accompanyment (update: by Dave Arbus) at the end of the song. It also includes all the rock drumming from the original, I think, sounds very out of place on an all instrumental "Baba O'Riley." (I dream of Stereolab covering this with fiddle played by Jean-Luc Ponty).

The Who toured Germany in 1972 and performed Baba in Hamburg -- a bootleg exists. Perhaps Baumann heard the song live then and it sparked his imagination for what it might be like to play Riley-esque instrumentals with a live band. Because that's what he was doing 2 years later with Tangerine Dream. (Baumann joined Tangerine Dream in 1972).

For those new to Tangerine Dream, permit me to recommend their live album from 1975, Ricochet. (Listen carefully for the industrial-psych breakdown with homage to Brian Eno). Below is a photo of Baumann inspiring a generation of blissed-out spacelings to grow their hair long and assume the waifish intensity that only those who channel long dead baroque composers endure.

Gamelan, Xylophone, and Computer Kitsch

spaceling — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 18:30:12 GMT

I listen to the punctuated tones and hypnotic melodies of gamelan music and I begin to understand why I become so flustered when trying to describe ambient to friends (and relatives, co-workers, strangers on blogs and listserves). Ethereal, atmospheric, and drone sounds also describe elements of the ambient spectrum, and in a way sets it so far apart from other music... try and describe the repeating, sometimes evolving melodicc patterns and textures and all I get back are blank looks -- no one knows what I'm talking about... but everyone's heard what an industrial air conditioning unit sounds like. I think it's important in understanding ambient to describe some nuance between the drone style and gamelan styles in the genre.

The gamelan school (for lack of a better name) is the school which has the most easily recognizable influence on modern classical style of Minimalism. I'm remembering now that Indonesian Gamelan music is what inspired the late romantic compositions of Ravel, Satie and Debussy... ambient pre-cursors according to David Toop in hi s book on ambient music Ocean of Sound. For a good introduction to this progression, listen to the sample of Gamelan mixed into "Voyage, Part 1" on Brainticket's 1982 album Voyage. Once you hear it, you'll begin to spot it throughout ambient and classical minimalist compositions. Hear it on Controlled Bleeding's "Hymns from the Shadows, Parts 1-IV" (1996 on Inanition and Dark Shadows). Hear it in Terry Riley's Shri Camel (1968) and "Kometenmelodie" by Kraftwerk (1975, on Autobahn and the bootleg Concert Classics), as well as their other earlier exquisite xylophone melodies "Ruckzuck", "Tanzmusik", and "Klingklang" from their 1970-1971 albums Kraftwerk 1 and Kraftwerk 2.

What makes this music form so communicable in this period, I believe, is how easily it reminds us of non-video computer-human interfaces, with each bleep and bloop, or sequence of bleeps indicating one step, function (or malfunction) in the operating system. There is definitely something of a culture hook in the kitsch of sci-fi and the continued appeal of gadgetry and computers for this music. And this sensibility has long been used with wonderful effect by bands like Stereolab. Listen to these note swimming behind the pummeling beats of "Les Yper Yper Sound" on their Noises EP (1996, not to be confused with "Les Yper Sound"... what a difference one Yper makes!) and "Mr. Fantasy's Love" by Fantastic Plastic Machine on Luxury (1999). With vocoder, the computer motif is complete. The musical connection of bleeps, vocoder, punctuated melodic structures, and computer aesthetics had been brought together for the first time by Kraftwerk in their 1981 album Computerwelt. (Please correct me on this, readers).

While djing, long I fought the misconception among fellow djs that ambient music was all drones and no beats. This was a technical concern for them, as their modus depended heavily on the mastery of beat matching and other techniques... mine on what I could accomplish by multi-layering tracks (often with the need for more than 2 turntables). Their exposure had been limited to the drone-core etherics, atmospherics, and industrial noises which had had its own evolution from Brian Eno to Throbbing Gristle to Pauline Oliveros, Spectrum and Tristeza. More on drone and industrial ambient in another post though. If you haven't yet, I urge you to listen to an incredible mixture of the two styles of ambient in Controlled Bleeding's "Hyms from the Shadows, Parts I-IV."

Following image is from Peter Herchenröder's multi-media work "Computerwelt I" (found via trusty old google image search, and curiously located on the site of the Yiddishist, Nizza Thobi.)