WFMU's Beware of the Blog

A New Venue in New Jersey

Venues: Central New Jersey has had it's abundance of home venues/ house shows/locations for some time, changing from address to address in a moment's notice, but a fairly active scene. We recently lost New Brunswick's Court Tavern, a club that booked original music for decades, through many genres. It was a huge loss to the patrons of the bar, as well as bands needing a venue in that area to play, who were from all corners of the country, and to anyone just needing that live music fix.

Two days ago I went to the grand opening show at the Warehouse Motor Club, a new venue in Middlesex, NJ. It's a team-run, decent sized space in a cement walled warehouse. The venue capacity looks to be well over 400 people; I didn't see an occupancy sign. Initial impressions: they're gonna have to move the slot car track in the back if they have bigger shows; more people in it may make it sound a little less reverberant, but there is a need for more sound absorption material in the venue's future. It's an all-ages venue, so there is no alcohol, which will bring loyal youngsters, maybe alienate the heavy drinkers; matinees may be the way to go; there is a snack bar. There was a bit of record distro action as well as a space for band merch. I didn't check the bathrooms, so no latrine report today! It's got the racing flag motif and signs all over the place, they've got branding going on, light trusses, what looks to be a sturdy stage, and an arm wrestling station! All a great way to start, and time will tell how everything goes; they'll figure out what works and what doesn't. I certainly wish them the best of luck! Sunday's show featured Night Birds, Altered Boys and Real Cops.  If they can get people to migrate to and venture from further areas, we may have a great new energetic spot in New Jersey, which is sorely needed. Clip on those jumper cables!

Don’t Say “Gorilla” if You’re Wearing a Monkey Costume: The Monkees’ 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee

by Ryk McIntyre - 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee

What's on Network Awesome today?

There is a little-known story from the history of The Monkees, the band that were a bunch of TV executives' answer to the overwhelming popularity of The Beatles. They were initially hired just to sing the songs and be the faces of the show. Over time, the band wanted to show they were more than pretty faces/actors and started demanding to play on their own songs, as well as perform live as a real rock ‘n’ roll band. So, out they went on tour.

Now, whoever put the tour together picked an opening act that had started to gain acclaim in England and, on the basis of that, wanted to play in America. All the promoter knew was this was Pop music too. So imagine the scene when, in front of an audience of mostly young teen girls and their parents, Jimi Hendrix is doing his opening spot, complete with guitar humping and the like.

And that’s as good an intro to the wonder that is 33 1/3 Revolutions Per Monkee.

Come on Down To Noise Park and Meet Some Friends of Mine

Noise Park, a pretty funny new tumblr that depicts noise icons as South Park characters.  Below is Aaron Dilloway.  

The Heretic Children Of The God Emperor of Dune Messiah

A strange coincidence when you are writing about someone, up against a deadline, and they die. No time to go back and make it a memorial, no point in going forward with what would now be an obsolete piece. A stranger coincidence in that the now never-completed post was to be about a never-completed project of Jean "Moebius" Giraud, the legendarily failed film collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky: Dune.
What follows is a free-imagining of a re-imaginging of the negated future of that impossible past:

Interview with dave phillips: "Any form of definition will eventually work against itself"

The most important thing to convey about Dave Phillips is that he fuses rawness and intensity with meticulous composition, rendered with an indelible form of scarcity. Whether it is short, sharp, and sparsely explosive tracks, or what Ron Lessard called “Otto Meuhl having his way with Hermann Nitsche”, Phillips uses body sounds, amphibian field recordings, conventional musical instruments, or things like party balloons, with widely varied results, but most apparently as a means to “activate primordial shared emotions otherwise hidden by civilized experience”. Not limited to that, “dp” has been participating in various punk, hardcore, metal acts or projects that are as light hearted as covering the B-52s, or the somewhat absurdist collaborations with Tom Smith (To Live And Shave In .LA), or Schimpfluch Gruppe, and others, since 1984.

Full interview beneath the fold...

Roadburn Recap 2012 Companion to Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine

Tilburg, Netherlands was the place to be this weekend if you appreciate heavy music AT ALL. It's my 2nd trip to Roadburn, and not likely to be my last. This is the festival that screams community in all the right ways. The festival's head, Walter, crafts a lineup from the roots of doom, rock and riff heavy original rock to the latest avant garde satanic acoustic bands, and it all works! This is the companion post to go with my program airing today, April 19th from Noon-3pm (if you're reading this late, well go check out the archive!!). I hope listening to the music creates the feeling of what goes on at the fest; not likely though, as good as it may sound! There is just a sense of overwhelming appreciation at Roadburn, this year with one day curated by Voivod, and featuring a one man art show by drummer Away who has illustrated many album covers for Voivod and others, who also designed the main festival poster. The banners for Roadburn were waving at me when I walked out of the train station and I was happy to wave back to Away's artwork! Note the little flying saucers on the top corner of the banners! Feast your eyes on 200 photos below...and the rest of the experiences after the jump!

 

Numismaticism Update UPDATE: OMG, Canada!

No wonder Canada isn’t making pennies anymore—they’re using the copper for their new quarters! While the US goes on churning out those sad commemorative quarters that no one even knows about (Chicasaw?), Canada is creating the Greatest Quarters Ever, oversized cupronickel disks featuring bas-relief full-color dinosaurs—four of ‘em, starting with our old friend  Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, and they are photo-luminescent so when you look at it in the dark, you see the glow-in-the-dark Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai skeleton!

And the obverse has the head of Queen Elizabeth, as per usual, but when you look at that side in the dark, you see the glow-in-the-dark depiction of her actual reptilian form!

Canadian money is so bad-ass! Next to the Thunk Tank Bieb (now the official currency of Iceland), it is the most bad-ass money in the world.

Jim Simon: How Could Such a Man Be Forgotten?

By Thomas Michalski

The Films of Jim Simon

What's on Network Awesome today?

Before the videos you’re about to watch (just watched?) landed in my email inbox, I had never heard of Jim Simon. This, in and of itself, was not surprising (there are many things I’ve never heard of), but where things got interesting was trying to learn about the apparently acclaimed animator and finding that the internet doesn’t know that much about him either. The man they once called “the Black Walt Disney” doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page and the collected clips of his original work on YouTube don’t even add up to 7 full minutes, but the scant few items of substance that Google can come up with tell a fascinating story. On one hand, it’s a tale about the challenges of being Black and ambitious in America, but it’s also more universal than that -- a story about humanity’s creative spark, the circumstances that conspire to extinguish it, and how it can be rekindled even after all seems lost.

At a young age Jim Simon’s parents divorced and his mother moved the children from Darlington, South Carolina, where he worked on his uncle’s cotton and tobacco farm, to New York City. While attending junior high, an art teacher noticed his natural talents and encouraged him to attend New York’s High School of Art

Decoder Knocks You Over

By Robert Ham - Movie - Decoder (Muscha, 1984)

What's on Network Awesome today?

To understand the power that a film like Decoder can wield over the people watching it, try this experiment: turn down the brightness on your computer screen until it is completely blank (or for the low-tech version, just shut your eyes while the video plays). Even if you don't have a working knowledge of the German language, the Foley effects, atmospheric sound, and background/foreground music meshed with the tone of the dialogue should orient you to the action happening on the other side of your eyelids and disorient you in equal measure. The disgusting squish of the bottle of condiments, the sexy throb of Soft Cell's "Seedy Films," the chirpy swing of the Muzak played in the fast food restaurant, and the squelching fritz of the lead character's sonic experiments will combine to leave you feeling jelly-limbed and slightly nauseous.

Where We At

Smiles of a Summer Night

From the Country that Brought You Lutefisk and Vidkun Quisling

I’ve written before (somewhat incoherently) about the Norwegian black metal scene—Until the Light Takes Us, Lords of Chaos, the murder of Mayhem’s Euronymous—but it’s thanks to WFMU’s Music Director Brian Turner that I know how to vote to get Euronymous’ picture painted on the tail of an airplane of the Norwegian National Airline.

Apparently, they’re having a contest—in Norwegian!—to vote for the dead famous Norwegian who most deserves to have his or her portrait painted on a plane. There are so many dead famous Norwegians (“The only famous Norwegian is a dead Norwegian”) that they have to have four separate contests! Euronymous is currently in FIRST PLACE in the voting to have his portrait on a plane that flies in and out of Oslo,  beating out the likes of Grete Waitz and King Olav V.

You should totally vote for Euronymous! Just remember, his real name was Øystein Aarsteth. You just go to the Oslo page of the website, find Øystein’s name, and click on the heart to the right of it. Yes, it’s in Norwegian, but it’s really not that hard. And also, don’t be trying to vote more than once; the Norwegians play fair and square, and they know if Du har allerede stemt.

And in case you need a reminder, here’s why Euronymous deserves to be painted on an airplane.

The Language of Humanity: Jerzy Kucia

by Daniel Creahan - Watch - The Films of Jerzy Kucia

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Jerzy Kucia’s work occurs in a world held at arm’s length from reality; the familiar forms of humanity -- our bodies, accessories, instruments -- all remain in the foreground, but floating in a vague disconnect from each other, lending each other a weight not always possible in the linear approach of traditional animation approaches.  Even time and movement find themselves removed in a way that’s startlingly refreshing, and, perhaps more notably, remarkably vocal.

"There is no pilot" - Laurie Anderson on "Good Morning Mr. Orwell"

On January 1, 1984, PBS aired Nam June Paik's "Good Morning Mr. Orwell." The entire concept, of PBS airing a series of bizarre happenings with artists ranging from Salvador Dali to Oingo Boingo, is pretty hard to imagine nowadays. Actually watching clips from the program is even stranger. A collection of clips from the program can be seen here, and gives a slight taste of what it must have been like to watch the program back in the day. John Cage plays amplified cactus with Takehisa Kosugi, Oingo Boingo is...Oingo Boingo, and Allen Ginsberg chants a sing songy tune with Arthur Russell on cello. The most striking piece, though, is Laurie Anderson's solo piece, "The Language of the Future." The piece also appears on Anderson's wonderful release, "United States Live." Her 1984 T.V. performance is transfixing: 

 

"Man, oh man, you know, like, oh man! It's so...digital!" And she just meant that the relationship was on again, off again, always two things, switching, current runs through bodies, and then...it doesn't. It was a language of sounds, of noise, of switching, of signals. It was the language of the rabbit, the caribou, the penguin, the beaver, a language of the past. Current runs through bodies and then it doesn't. On again. Off again. Always two things switching. One thing instantly replaces another. It was the Language of the Future."

Punk Reverance: Derek Jarman's "Jubilee"

by Thomas Michalski

Movie - Jubilee (Derek Jarman, 1978)

What's on Network Awesome Today?

After the release of Derek Jarman’s Jubilee in 1978, Vivienne Westwood, outraged at what she saw as a misrepresentation of punk, took to her then preferred medium, the t-shirt, to express her displeasure. The “Open T-Shirt to Derek Jarman,” with its wordy scrawl, is a rather confusing cultural artifact in that it now seems rather counterproductive. For starters, punk certainly had more important enemies in 1978 than a queer experimental filmmaker and visual artist, a fellow member of the counterculture whether she liked it or not, and what’s more, some of the language seems rather homophobic, being that it attributes the film’s fancier bits to “a gay (which you are) boy’s love of dressing up and playing at charades.” Of course, all of that is to say nothing of the sheer impracticality of using a t-shirt to communicate a lengthy essay. But to be fair, it was a time when what punk meant, what it was trying to say and what it wanted, was a fiercely debated topic, especially in the UK and especially among those who would claim the movement as their own, Still, in hindsight, Jubilee seems to not only encapsulate what was in the air in the late 70s, but also punk’s roots and hints of its future.

Jubilee started life as a planned 8 mm film about the actress/model Jordan, whose outrageous couture and attitude fascinated Jarman, but the project soon grew into something more ambitious, “a film about punk”, before transcending even that broad description. Writing in The Guardian, Stuart Jeffries explains that,

In case you didn't feel like showing up - Volume 30

Let's break our usual pattern of directing your attention towards things from the past for a second. There will be an amazing show of fragile beauty and darkness at Saint Vitus in Greenpoint, Brooklyn tonight, Thursday March 15. Picastro is coming down from Canada exclusively for a one off show and will be flanked by Sondra Sun-Odeon and Yosh/Bloody Panda. For more details please check out the FB invite.

The regular program resumes after the jump.

Fehérlófia: Hungarian Folktale and Psychedelic Trip

By Kristen Bialik - Movie - Fehérlófia (The Son of the White Mare, 1981)

What's on Network Awesome today?

Without knowing you at all, I can say that Fehérlófia is unlike any other movie you’ve seen. Sure, it’s animated. That’s familiar. And sure, there are some recognizable images. Like, in that the English title is “Son of the White Mare,” and there are both sons and white mares. In fact, the storyline itself is incredibly familiar, and in a way, almost universal. Based in ancient folklore, the story is culled from ancient tales of the Scythans, Huns, and Avars but it taps into a shared collection of stories around the world. Ones with

Seize the Time: Pat Thomas, Black Power, and Listen, Whitey!

As author Pat Thomas puts it, “Every revolution needs a soundtrack!” And in the late-'60s/early-'70s, the soundtrack and the revolution were often one in the same. In hs new book, Listen, Whitey!: The Sounds of Black Power 1965-1975 (Fantagraphics), and companion CD/double-LP of the same name (Light in the Attic), Thomas examines the Black Power movement of the 1960s and ‘70s, the explosion of creativity happening across the musical spectrum at the time, and the now-obscure Black power protest anthems that resulted from the two movements intertwining.

A writer, producer, and musician, Thomas has also worked at Water and 4 Men With Beards, where he began his research for the Listen, Whitey! project. Surely the crate-digging chops he honed while at those labels came in handy when tracking down some of the impossibly deep musical relics from the heyday of the would-be black revolution (most notably Black Panther house band The Lumpen).

It’s almost shocking that no one has explored this topic in depth until now, given the longevity of the Black Power aesthetic and our continued obsession with "The '60s." When taking into account the rocky state of our nation  (politically, socially, and culturally) and the fledgling Occupy movement creeping into the mainstream, it seems not only timely but essential. (Although one shudders to think what a consensus-driven Occupy soundtrack might sound like.) 

Poetry Out Loud, Couples Rock, Policeband And America's Never Ending Font Of Unrecognized Genius

Clint of De Stijl Records hipped me to Poetry Out Loud, a series of LPs made by two American couples in the 1960-70s documenting their group experiments in "taking poetry off the page." -- and I can see why -- the recordings, wilth all manner of voices male and female, chanting, wailing, moaning, soaked and fried in tape delay with tranced-out percussion uncannily recall my own recordings with another double couple band. Lest you think De Stijl, digitally rereleasing all ten of the Poetry Out Loud albums, could have had a financial motive in contacting me, ask yourself what financial motive could one really have in putting out poetry records in this or any age?

Marco Fusinato

 

 

10 Seconds from Every Top-100 Song Ever + A Free Cut-up Software!

1959 | 1960 | 1961 | 1962 | 1963 | 1964 | 1965 | 1966 | 1967 | 1968 | 1969 | 1970 | 1971 | 1972 | 1973 | 1974 | 1975 | 1976 | 1977 | 1978 | 1979 | 1980 | 1981 | 1982 | 1983 | 1984 | 1985 | 1986 | 1987 | 1988 | 1989 | 1990 | 1991 | 1992 | 1993 | 1994 | 1995 | 1996 | 1997 | 1998 | 1999 | 2000 | 2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011

In 1959, Billboard began releasing their annual charts of the top 100 songs of each year.  Here are mp3s with 10 seconds of every single top 100 song ever.  Follow the lists along with the music on this site.  There are some errors here, so bear with me and do point out major imperfections in the comments.  If you've been following my column in the past, all of these mp3s are improved versions, with crossfades in between tracks and smarter choices of clips.

I produced these supercuts with a software that Frederic Cornu and I developed together.  Fred is a genius and I'm eternally grateful to him.  This software is VERY SIMPLE to use and 100% FREE.  It simply takes a music playlist of your choice (from iTunes or a similar program), finds the loudest point of each song and stitches all the songs together.  These supercuts are useful to condense information and I think they're totally beautiful too.

In a few minutes, you can easily make supercuts of your music collection, even if you are a luddite.  Download the file below, unzip the folder and click "Run Supercut-O-Matic"...there'll be a button to press in the program to give you further instructions.

UPDATE!  You can get improved versions of the Supercut-O-Matic at this link.  The new version gives you more options, such as changing the size of each clip, the crossfade, and more!

Download Supercut-O-Matic for Mac (2mb zip file)

Download Supercut-O-Matic for Windows (3mb zip file)

Source code for Linux

Once you've made your files, send them to me (contact info is provided in the program's helpme file) and I will release YOUR MUSIC on a CD!  Do you have a completist collection of yodeling music, blues singers, minimal-synth, presidential speeches or tuba solos?  Use Supercut-O-Matic and SEND ME THE RESULTS!  Please do contact me with any feedback.

"Supercuts Supercut", a CD with the best submissions I get, is available to anybody who pledges $75 or more to my radio show in the current WFMU fundraising marathon!  Use the widget below to pledge to the greatest radio station on the planet and help us broadcast for another year.  Also, if you pledge $30 or more to my show, I will remix a top 100 song of your choice LIVE on the air.