WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Rambling Syd Rumpo (MP3)

Five bucolic yet lugubrious MP3s after the jump.....

On this week's episode of Le Show, Harry Shearer paid tribute to recently deceased radio personality Brian Clewer, who hosted the radio program "Cynic's Choice" on LA-area radio for more than 40 years. Clewer's program featured lots of British comedy, and Shearer played a few examples on his program from Peter Sellers, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and Flanders and Swann. This got me thinking about the British comedy I was listening to when I was in grad school ages ago, when the local public radio station used to air the amazing "Round The Horne", a BBC radio comedy program that made its name in the mid-to-late 1960s by pushing the limits of the British double entendre.

For the musical portion of the comedy, they relied on the amazing Kenneth Williams and his rustic folksinger character Rambling Syd Rumpo. The joke was that Syd was supposedly singing old English folk tunes with long-forgotten archaic words, but the lyrics (written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman) were an equal combination of sly innuendo and hilarious nonsense. It's better to demonstrate rather than try to explain, so in honor of Clewer's passing here are a small selection of Rambling Syd Rumpo songs that are sure to gladden your earholes and tug at your artefacts.

Bits & Pieces remixes the Web

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.

Future Hoof & Mouth Sinfonia musician? (video)

Just in case you need a drummer next year, I suggest this guy:

Betty Hutton belts out "Old Man Mose" (video)

Oh, we missed the anniversary of Betty Hutton's death earlier in the month (March 11). To add to Irwin's list of Betty Hutton videos from last year, here's one of Betty's greatest musical triumphs: "Old Man Mose". See Betty smack herself in the face, threaten the orchestra, and get pushed to the floor several times. In 1939 this was good clean family entertainment!

The return of Leoncie (video)

When last we checked in with Icelandic songstress Leoncie, she had a few albums out and a killer Website plugging her music. Well, the site's gone now, but a couple months ago she discovered the wonder of YouTube, so now we've got a load of Leoncie music videos to check out.

It's hard to pick a favorite, but I'm partial to "Killer in the Park", a terrifying story of a stalker in the park where Leoncie goes jogging. Fortunately Scotland Yard is on the case (apparently they hold jurisdiction over murder investigations in Icelandic jogging parks), and the guy is busted. All this while Leoncie sings a jaunty little song!

As one of the posters on the YouTube page of this video says, Leoncie "really captures the upbeat, happy-go-lucky lifestyle of a serial killer."

Another Canadian for Americans (MP3)

In Ken's 1991 comp The Happy Listener's Guide to Mind Control he included a rousing defense of Americans by Canadian Byron MacGregor. Recently I found another recording of the same dang essay by similarly pro-America Canuck Robert Marshall.

Robert Marshall - Americans (4.11 MB MP3)

Although MacGregor is now most closely identified with the essay (at least among WFMU listeners), neither his nor Marshall's recordings were the original version. As the Urban Legends Website documents, "Americans" was originally written and broadcast by Canadian commentator Gordon Sinclair. Fortunately the History of Canadian Broadcasting Website has preserved the text of the original essay, along with Sinclair's 1973 broadcast of same. So now we have three versions of "Americans." Who'll be the next Canadian to record it? William Shatner? Sandra Oh? The cast of For Better or For Worse? I can't wait....

Cadbury Gets Political (MP3)

Well, not really that political, but in this never-ending season of Super-Duper Tuesdays and caucuses and what have you, I was reminded of this little promotional flexidisc that Cadbury put out in the UK, ostensibly to promote its Fruit & Nut bar. Unlike the political campaigns of today there's no hard sell on this disc; just a bunch of people who really love their fruits and nuts. Enjoy.

Party Noises (4.02 MB MP3)

2008 Changes are 2006 Changes (video)

No doubt you've seen the video of the 2008 Presidential candidates offering changes to the tune of David Bowie:

This video turns out to be a perhaps unintentional remake of a similar British video used by Armando Iannucci in his 2006 TV series Time Trumpet, where he demonstrated the similarities in the speeches of former Prime Minister Tony Blair and Conservative Party leader David Cameron:

The moral: the more things change, the more they change the same

WFMU Sleeveface

Inspired by Ken's post from last month, here's our cat modelling a copy of Blackhole Boogie.

Crate Digger Death-match

Is it possible to create great art in a ridiculously short time limit? Probably not, but that didn't stop the folks at Drown Radio from organizing Crate Digger Death-match, a challenge to artists who use samples in their works to create a complete album, start to finish (including purchasing the sample sources) in a mere 12 hours. The results of the first round are up on the Drown Radio Website, and there will be at least one artist familiar to WFMU listeners: The Evolution Control Committee, who always seem to show up at unusual music-related events such as this. Voting on the tracks ends tonight, with the winner announced on Monday.

When Emily met Jonathan (video)

No doubt you've seen by now the "Code Monkey" dance, a rather popular YouTube video of a young lady named Emily doing a little dance to Jonathan Coulton's song "Code Monkey". This little video, posted three months ago, has been linked to by NPR and the New York Times, and made the song very popular -- so much so, that when Jonathan was playing Chicago last night (with opening act and occasional background singers Paul and Storm), he asked if the Evanston actress was in the crowd. Of course she was, and of course she was invited to join the band onstage for a live recreation of the dance. And of course that performance was taped and posted onto YouTube, where we can all marvel at the meta-ness of it all.

Today's video moment of Japanese surrealism

Courtesy of TV in Japan (you are reading them on a regular basis, right?) comes this disturbing footage (YouTube link) of an oiled-up guy getting licked by a dog on the Japanese equivalent of the Gong Show. Please don't tell Rick Santorum about this clip.

Potatoes (MP3s)

Twenty earthy and nutritious MP3s after the jump.

Inspired by Lukas' post of the Ralph Records Goobers album last week, here's a companion album: Potatoes, an out-of-print collection of folk songs that was released on vinyl in 1987 and on CD in 1989 with a slightly different lineup. Here's the complete collection of material from the CD version (including folk songs by Reverend Howard Finster, Mark Mothersbaugh, Half Japanese, Bongwater, The Tinklers, The Residents, Snakefinger, and Negativland), along with a couple bonus Potatoes tracks sliced from my vinyl version of the album (the version pressed with potato-brown vinyl).

Today's video moment of Japanese surrealism

From the great Japanese video blog TV in Japan comes this bizarre clip from the 1977 horror flick Hausu, featuring a carnivorous piano. No, really. Watch and see (YouTube link).

Your bizarre record cover scan gallery of the day

Immerse yourself in the multicolored world of David Greenfield's collection of 60s and 70s Asian pop record covers. Some names may be familiar to WFMU listeners, such as Nancy Sit and Rita Chao, but others are definitely going on my own personal list of weird band names. Ismail Haron and The Guys? Jeffridin & the Siglap Five? And how could you not love an album called "Sing Along with the Christones"? Excellent stuff. (link found at Bedazzled)

YouTube freakout dance competition (video)

In this corner: anonymous Japanese street dancer (YouTube link).

In the opposite corner: Mimsy Farmer's LSD freakout (YouTube link) from 1967's Riot on Sunset Strip.

The winner? The viewers, of course.

Corporate rap-off (video)

Inquiring minds want to know: who's got the best rapper for their corporate video? Microsoft (Google Video link, fast-forward to the 7:00 mark), Wendy's (YouTube link), or the Software Publishing Association (YouTube link)?

Rutland Weekend Television musical parodies (video)

From Eric Idle's 1975 TV series "Rutland Weekend Television", best known for providing the origin of the Beatles-esque band The Rutles, here's another musical moment that should be remembered: Neil Innes performing "Godfrey Daniel" (YouTube link), a great parody of a certain 1970s pop star. And while we're on the subject, here's the original Rutles sketch (another YouTube link). Related on the WFMU blog: Bonzo Dog Band performance video, posted exactly one year ago.

Sid transit gloria: an appreciation of Sid Davis (video)

Last month, legendary safety film producer Sid Davis died of lung cancer at age 90. If you were in school between the 1950s and 1980s you might have seen his cautionary films, with names like Keep Off The Grass, What Made Sammy Speed?, ABCs of Walking Wisely and the joined-at-the-moral-hip pair of films, Boys Beware/Girls Beware.

Author Ken Smith, in his comprehensive book on school safety films (Mental Hygiene), called Davis' film style "trancelike ... stripped of anything even remotely approaching drama or human emotion", due mostly to Davis' rock-bottom film budgets and inexperienced acting pool.

Thanks to YouTube and the Prelinger Archives, you can enjoy a retrospective of Sid Davis' cautionary career. The following films, taken from a list in Mental Hygiene of Davis' best work, are available for download and streaming from archive.org, or available for viewing at YouTube.

"Over the Hiccups": Is there any escape? (video)

Tim Maloney, the animator behind the tour de force video for the Negativland composition "Gimme the Mermaid" (YouTube link), has completed another film for a Negativland track. It's for "Over The Hiccups" (YouTube link) from the band's classic Escape From Noise album, and it's a beautifully tragic animation featuring a character trapped with her cat on a "Little Prince" type asteroid. Tim says in the comments that it'll be on the forthcoming Negativland DVD Our Favorite Things, a release which has been in the works for quite some time now. Hopefully it'll show up sooner rather than later.

Other Negativland-related posts: Mark Hosler's talk at NYC's New School; a video for Negativland's "Bottom Line" collage; and a mention of Negativland in this post about the still-in-production documentary Copyright Criminals.

"Gimme a beat!": The Sondra Prill archives (video)

Blessings on the anonymous YouTube user who posted an amazing collection of videos starring one Sondra Prill from Tampa, Florida who apparently recorded cover tunes (badly) and did public-access videos for them (badly) in the early 1990s. Sondra's story was told on day #338 of the 365 Days Project, but thanks to recent innovations in Internet video we now get to see her in all her glory. The music blog Idolator, in the latest installment in their series of astounding public-access music videos, introduced me to her rather alarming cover of Janet Jackson's "Nasty" (YouTube video link), but once you hit her cover of "Pump Up The Jam" (another YouTube video link) you'll know that you're in the presence of something special: the Jan Terri of Tampa.

A Chartsweep for the 21st century

One of the great things about the current age of computer-aided audio processing is that the sky's the limit on what you can accomplish. Want to reverse every single quarter-note of "Stairway To Heaven" and reassemble the pieces in order? Check. Want to take Ted Stevens' incoherent definition of the Internet, make a loop of all his stutterings, and put it up on a Web page? Check.

And just recently NYU teacher R. Luke DuBois offered his computer-processed take on music with "Billboard", a 37-minute audio piece that samples the #1 hits between 1958 and 2000, 857 songs in total. Instead of containing a direct sample from each song (like "Chartsweep", another charts retrospective mentioned in an MP3 download post of yore), "Billboard" averages the song out to a statistical drone. As someone on the Negativland mailing list put it, "Sounds like I'm going to all my neighbor's houses and putting my ear up to their water pipes and air ducts." This example track (14.9 meg MP3 file) samples the hits from 1991 through 1999. Wired News included some compare-and-contrast MP3s in their recent report on the project. "Billboard" is apparently available for purchase at Amazon under the name Timelapse (I hope DuBois got sampling clearance for all 857 songs used in the piece),

While "Billboard" is interesting in a Kenny G sort of way, you might be more entertained by "Academy", another culture-crunching project of DuBois'. That project is a 75-minute film of highly compressed versions of the first 75 films that won the Best Picture Oscar. Check out the "Academy" site for one-minute versions of Wings, From Here To Eternity, The French Connection (with an insanely fast chase scene) and Titanic, pictured here.

Jandek sighting in Chicago

So Jandek showed up last night for the kick-off concert of Adventures in Modern Music, a five-day festival put on in Chicago by The Wire and local hip venue The Empty Bottle. (He was supposed to show up at last year's festival, but hurricane-related emergencies forced him to cancel.) Some appropriately blurry pictures are up on Flickr, but no video footage has shown up on YouTube yet. Fortunately for you, there's already some Jandek performance footage to check out: "Real Wild", from his 2004 performance in Glasgow.

The festival continues through Sunday, and is closed out by another one-word-named performer familiar to WFMU listeners: Steinski, who is also up on YouTube: a short live performance clip; and a video for "We'll Be Right Back."

(Jandek photo by russell bassman)

Enter the Acme Novelty Library

Courtesy of the Fantagraphics blog, it's the moment you've all been waiting for*: an eBay auction to have the winner's likeness show up in a cartoon drawn by Chris Ware, illustrator of note (and not just for his WFMU T-shirt design, pictured here). This is your chance to hang out with the likes of Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown, Quimby the Mouse, and other depressing yet lovingly illustrated cartoon characters!

Chris will also send you a signed copy of the comic, "but only on the proviso that the person in question doesn't get mad or otherwise grow to despise me if their likeness is construed as satirical, incorrect, unflattering or in any way unliterary." So I guess Andy Breckman need not apply. (Image from Megan's frabtabulous WFMU wallpaper post.)

*If, in fact, you have been waiting for the chance to appear in a Chris Ware comic.

Austria's got talent

Hey, if you're going to go on Starmania (Austria's version of "American Idol") and do your death metal warmup exercises, at least make sure you can do them for more than 5-10 seconds without running out of breath. Check it out (YouTube link, via sneakmove).