It's a city with 1000 slogans, but no defining song. Baltimore's bred and acted as a magnet for untraditional instrument builders, Wham City's Fort-Thunder-inspired transplants, and the Baltimore Club stylings of DJ Technics, Rod Lee and many more, as heard on television's The Wire.
Feeling sluggish? Need some energy? Then I got what you need, Melt-Banana covering Toots & The Maytals' 1969 ska classic "Monkey Man". Set the volume to 11 and put it on repeat. You'll feel better in no time.
Everyone has seen a live visual presentation (i.e. Shakespeare in the Park), and everyone has heard a live audio presentation (i.e. WFMU). And most people have seen a TV show or a movie (i.e. Beavis and Butt-Head, Baby Mama). Some people have even been told they're being treated to an audiovisual presentation (i.e. Dark Side of the Moon Laser Light Shows). Until last week, I didn't think anyone had made an live audiovisual presentation that really truly was aural and visual at the same time, together. Then I saw Meat Beat Manifesto on Saturday at the Highline Ballroom.
Zillion-dollar budgets can give electronic music performers like Daft Punk and Kraftwerk an edge in creating visceral visual thrills at their concerts - you can't really do much more for a techno fan than have real robots playing a concert. But Meat Beat Manifesto has taken a well-worn and considerably less expensive approach - collaging video behind the performers onstage - and taken it to a new zenith of accomplishment in that medium.
Meat Beat mastermind Jack Dangers and Mark Pistel from the political hardcore band Consolidated stood onstage controlling the otherworldly jungle-dubstep-trance beats and squiggles, and at the far right live drummer Lynn Farmer kept incredible pace throughout the entire performance. On the far left stood Ben Stokes, the visual programmer for the show, who's worked with everyone from Ministry to Public Enemy to Levi's. He grabbed video samples of Captain Beefheart, old BBC Radiophonic Workshop-esque explanations of sonic technology, Dali's eye-cutting nightmare, The Invaders, Sammy Davis Jr., Harrison Ford as President James Marshall in Air Force One, Star Trek, Billie Holiday, and even Animal, playing in tandem with a live feed of the drummer.
Unlike so many other video shows, clips didn't just sit lay flat and stuttery in the background. They were accompanied by audio, and were layered over existing beats, scratched, stretched, and re-sampled in a way that fit in with the theme of the song - video of nuclear bomb blasts dropped to the beat, sounds and videos of Rastas burning weed edged their way into a drugs song (well, at least the one that referenced them the most overtly). Dangers and Stokes were always working together in the audiovisual realm, as well - you could almost imagine the behind-the-scenes dialogue: "Jack, I've found about 15 clips of people falling from the tops of buildings, can we work the sound of them screaming into the set?" or "Ben, could you work on finding a video of James Brown playing this one sample I use in this song?" Magic like that doesn't just pop out of a video mixer, or an audio mixer for that matter.
The most impressive part about the whole thing was Meat Beat's mastery in weaving overt political commentary into the show.
This week marks the arrival (April 29, 1937) and unfortunately the departure (April 25, 2005) of The Wildest One Man Band Hunch Machine that ever stalked the planet. Hasil "The Haze" Adkins wrote, performed and lived out his wild-ass rock & roll dreams with a sincere ferocity unmatched by fellow humans north or south. Rattling the walls of his Madison, West Virginia shack, Hasil would croon sweet odes to commodity meat and serenade the fickle moon above with his hot dog reverie. Early on, he'd mail out his home-recorded concoctions to the country music stars of the day, hoping to place a song or grab a plum spot on a traveling package show. Like the rest of the world, Nashville would have to wait a few decades to get hep to Hasil's chicken walk-inspired genius.
Philadelphia's got a lot to be proud of. According to Philly Boy Roy, well there's hoagies, Rocky, Frank's Soda, them Eagles, Dead Milkmen, them Hooters, and laser GG Allin. With Mr. Ziegler's endorsements duly noted, what follows is a sampling - by no means comprehensive - of some of the other Philadelphia artists you'll be able to hear on WFMU's Free Music Archive.
Mp3s from Bad News Bats, Boogie Witch, Clockcleaner, Fursaxa, King Kong Ding Dong, Mincemeat or Tenspeed, Mountain High, The Original Sins, Phil Moore Browne, Sonic Liberation Front, The Strapping Fieldhands and Kurt Vile after the jump. Feel free to suggest more by email or in the comments.
[ There are 18 MP3s in this post. All but one feature gratuitous yodeling. Some even include bird impersonations. Don't say you weren't warned. ]
Applied chaos theory in the information age? Whatever you want to call it, it happens to me quite frequently. Stuff somehow makes its way onto my hard drive, and I have no clue where it came from. So I had this MP3 compilation called "Yodel!" lying around for a while, and the title and artist information all seemed very suspicious. (Like a song called "oooooooooo" by "That DUDE" or such.) It doesn't seem to be ripped from one of the countless commercially available yodeling compilations, which makes it a bit harder (at least for me) to figure out what these songs are actually called and who performed them. I was not 100% successful, but I am confident that you can help me fill in the blanks. In exchange you get lots of free yodeling. Here it is, with all the (hopefully correct) info I could gather:
Standouts are definitely the three songs by the Cackle (DeZurik) Sisters. You can get much more music by them at the 365 Days Project. And please, if you know any of the missing artists/titles, leave a comment.
One of the first sites I ever found that did interesting audio collage work was bits & pieces, a project put together way back in 1999 (and still going strong) by one peter m traub as part of his studies at Dartmouth. The bits & pieces site consists of programs that automatically trawl the Web for audio files and throw together randomized mixes of those sounds based on a few general remixing templates. You're not gonna get a Jason Forrest album*, but if you have a listen long enough you will hear some fascinating remixes, somewhat reminiscent of number shortwave radio stations. I fondly recall hearing one mix long ago that juxtaposed the Scooby Doo theme song with Charlton Heston's line from Planet of the Apes: "Get your filthy paws off me, you damn dirty apes!"
* Well, not unless someone wants to make bits & pieces v2.0.
A few years ago, I was scanning through a batch of used reel to reel tapes I'd bought, when I came across one which contained several tracks which were much less mainstream than the rest of the material on these tapes. I was particularly taken with a pair of songs which the original owner of the tapes had indicated were by Bernie Green, and described as "More Than You Can Stand". Both tracks were fantastic, and I assumed that the notation was a joke about the "fringe" quality of the material.
A search through the internet found enough references for me to learn that Bernie Green had released at least three albums, one in conjunction with both the great Henry Morgan and Mad Magazine, and another one called "Bernie Green Plays More Than You Can Stand In Hi-Fi". I quickly snapped up copies of all three albums via various online sellers. While the Mad album (and the other one) have their moments (and both of those have been reissued on CD), "More Than You Can Stand", which as far as I can tell has not been re-issued since its original 1950's release, is the real killer.
Today I've provided four of my favorite tracks. The music strikes me as a combination of Spike Jones and Raymond Scott. This is particularly true of "Ragging the Scale", which for my money is the standout track, particularly for the role played by the timpanist, who must have worked long and hard to be able to do things he does here.
One other note is that the calliope on the final selection is played by the great Dick Hyman.
(Incidentally, the scan of the cover is quite clearly a composite from two separate scans, as my scanner can't take in the full cover, and I can't seem to make the two parts scan at the same degree of darkness!)
There I was just cruising Hulu to see how my dad's favorite television show holds up 15 years down the line. Kelly is still hot, Bud is still a dick, Al is still stuck in the shoe store etc etc but THE FUCKING THEME MUSIC IS DIFFERENT! It's supposed to be the VOCAL VERSION of "LOVE AND MARRIAGE" but now it's some goddamn terrible royalty-free bullshit MIDI instrumental impression of a song that might sound like "Love and Marriage" if you are Tiny James and had been stuck inside a Regular Size Vodka Peach for four days.
I don't think it's possible not to feel a bit more joy after listening to New Musik, who give us one of the most upbeat and uplifting songs I've heard this week.
All MP3 and RealAudio links are streaming links from the WFMU archives.
At the risk of sounding like a salesman, I want to tell you about a promotional event that happened Wednesday night at Southpaw in Brooklyn, not because I'm particularly enchanted by what was being sold - I'm more in awe of the way the event was put together. Yamaha hired a bunch of excellent experimental electronic musicians to sell its blinky handheld version of the future, the Tenori-on. Robert Lippok of To Rococo Rot, Pole, I Am Robot and Proud, Sutekh, Safety Scissors and Nathan Michel were given one of the instruments a few weeks before the mini tour (NYC and
San Francisco) began, and each created a set that was based on
Tenori-on to some degree. Here's what it looks like:
Robert Lippok, Sutekh, and Nathan Michel used the small but functionally expansive unit to create almost every aspect of their performances; the lights glow on both sides of the instrument, so while they programmed beats, melodies, and soundscapes on the fly the audience was able to see from the other side exactly which buttons were being pressed.
I Am Robot and Proud and Safety Scissors used the device sporadically throughout their performances, and Pole, who put on the most entrancing performance of the night, only seemed to be using Tenori-on a little bit, mostly to trigger the internal synthesizer sounds - they sounded kind of limp on top of the rest of his throbbing basslines and expansive reverb.
The middle of the set, though, was the real-deal pitch of the night: the creator, Toshio Iwai, took the stage for about an hour to describe in vivid detail how the Tenori-on evolved from concept to completion. And it was a pitch straight from the heart, unlike anything I've ever witnessed.
Thanks to my simple gmail address I get a lot of mail sent to me on accident. My favorite unintentional correspondent is a juvenile correction officer from down south. He mistakenly sends me lots of pictures of juvenile young women posing in hotel rooms, with captions like "Buddy, isn't she hot!" Last night he fwded me an office thread containing an mp3 clip of a distraught mother calling 911. Of course the clip is totally amazing (mom is ready to kill her 15 year old son who is being disrespectful), but it is a bit surprising that the people in charge have no problem using their work email accounts to fwd this stuff around:
While walking to work today I heard a rasta guy leading a workers strike in front of an office building while a generator hummed in the background inflating a giant skunk. It sounded really great with lots of sound bouncing off of the skyscrapers around the world trade center and unfortunately I did not have the presence of mind to start recording until a few minutes had gone by. Though I missed most of the good stuff here are a few (loud and noisy) minutes captured for your auditory pleasure.
This post is not being made with any political slant in mind. This is just random found audio. I've excerpted a surreal "I want my money" refrain as well given that its April 15th and all.
WFMU's own sound/image/video collage mistress People Like Us (aka Vicki Bennett) is being featured in a gallery exhibition next month. In case you weren't already aware, People Like Us is an amazing artist, DJ, and podcaster, sampling and reappropriating audio, music, film, television, found footage, and anything else she can get her hands on, resulting in surreal and sublime juxtapositions that bend one's perception of culture.
We Edit Life: a retrospective exhibition alt.gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Opening Night: 15 May 2008, 6 - 8pm Exhibition: 16 May - 12 July 2008
The exhibition will focus on the concept of collage, showing an edited selection of Vicki's work, including twenty album releases, numerous singles and remixes, live sets, seven films and over a hundred and fifty radio shows. Dr. Drew Daniel of Matmos even composed an essay for the the exhibition! On top of that, We Edit Life also marks the launch of a new compilation CD, "Smiling Through My Teeth," curated by People Like Us for the Sonic Arts Network.
People Like Us has previously shown work at Tate Modern, Sydney Opera House, Pompidou Centre and Sonar, and performed radio sessions for John Peel and Mixing It, as well as WFMU. In 2006, she was the first artist to be given unrestricted access to the entire BBC Archive, no small feat.
Since my MacBook went and died on me the other day, leaving this week's blog post quarantined within its wretched soul, I present you with an oldie-but-goodie. Courtesy of Polar Alert, a stunning exhibition of blank cassette j-cards, a design world all its own. This should take you right back to the days of pause-play on your Radio Shack deck, snippets of DJ Red Alert rocking on KISS-FM.
Freezepop are not just a band. They're the first band in the world to become popular almost entirely because of their appearances not in newspapers, radio, magazines, or the blogosphere, but in video games. As a result, they're a convincing picture of the near future of music, gaming, and the worlds of art and commerce that surround both.
Just a few years ago, Freezepop's songs were sharing the stage with karaoke-style covers of "Smoke on the Water," "Ziggy Stardust," and "Spanish Castle Magic." Now, through a combination of good timing and great songwriting, they're sitting right up there with Bowie, Radiohead, and Blue Öyster Cult. Not karaoke-style Blue Öyster Cult, but the REAL Blue Öyster Cult...in a way. *
The Boston 3-piece has at its core The Duke of Pannekoeken, a programmer of infectious synth-pop and also of music for highly infectious video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Liz Enthusiasm is Freezepop's bouncing, purple-haired frontwoman whose deadpan delivery is every bit as plasticky and cutting as their synth lines. The two were kind enough to answer a bunch of my stupidly detailed questions about music, licensing, the Cardigans, and the concepts of "fun" and "songwriting" in rhythm gaming. If you haven't experienced rhythm gaming or Freezepop, you might want to watch these videos to get an idea of what you're dealing with. The first is Freezepop's official video for "Less Talk More Rokk," and the second is the same song being played to perfection in Guitar Hero II.
Trent Wolbe: How have your audiences and concerts changed and/or grown over the years?
Liz Enthusiasm: Well, when we were in the smaller games (Frequency and Amplitude) it was more hardcore gamers who came to our shows, but Guitar Hero has really opened it up to a lot of people. One thing I really like is that there are all kinds of people there, all ages groups and different scenes. It's pretty cool.
TW: Duke - you work at Harmonix, the company that makes the best Rhythm games in the world. What is Freezepop's relationship to Harmonix, exactly?
The Duke of Pannekeoken: why thank you kindly for the praise... i hope to think that harmonix has worked really hard to try and bring fun, interactive music experiences to people! the relationship is pretty straight-forward... just after freezepop was started back in '99, i joined harmonix as a sound designer and composer and was tasked with writing music for our first game FreQuency, as well as authoring a number of other tracks in the game. after a couple of years doing that, i moved up and became the audio director for the Karaoke Revolution series of games, AntiGrav, and Guitar Hero 1 & 2. Since then, i've transitioned over to being a producer and lead the team that made Phase for the iPod which was released last fall. All of this has opened up a great opportunity for freezepop to include tracks in almost all of those games and reach whole new groups of fans. it's been amazing the reaction we've gotten to our songs in the games and has brought out lots of gamers to our shows.
TW: Do you write Freezepop songs and hope they'll end up in Rock Band, or see a hole in Rock Band, for example, and write to fill it?
LE: We generally use pre-existing songs of ours. There are certain ones that are just more obvious choices as to what would work well in the video game context.
DoP: For the most part, it's just a song we've written, and have gotten an opportunity to include it in a game, and then we've made some changes to the track that will make it play more fun. the only exception to this really was Less Talk More Rokk which was pretty much explicitly written knowing it was going to go into Guitar Hero 2. But it sounds pretty much like our other songs so it wasnt much of a stretch. We have added guitars and beefed up some of the instrumental parts in Brainpower to make sure it's super fun to play in Rock Band.
I wasn't ready for the overwhelming emotional impact the Alvarius B & Cerberous
Shoal track would bring me, and repeated listens don't seem to make it any less impressive. And I've been hearing great stuff for a few weeks from Kurt Vile, so his release Constant Hitmaker must be a work of beauty. DJ Small Change brings us some big dance classics from back in the day as well.
All MP3 and RealAudio links are streaming links from the WFMU archives.
Japanese noise / punk / kraut / space / future rockers Boredoms played last night at Terminal 5, and it was absolutely amazing. I wrote about their (also absolutely amazing) 77BOADRUM event in these pages this summer, but I think it's worthy to write about last night's concert because, well, every time they play is an...absolutely amazing and inspiring event.
Terminal 5 is a well-designed space, and the non-ground floors offer plenty of front-row rail access good for leaning over and catching the action below from. But the spectacle last night pushed Terminal 5's (considerable) capacity to its limits. Every floor was packed, and I stretched nudge muscles I didn't know I had trying to get a direct line of sight to see the band below.
Every Boredoms concert is an explosive exploration of ideas in
music, with lead Bore EYE literally turning everything we know about song structure inside out and puking it up in a perfectly-orchestrated space of time. The sound itself is an exercise of controlled and
beautiful explosions: at the beginning of
each performance, Eye summons some sort of powerful otherworldy being
into existence on the stage via two glowing orbs that he swings around
in the midst of ecstatic shouts and song, creating miraculously glitchy
lightning crashes. Three drummers pound away cyclic and ever-changing
rhythms that build and collapse on themselves, only to reveal more
complex rhythms that you're surprised you didn't heard before. The
centerpiece of Boredoms' round stage is a disembowelment and
re-construction of 7 purple guitars called the Sevena, built by Boredoms "sub-member" and DMBQ guy Masuko. Eye treats it as a percussion instrument, hitting it with a broomstick, using such force that it must be anchored in place by a steel crossbeam and
two assistants to make sure the fucking thing doesn't topple over in
the course of the performance. Eye makes it his business to play the
perfectly-tuned (and re-tuned, and re-tuned) strings off of the instrument, and when they finally
walked off the stage, only a few strings remained -
all but destroying the Sevena in the process. A few minutes into the set as I watched Eye spazz out across the stage, I noticed - this guy is in a motherfucking CAST. After seeing that, in a move I'll probably regret later, I took my earplugs OUT towards the end of the show to experience what was going on in a more direct manner. I didn't need my eardrums anyway.
I was reminded more and more as the night went on of the Cai Guo-Chiangexhibit currently on display at the Guggenheim.
Last week I mentioned Laff Records (Look forward to some raunchy gems in the next few weeks from LaWanda Page, Skillet and Leroy, Reynaldo Rey, Howard Thomashefsky and others). Laff joined a handful of other
prolific labels that specialized in "Adults Only" comedy. Other labels that dealt with the genre were Dooto, Kent, After Hour Records, Surprise, StereOddities, Jubilee and Fax. Fax Records mostly pressed suggestive comedy LPs by a scrawny nerd named Bert Henry. Henry's suggestive LPs were in direct contrast to his day job working in the chorus of The Golden Horseshoe Revue in Disneyland. Several of the Fax LPs were "Stag Party" albums with a naked woman on the cover. Today we listen to one of Fax's more obscure (and less dirty) offerings by a stand-up comedian named Stu Gilliam. Gilliam was very busy in nineteen seventies television and film and one of only two actors to work constantly in both Hanna-Barbera cartoons and Blaxploitation movies (Scatman Crothers was the other thespian to partake in this unlikely combo). Listen to this lo-fi and surprisingly normal comedy LP from Fax - Stu Gilliam at the Basin Street West here.
If you've listened to WFMU for any large chunk of time, chances are you've run into the recorded work of Carla Bozulich. Her 2006 album "Evangelista" ended up on a coupleofpeoples' Top 10 lists of 2006. She also played live on Brian's show that year, and her new album "Hello Voyager," recorded with her band Evangelista, is making its rounds on the 'FMU programming grid right now.
Now available to you, the patient blog-reading and listening public, is Evangelista's entire performance at the WFMU South By Southwest showcase on March 14th at Spiro's in Austin. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, the band is used to playing in darkness, which made the pink-lit outdoor stage at Spiro's a bit of a change of pace for the band.
All of Carla's music is powerful and haunting, and that's especially true in her live performance. But a heavy dose of twisted humor shines through when she plays live that isn't totally apparent in her albums. She's constantly sporting a devilly grin and cracking half-jokes in between fits of all other kinds of emotion. It's a dark and strange ride - listen for all sorts of weird and fantastically played instrumentation: cymbals attached to a rubber strap and dropped, toy telephones being crooned into, cellos being beaten in submission, and the actual stage structure being used as a percussive element by the bandleader herself. Also, the Low cover, if you haven't heard it yet, is unmissable.
Carla Bozulich: vox and guitar
Dominic Cramp: keyboard and sequencer
Adam Baz: drums/percussion
Andrea Serrapiglio: cello
Jeremy Drake: guitar and backing vox
Tara Barnes: bass and backing vox
For more photos from Evangelista's performance at Spiro's in Austin, go here. For more on Carla Bozulich and Evangelista, go here or here or here.
We received such an outpouring of extraordinary listener artwork submissions for our recent logo design contest that we just couldn't keep it all to ourselves.
Hold your champagne glass high, extend your pinky, turn up your nose, and take a stroll through this gallery of WFMU-centric works from the modern era.
It's a city with 1000 slogans, but no defining song. Baltimore's bred and acted as a magnet for untraditional instrument builders, Wham City's Fort-Thunder-inspired transplants, and the Baltimore Club stylings of DJ Technics, Rod Lee and many more, as heard on television's The Wire.
One of the first sites I ever found that did interesting audio collage work was 
