WFMU's Beware of the Blog

The Films of Maurico Kagel (1965-1983)

The Films of Maurico Kagel (1965-1983) (AVI): Whether in the classical music hall, the theatrical stage or film/video, Kagel's neo-dada performances and wickedly original techniques always opens one's eyes and ears to the pure possibilities of sounds and their production. Although this aspect of his varied productions is little known in the US, Kagel's output as a filmmaker is tremendous. He just about made a film or video each year in the 60s and 70s, and has only begun to slow down in recent times. Films include "Antithese" (1965), "Match" (1966), "Solo" (1967), "Duo" (1967-68), "Hallelujah" (1969), "Ludwig Van" (1969), "Blue's Blue" (1981) and "MM51 / Nosferatu" (1983). You can also listen to Kagel's music here. (via UbuWeb)

Straight Outta Lambeth

Attention all Grimers / Dubsteppers: Photographer Simon Wheatley has a nice gallery up which documents his time hanging out in South London. Apparently these large knives are popular with the kids these days. (Link via Futurefeeder)

        

Meanwhile, Matthew Herbert has some great videos documenting the recording of his latest record up on his site. There are clips of him recording drums in a hot air balloon, under water and while speeding in his car.

 

As a bonus there's also footage from the excellent Matthew Herbert Big Band's 2003 performance at The Queen Elizabeth Hall. (Link)

Can & Kraftwerk Rarities

Some of the best early work of German Krautfathers Can came from assorted soundtrack music they did; this track, the previously-unreleased "The Million Game" (MP3) was the theme to a 1971 TV show called Das Millionenspiel. It apparently existed in segments, puzzled together Frankenstein-like for the compilation Kraut! Bloody Rageous, which has been popping up on CD over the years piecing together some of the lesser known moments of the German 60s/70's underground (many of these tracks appeared on 90's LPs in a series called Prae-Kraut Pandemonium). If you're missing the better-known Can from your collection, hop to it, Mute has been issuing great sounding remasters of their entire catalogue in the last two years with a new batch just hitting now of some of the later period discs. I bought a lot of these on CD back when Restless was issuing them in the 1980's and the sound of the new batch is a hundred times better.

Secondly, here's an excerpt from a 1971 Bremen radio concert from Kraftwerk, "Heavy Metal Kids" (MP3) is a side of the band their present-day fans don't hear much, full on guitar and drums raging along.

This Week in Sex: Fuck, Let's Have a Sex Party!

Million and millions served. And here I thought I was the only one looking for sex on the internet. I feel a little sorry for the people who get here thinking they are going to find porn--none of the links below are unsafe for work. A little sorry, but not much. Not as sorry as I feel for you when you see how lame TWiS is this week due to technical difficulties. But I hear you can search for sex on the internet, so go for it.

(P.S. There's a new browser for smut surfers that covers your tracks and has a panic button for when the boss comes over. I'll wait here while you go get it.)

Condoms for kids. Durex is making a condom for kids, not to be confused with the condom a kid ate in a hotel room in Las Vegas. Or the Condom Grandma, who educates senior citizens about sex, in case they have a senior sex moment. Or the Batman condoms.

Hands off the merchandise.  Password protected underwear.

Breakfast of champions. This guy has a glass eating fetish. It sounds as good as it looks.

"Nothing about having a 176 IQ means you have good judgment." Don't I know it. Runner-up Man of the Year, geneticist William French Anderson, is convicted of child molestation.

Communist porn. Well, not exactly. The Vietnamese government will be putting downloadable sex movies on the internet. Internet porn is banned in Vietnam, so this will be an "orthodox sex Web site" for educational purposes only. One of the goals is to help married couples who haven't had sex in more than a year. Nothing heats up your cold communist marriage faster than a good orthodox sex ed flick. (Better make some for British women, too.)

The Wank-at-thon will be televised. The BBC's Channel 4 will air a programme on the fundraising Masturbate-a-thon on August 5, and whiners say "it's bringing TV standards down once again." Lower than the baby mind reader?

Make your mother sigh (crying babies o'plenty)

From Jill Greenberg's "End Times" exhibition:

via qotile/slocum

Coming Soon to a Cellphone Near You: FEMA Disaster Spam

It wasn't so long ago that the high pitched beeps of the old Emergency Broadcast System were replaced with the odd electronic belching of the Emergency Alert System (EAS). But now FEMA (which oversees the system), the Department of Homeland Security and PBS are giving the EAS a digital makeover and are preparing the latest in useless federal notification systems - the Digital Emergency Alert System.

The new system will allow the government to send text, voice or video directly to people's phones, e-mail accounts, Treos and Blackberries. The digital EAS system will augment the existing system, in which a daisy chain of radio and TV stations notify each other of emergencies, and local and federal authorities can reach in and broadcast directly over all broadcast outlets if they so desire (although that's never happened, unfortunately. It would be such a wonderful Big Brother moment).

So the next time the flood waters are a-rising, FEMA will be able to send a short video message to everybody in the affected towns showing the ideal evacuation route. That sure would be a big improvement from the way our EAS unit worked two Delaware River floods ago, when we were instructed to announce that "a Civil Authority" had declared a "Civil Emergency Message." It was unclear what the emergency message was, which towns were affected, or what the proper procedures were. (We found out the next day that many towns along the river were under an evacuation order.) Under the new system, such scary and useless messages can be digitally delivered directly to the citizenry, complete with graphics.

More Bollywood Greatness

If you dug the Mohammed Rafi clip we posted a while back, here's one (14MB mpeg file) that may not be as famous, but it's definitely as infectious. Thanks to David Tibet for sending our way.

Your Free Will Ain't Worth Shit

Click on the image to take
blog.outer.court's fascinating click survey.

Black Metal from Lebanon and Israel

Oddly enough, one thing Israel and Lebanon actually have in common besides hurling artillery at each other is that they've produced some pretty solid society-hating Black Metal as of late. From Lebanon: Ayat's misery-soaked "The Possession" (Real Audio) taken from their album Al Nabi Moujrem Moughtasab Dajjal, and you can check out an interview here which curiously depicts their stance as not so much anti-Christian, but anti-everything including their own Arabic society at times (though the interviewee admits his day job is for a company owned by the Bin Laden family which he says "is cool").

Our Israeli offering comes courtesy of Tangorodrim, whose "My Intentions" (Real Audio) is off their new disc Unholy and Unlimited (out recently in limited run from Southern Lord). Tangorodrim's lineup is credited with instrumentation that includes "hate guitars, throat, unholy bass, death guitars, hell drums", and their liner notes give nods to the old school of Bathory and Hellhammer. They sound a bit like Venom too, and like Ayat, they also seem out for the general misanthropy route though they definitely seem to hate priests more than anyone (the album's back logo sports the phrase Antipriest Unholy Black Metal, and song titles include "Priestkiller" and "The Six In the Coffin (Not Including the Priest)". Maybe it's actually a beef against Rob Halford and KK Downing? Regardless, it's pretty raw, destructo, extreme stuff with pronounced leanings towards fuzzed, grotty production (both these bands revolve around a core of only two members) and it sounds like they'd like to keep it that way.

Jerry Seinfeld, The Rockin' Years

Bruce and Gary were so stunned when Jerry Seinfeld became their drummer that they didn't even notice Neil's pants... or moustaches.

This (youtube link) is Heath, Mike, and David rocking out at an REO Speedwagon concert.  Thank you, goodnight.

Mazen Kerbaj: Trumpet vs. Bomb

Between many trips to the BBC and CNN I’ve been checking in often over the past few days with Kerblog, a site by Lebanese improv trumpeter Mazen Kerbaj. Truth be told I’d never heard of Kerbaj or his music until I recently received a link to his site where he has been chronicling the events of the past week via some amazing drawings and more recently with written commentary.

While any description of events in Lebanon and Israel will be inherently political what struck me about the site was the very humanistic portrayal of daily life amid the chaos: the tension during the long pauses between bombings, the lack of sleep, the compulsion to watch sponge bob when you are unable to wander outdoors and also the desire to make music as a way of coping. He gets drunk, the milk in his fridge is going bad… Somehow the guys is able to have a sense of humor about the whole thing. At one point he writes:

"music and drawing are the only things keeping me going these days. i recorded two hours of bombs + trumpet from my balcony yesterday night. some bombs were really close (what kind of mouthpiece do the israeli pilots use to have this sound?). the tension you get in your playing is incredible… …but having regards for what is a good drawing or a good music track drives me crazy. i cannot stop saying after a bomb: "yeah, this one was huge. i'll leave a long silence then make a small sound to balance the track. this is totally crazy!"

You can hear Kerbaj’s music on his main site (http://kerbaj.com/) but he has also sent over an mp3 of his 6:30 minute piece (edited down from a 40 minute piece) consisting of trumpet, bombs and a healthy dose of silence. You can listen to it here.

Mazen was set to come to the US on a 5-date tour this week  but has obviously had to cancel. (Thanks to Woody for the link).

On a final note: it goes without say that people on both sides of the fence are not enjoying themselves much these days. I feel ridiculous having to spell this out but for those who might be inclined to read any sort of political message between the lines of this post: there isn’t any.

Beware of the Blog Statistics

Our humble blog just reached it's four millionth page view since being launched in February, 2005. I know that you're hoping I'll celebrate with a batch of MP3s about "four million," as I did when we passed the one million mark.

Alas, all I have to celebrate are a batch of fresh stats on Beware of the Blog, courtesy of Google Analytics and Doron. These are stats for one week in July, 2006.

Referrals: 34% of our readers come from google searches, 25% come directly to BOTB, 11% come from the WFMU website proper, and 30% come from the great beyond, which is to say, somewhere else.

Keywords: Of that 34% of our readers who are coming from google, what the hell are they searching for - MP3s, Videos, Cheesy Euro-Disco? Fat chance. Here are the five keywords and phrases, in order: "Sex Party," "WFMU," "Sex," "WFMU Blog" and "Sex Fuck." Which all goes to show that it is Amanda's This Week In Sex column which has saved our collective bloggy ass. Thank's Amanda! Let's have a sex party real soon. Sex Party Sex Party Sex Party Sex Party Sex Party Sex Party Sex Party. Fuck. Did I say Sex Party? I meant to say Sex Fuck.

Browsers: 52% of y'all are still using Internet Explorer - are you out of your minds? 32% use Firefox, 12% use Safari, 2% are using Opera and another 2% are looking at us through a kinescope.

Speed: Private Cable/DSL counts for 73%, "Corporate" users stand at 10% although I suspect that many of the cable and DSL users are also corporate but not identified as such. And dialup readers count for only 9%, which includes me on the weekends. I feel so special.

Screen Resolution: And the winner of the one week in July Beware of the Blog Screen Resolution Prize is.... 1024 by 768 pixels, accounting for 51% of the readership. The silver screenie goes to 1280 by 1024 (15%) and the bronze goes to 800 by 600 (9%).

Operating Systems: Windows systems check in at 80.5%, Mac OS's count for 18% and Linux garners a lowly 1%. That other half a percent? Abacuses and Unix.

Browser - OS Combinations: The most popular combination is Internet Explorer 6.0 with Windows XP which represented 44% of our readers. Firefox 1.5 or better and XP got 18% and Safari/Mac OSX scored a 5%.

That's a sampling of the stats for Beware of the Blog. We will now take the hint and turn the blog and WFMU itself into a big high speed sex party with trays of free spyware for all.

Hospital Radio

Last night I enjoyed a pleasant visit to my local Jersey City emergency room courtesy of a sudden and acute allergic reaction of mysterious origin.  One moment I was sitting on my bed watching TV, the next I was in an agony of itch, contorted with stabbing pains and puking on the kitchen floor.   Hello, ambulance.  Hello, hospital.

There's a lot of interesting things going on in an emergency room at 2 in the morning, as you may imagine.  Like the guy in the next bed over who had been mugged for his Ipod up on Palisade Avenue, and was running on so much adrenaline he wouldn't stay put.  He came over to my side of the curtain to congratulate me on not taking the anti-nausea shot the nurse wanted to give me, and then he asked if I thought that the lengthy razor slash down the side of his face looked "very bad".  I told him that in my not-at-all-professional opinion that it looked ok, and that I didn't think it would need stitches.  We were pretty simpatico after that.  After getting a prescription for an emergency allergy shot, and drinking some vile green concoction, I was allowed to leave, giving my buddy in the next bed over a thumbs up on the way out. 

The experience got me to thinking about entertainment options in the hospital.  Sure, eavesdropping on the neighbors or chatting up ward mates is kind of fun, but besides that, it's pretty boring to sit in a bed for hours at a time waiting for someone to come poke you with a needle or to take your blood pressure.  Hospitals in the UK look to make the time for their patients go faster with in-house radio or television stations.  According to the Hospital Broadcasting Association, "There are hospital radio or television services in around 90% of hospitals in the UK." 

Generally small volunteer-run operations, many of these radio stations have websites where patients or their friends can make requests, or you can see what might be playing at any given hour.  From Wikipedia: "Most stations are on closed-loop wires and can only be heard inside the hospital wards on headphones or speakers next to the patient's bed. There are a few stations using AM or FM free-to-air transmission... some stations broadcast for only a few hours each week, with others using computer technology to provide their service 24 hours a day... Ward staff in many hospitals report that when a record request show is in progress, patients forget that they are ill for a couple of hours, while they enjoy listening to their choice of music and the choices of their fellow patients."

Here's a list of UK Hospital radio station websites you can check out, and one American hospital where the phenomenon's jumped shores.  I've already requested that the Barnet Hospital station play "Itch and Scratch" by Rufus Thomas (hear it on Debbie's January 17, 2005 show here (2nd song)), for all the patients in the allergy ward.   

Hospital Radio UK

Hospital Radio Bedside

Hospital Radio Barnet

William Harvey Hospital

Bishop Auckland General Hospital

Hospital Radio Perth

Kingston Hospital Radio

Radio Tyneside Online

Hospital Radio Chelmsford

Miami Children's Hospital (part of the Radio Lollipop Project started in the UK)

Jan Svankmajer's Food Trilogy (videos)

If you've got the stomach for a heavy dose of gastronomic surrealism, here is Czech animator Jan Svankmajer three part movie called Food (Jidlo). Svankmajer made it in 1992, employing his trademark stop motion techniques with human actors and clay prosthetics.

Part One, Breakfast: A tale of food and automatons in which Mr. Babicky, Mr. Cecil and Mr. Albert take turns eating from, and providing the services of a food dispensing machine not unlike the kind that used to be found throughout the US at Horn and Hardart's Automats. [download mpeg video, 15 megs or youtube it]

Part Two, Lunch: The best of the three parts, in which an inattentive waiter forces two diners to partake in lunch without food. They eat everything on their table - the flowers, the tablecloth, their plates, their clothes, and in a nod to Charlie Chaplin's The Gold Rush, their shoes. But it doesn't stop there. [download mpeg video, 18 megs or youtube it]

Part Three, Dinner: The cannibalism continues at a higher end establishment, but unlike at lunch, the diners now have all the necessary garnishes and sauces to flavor their own body parts. [download mpeg video, 8 megs or youtube it]

More info on Svankmajer's Food here and here, and you can purchase it on DVD here. And if you like Eastern European stop motion animation, don't miss Mike Brent's Dark Strider site. via parumo

Roland P. Young's Isophonic Boogie Woogie

Roland P. Young was a huge advocate of underground music, culture, politics and radio, DJing in the Bay Area in the 1960's and 70's before creating the amazing Isophonic Boogie Woogie LP in 1980. Here, an entire realm of free sound gets channeled through Young's mind into what can best be described as "afro-minimal-free-electronic-drone music" (according to the site of Em, the Japanese label that just reissued this). It's a stunning statement indeed, with Young crafting his out sound with kalimba, sax, clarinet, bells, electronics and assorted other instruments, all flowing in their own space to amazing result. Like Larry Young's Lawrence of Newark, Philip Cohran's On the Beach or Love Cry Want's live 72 record, this is a highly cosmic sound experience rooted in the earth itself. You can find this CD here or here, and for now check out "Velvet Dream" (MP3).

How I Love My Country

A couple weeks ago I went home. Not exactly, but close enough. I went to Michigan. We were subjected to the incredible hospitality of my brother and his family and had a great visit. I spent many hours in their suburban backyard listening to the radio with the recorder engaged, scanning the broadcast bands for my radio series on this blog. As I ford through those tapes and digest all the reception, I thought I’d share something special I found on the AM dial there– WCXI. (Extended MP3 airchecks can be found at the end of this post.) 

During past visits, I hadn’t paid much attention to WCXI. Years ago, a contemporary country station with those call letters at about the same place on the dial was a mainstay in the Detroit market, and when I came across it I just assumed it was the same station. It isn’t. The old WCXI ceased to exist in the early 1990's, and their AM frequency (1130 kHz) is now the home of yet ANOTHER sports talk station. This WCXI, based out of Fenton, Michigan (just southwest of Flint) broadcasts at 1160 on the dial, and grabbed up the old call letters in 2000 to help brand their new “classic country” format in southeastern Michigan. And six years later, in an era where AM dial music stations across the country have been almost completely replaced by talk, news, sports and ethnic brokered programming, WCXI is bucking this trend and doing it the old fashioned way.

I don’t know exactly when classic country became a format, but I suspect it occurred in the early 1990's, coinciding with either the rise of Garth Brooks or the runaway success of Billy Ray Cyrus and his “Achy Breaky Heart.” Country music was changing (ugh), and traditional artists and old classics were increasingly left behind on newly popular “hot country” stations to make way for the new sound. While never a big player in the U.S. radio scene, the classic country format filled a niche out there for an (aging) audience who wanted to hear fiddles, pedal steel guitars, mandolins and rollicking Nashville rave-ups coming out of their radio. And who could blame them.

They Had No Space for Gyrations

The journal of psychopharmacology has just published a report suggesting that shrooming still makes for fun science:

36 middle-aged adults were dosed with either 30 milligrams of psilocybin (the stuff in magic mushrooms) or 40 milligrams of methylphenidate, the stimulant sold as Ritalin.

The ‘sessions’ lasted eight hours in a room where a person could listen to music, relax on a couch with eyeshades or talk with two monitors always in attendance. Each subject then took the other drug in a different session two months later.

Of the 36 people, 22 had a "complete" mystical experience as judged by several question-based scales used for rating such experiences. Many reported feelings of joy and peace, and a sense of transcending time and space. Two-thirds judged it to be among their top-five life experiences, equal to the birth of a first child or death of a parent.

The Press is making quite a fuss over the findings (Link) But Johns Hopkins (where the study was conducted) maintains that this is not a return to the 1960s and Chief Researcher Roland Griffiths insists that he is not Timothy Leary (link) 

                                                                    oh really....

On April 20th 1962 Timothy Leary conducted his famed Good Friday Experiment in the basement of Boston University’s Marsh Chapel.  He dosed a number of Andover Newton students with psilocybin and gave others a placebo. As Ben Griffin (one of the 20 students in the study) recounts for filmmaker Aron Ranen:  “almost all the persons who got psilocybin reported that this was a profound experience in their life.. not just that day.. but in their life”

The first 4:30 of this YouTube video (link) contains not only the remarks of Ben Griffin but a guided tour of the basement of Marsh Chapel where America’s first magic mushroom experiment took place.

 

extra: still more Shrooms in the news

New Zealand's Ghost Club

In the history of New Zealand modern music, David Mitchell and Denise Roughan are among the key players in both the Flying Nun and Xpressway label rosters of the 1980's and 90's that defined some of the most fertile moments of the country's scene. Denise started out in the Look Blue Go Purple in the 80's, who produced gorgeously humid strum-pop until its ladies splintered off into various other bands; David reigned supreme as a twisted axe-man with groups like Goblin Mix, the Plagal Grind, and probably most visibly to Yanks in the 3D's (a band that also included Denise). The 3D's music made quite a few waves both at home (where they opened for U2, Nirvana, and Pavement) and here in the USA where a major label subsidiary got them a bit of a foothold on college radio before they settled in with indie stalwart Merge later on. The music was a mixture of demented noise-pop, dark and weird, unsettling even when they cooled down into more tranquil realm, and somewhat fit Mitchell's wonderfully creepy, seafaring-Clive Barker artwork that adorned their sleeves. I'd always been a huge fan of his guitar playing most, sounding like he had harnessed the sound of effects pedals plugged together backwards into amps about to melt, his distorted wah-wah solos sounded shorted-out, his squiggled, fuzzy sustain tones complementing his unusual  voice perfectly. Finally seeing them live in the 90's was a huge thrill. When the 3D's disappeared, Mitchell turned up in a rock trio for a 2000 broadcast WFMU aired of a Dunedin festival (kindly shared with us by the recordists at KFJC), and I was thrilled to hear his guitar playing as intense and twisted as ever. Now, Mitchell and Roughan have moved to London, started a new band called Ghost Club, and are about to release their second album in July, according to an email I got from the third member of the group, Jim Abbott. They definitely pick up where the 3D's left off (here's an MP3 of "Cool Air" from their debut album Ghostclubbing, thanks to the band), though Mitchell says the new album is "less gnarly" guitar-wise and heavier content-wise. Mitchell also appears as "David Evil" on a new UK 10" record out now by the band Evil, which you can read more about here and also via our neighbors down the pike, Siltblog.

Rebel Without A Pause

Allow the ornately bejeweled and utterly beguiling James "Rebel" O'Leary (and his totally unenthused family) to mesmerize your senses with this music video of "Walkin' the Floor Over You" [download video, wmv,  7MB]. Making direct eye contact with Rebel's blingin' belt for over 10 seconds will result in corneal damage.

This clip was featured in a 2-hr long, self-produced, public access rockumentary that Irwin purchased from Rebel's family years ago. In the full-length video, Rebel shows off his collection of photographs of himself posing next to many country music greats (though his shots next to Dolly Parton and Crystal Gayle could use a little photoshop magic to uh, preserve authenticity). In any case, we think you'll admire Rebel's grandeur, turquoise rings and all.

'Til Someone Loses An Eye (mp3s)

(If you want to go directly to the MP3 files, jump, you sucker.)

Every year scores of people are severely injured or even killed in household accidents, making an eventual all-out war on architects, household appliance manufacturers, and interior designers virtually unavoidable. However, until then we have to stay vigilant, so the Office for Domestic Preparedness has urged WFMU to post some educational audio to increase the domestic preparedness level of the American public. Domestic Preparedness has always been one of the prime objectives of WFMU, so we are more than happy to comply with this request.

In 1999, the now defunct Superpickle Music Arts label released a compilation called 'Til Someone Loses An Eye, featuring 24 songs and 28 safety tips by 29 different bands and individuals. The safety tips are 30 second long Public Service Announcements, and running this CD in shuffle mode beats most college radio stations by a long shot, both musically and in terms of useful content.

Unfortunately, this magnificent compilation is out of print, and it is hard to find information or more music of most of the bands featured on it, but here is the whole album in MP3 format. As a bonus, you get a cover version of a song by Queen and a crash course in elementary logic.