WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Letters from Billy

I often forget about the power of a real post-delivered letter. In the late 1990s Bill Geerhart penned dozens of letters to various pop culture celebrities, including several serial killers and other verifiable psychos like Dick Cheney. He got lots of personal responses and they've just beenpublished online.

Highlights: Getting Richard Ramirez to respond on "official Nightstalker" letterhead; Charles Manson's mysterious photo of a barn and his continued commitment to the phrase "far out"; Clarence Thomas' above the call of duty handwritten thoughts on the McDonald's menu. And yeah, that Dick Cheney trading card.

The Effect of Harsh Metal On the Vocal Chords

Recently a team of Dutch scientists conducted a totally grody endoscopic study on whether the habit of singing "harsh vocals" causes damage to vocal chords. This is certainly a very nurturing and Scandinavian topic, because if the Queens Medical Center in Nottingham isn't willing to look after our heavy metal vocal practitioners by dropping a camera down a paid participant's throat and asking them to stress their glotis, who is?

So it's resolved now: This behavior "can be done safely." I'd like to think that this fact will usher in a whole new demographic of death metal growlers who were previously sidelined due to concerns about harshing their biologies. If you still don't feel called by mother nature to this task, remember, you can always teach yourself. (Via.)

R. Stevie's It's My Life, 1988 [Video]

I recently found a video of one of my favorite R. Stevie Moore songs, an even more respectably adolescent cover of the Animals' It's My Life. It was shot at WFMU in 1988 during his tenure here on staff. Aside from glimpses of a bombed out proto-locale that a youngster like me will never know, you'll catch a few past WFMU luminaries, such as the late Frank Balesteri.

You'll find more of Stevie's video work on this YouTube page. I'm thinking of throwing down for the DVD.

Anger Anxiety

One of the challenging things about writing for the WFMU blog is that everything's already been written about before. Most everything. I just caught up with part two of the Kenneth Anger DVD and was moved to go back and revel in Puce Moment, a film he recut in some indeterminate time in the late sixties to an awesome score by... Actually screw it, Brian Turner wrote about it here.

The least I can do is to provide a functioning screening of it:

I thought that I'd get my two cents in for posterity after finding a copy of Kustom Kar Kommandos but I swear that I only just realized that Mike Lupica dropped mention of it even before Brian's post.

The only thing I can think to do is to reflect upon the anxiety of influence and the difficulty in getting out from behind what has come before us. But you don't want to hear about all that, do you? Me neither.

Why Does Fugazi have a Myspace Page?

The sale of social networking site Bebo.com to AOL last week for $850 million prompted Billy Bragg to write an editorial in the New York Times about how artists are getting shafted out of royalty payments by web 2.0 websites who use their work to build their businesses. Though it's true that every artist that creates a profile on MySpace or any other social networking portal is legally waiving their right to royalty payments, he raises a good point: musicians and record labels using these sites to communicate to their fanbases are underselling their own worth.

I just spent a week in Austin, Texas for SXSW and I observed two completely different business cultures at work; first, the "interactive" (internet) dudes held court, then later in the week most left and the town gave way to the music fest folks. The vibe in the conference center spelled out the different trajectories of the two industries. Venture capital is currently pouring cash into every half-baked disemvoweled idea set to a powerpoint deck, so the internet guys are whooping it up. But as the music panels began the central theme congealed fairly swiftly: abject fiscal despair.

This much is clear: the retail market for music is drying up. But that doesn't mean it's time to fold in cards.

Nick Jaina, Power (MP3s)

It's raining again and Nick Jaina's got a new album out; it's called Wool and he's going to be playing at the Knitting Factory in New York tonight to support it. I'm not sure if he has the means to pull of the album's chamber arrangements but dude has a really deeply doleful voice that would suit me set to plucked catgut alone.

Here's a cut from Wool.

Nick Jaina - Power

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

John Maus (MP3s)

I returned from Austin, Texas only this evening, after being immersed in the information orgasm that is SXSW for an entire week +. The prospect of saying anything comprehensive about what went down this year is too daunting for a man fresh off a solid 24 hour stand-by airport sojourn, so I'll just drop a few mp3s on you for the moment and call it a post.

Ever heard of John Maus? He performed at the Todd P. showcase and verily scared the crap out of my friends with a very committed, intense and screamy lo-fi darkwave set.

He also played keys on a few Ariel Pink albums and your feeling about those songs will follow you here as well. They're much more mellow and 'verbed out than what he threw down upon us live.

John Maus - My Whole World is Coming Apart
John Maus - Just Wait Until Next Year

Nobody Knows Why

I hope that you reserve the use of the word genius for those who really deserve it. Don't just say "GENIUS!" as a casual exclamation; the word is too useful and needs to be reserved for when it's truly ready to deploy with force. I'm about to do that now: Why The Lucky Stiff is a GENIUS.

Great swaths of deepest geek Japan know him as a core contributor to the programming language known as Ruby. There are various cultural camps that gather around various programming languages and Ruby, a relatively accessible "scripting" language, has a reputation for bringing the creative types together, the bike mechanics, and the micro-brewers, the in-a-banders, and the creators and solvers of absurd problems.

The mysterious personage known as Why The Lucky Stiff wants to draw creative brains to this party from wider sources. And he's done so by publishing absolutely unique technical book works like The Poignant Guide To Ruby.

His work is informed by early 90s zine culture. And maybe British drug comedy. (And perhaps syphilis. That's just my theory.) And lately he's on a new kick that tops all of his previous manic passing obsessions: Hackety Hack. Ostensibly it's about giving kids an introduction to programming, though I know more than a few adults who have relived their Commodore Basic youths through his tutorials.

When he realized that he needed a better way to allow users to create user interfaces he decided to basically build his own programming language to suit the task. He's been working on it forever and now he's released the guide for free. It's called Nobody Knows Shoes. And taken as a new confluence of disparate cultures and as a social project for the common good, it's verifiably genius. Somebody call the MacArthur folks. I'm not even kidding.

"Underground" Computer Movie About CERN

National Geographic just published an amazing article about CERN, a particle accelerator research laboratory in France.

It's a (pretty) good pop-science read but props to our own Brian Turner for highlighting what should have been the big pull quote,

"The people running the LHC aren't in a rush to talk about all the things that can go wrong, perhaps because the public has a way of worrying that mad scientists will accidentally create a black hole that devours the Earth."

I don't know, I feel like they're probably fighting for the forces of good. More than the article, I'm persuaded by this "underground" documentary about the facility from 1974, just some few years before the the internet was birthed there by an English computer scientist by the name of Tim Berners-Lee. 

Megachurch Media

I went to CHURCH this weekend. No shit. In Spokane, a once-was industrial mining and logging powerhouse in eastern Washington state that has given way to suburban sprawl, methamphetamines, and yeah, HUGE CHURCHES.

Go ahead, laugh. But let me tell you something: if we are engaged in a culture war, these folks are kicking our ass. The Life Center church that I attended was one of four in the city, which qualifies it as a religious franchise on the make.  Capacity 2500+, which places it as one of rough 1338 megachurches in America. They conducted a full-on TV-quality broadcast of the sermon and bookended every section with a live Christian rock band. People cried and waved their hands in the air. The WB-friendly compositions were  licensed from a commercial firm.

They interspersed the even-toned vanilla moralizing with hallmark-specialesque videos played on dual jumbrons, and a little digging leads me to think that these pieces may have been farmed out from a company like this one (dig the Die Hard respect!).

Browse GodTube.com for a spell and one realizes that this culture must be experiencing a (gross) mass media renaissance of its own.

I know it's funny, but dudes, IT'S NOT FUNNY. Measured in brute numbers, this culture is outmaneuvering the left on a daily basis. The army of god is on the march, and they're already geared to mobilize en masse against whichever candidate our superdelegates (near arbitrarily) choose.

Y'know, sitting there under the influence of one or two of their 16 oz. Christuccinos, I came to the conclusion that the form they've chosen for mass communication may really have legs. Put people in a room and talk to them about what goes on. Deary me, I think we need a new weird church of our own to galvanize all our stray lefty sheep. (No Ted, not that weird.)

Amen. Anyone else up for Sunday service?

Cable Access Hits

Reading the High Places blog this week, I found this video of Subjects playing on an old episode of New Wave Theater (previously covered here).

Now that it's technically irrelevant as a delivery platform, cable access seems to be everywhere lately. Do you realize how many choice YouTube hits from the past year have sprung from the interlaced-licious VHS loins of this cultural institution?

The prospect of delivering one's selfhood over the boob tube is a prospect that has lost a little bit of its culture fuckery bite now that any old fool can upload a web cam vid and have it light up sallow faces around the world moments later.

But beyond the lighting racks and studio furniture, the cable access tradition has loads to offer. It's developed a true aesthetic of its own, and though it's easily mocked, its uselessness has begun to cast upon it a romantic glow.

(As I write this, channel 11 in Portland is showing something called Vortex Church, which involves a lot of woozy shots of cathedral ceilings multilayered over some dude sitting with a cat in his lap. As with radio, there is always this terrible pain at the knowledge of its transience. Thankfully, I have heard some good folks are currently organizing to alleviate this.)

Ok, enough talk. What's your pick for the next up and coming cable access weirdo hit? I'm putting chips down on Von Hummer:

NW Croon

Marriage Records in Portland, OR has a spiritual consonance with a lot of other record labels you know from the pacific northwest area. They've been around for a few years and have put out a lot of low-run handmade objects, tell-tale paper folded CD cases and some really Ghee-orgeous vinyl releases. They just put out new comp, their second (only $10!), and I want to play two tracks from it for you, both from dudes who possess a different kind of vocal swagger than I know of from dudes elsewhere. (I think it's weird regional soul music for the extremely pale complexioned.)

Adrian Orange (of Thanksgiving) comes along with the "young poet who's been cranking out two albums every change of the weather since he was fourteen" mythos but whether you've been a fan of his creakier early stuff you have to admit that lately, he's really on some soulful shit (and horn sections have helped). But this song's just him and that guitar and it's in the mode of an asshole Dylan breakup song. Adrian Orange -

It Ain't Me

Read on for another MP3.

Goodiepal and the Danish Broadcasting Corporation Conspiracy

Before we arrive at the moment's entertainment, I have been instructed to ask you to play this audio file in your browser.

Goodiepal Maved Soundtrack

And here is the video that our friend Goodipal has just asked you to play at the proper moment, as cued by the audio recording.

I'll assume you're well on your public Danish television voyage by now. You're witnessing a televised lecture presented by Goodiepal, a Danish electronic musician that enjoys some airplay on WFMU and is probably most widely know for blowing minds with his mechanical bird invention, and composing tones and melodies for consumer electronics companies.

You'll see him keep his studio audience stupefied with a near hour-long discourse on: The Eurobot (as demonstrated by cardboard scenery cutouts and handmade balls of yarn), the assertion that Europeans don't understand time, the idea of mirror points in music, the future of electronic music, and how to keep music scores hidden from artificial intelligence.

At first blush it all seems very whimsical but discursively sound but at about the twenty minute mark when he's still playing with his little robot set and whistling the Eurobot score to himself, one can't help but wonder if he's putting us on. And yeah, you've got the simul-soundtrack cranked, so you're on media-fuckery watch anyway.

What's going on here, you ask? Thankfully, a mysterious poster to a web forum has left a few clues.

Lo ModA's Gospel Store Front (mp3s)

Lo ModA's minimal art school dropout sound is a confident and laudably new idea derived from a myriad of 90s era Baltimore Dischord-ish projects, including Candy Machine and Fascist Fascist. Cool bands, both, but with Lo ModA's (sic, sorta) debut album, Gospel Store Front, we meet a band that's grown away from any very easily identified genre roots and created a very natural sound that they own outright. It's a slinky, mean, great album.

Of course with a name that translates to "The Fashion," it's hard not to receive some of the invention (wide use of strings, subtle percussion and stripped down production) as more (mere) aesthetic polemic. But they're very direct and catchy and they earnestly address our culture in a way that ties them to their dissident punk roots and rescues the album from being too precious.

It's been receiving a fair amount of airplay here at WFMU recently. They've agreed to let us share a few tracks from Gospel Store Front and they send word that they're putting out a new album soon.

02 - Les Jardins (De L'bouli)
04 - Electric World

001 Collective: The First Real P2P Scene (mp3s)

Most liberal, enlightened, grown-up Americans have become that way by working hard at it. Some have to slough off the cultural impositions of conservative and religious ideologies; I'm one of those children-of-a-child-of-the-sixties who fights to rid himself of ideas like, "root chakras" and, "meaningful coincidence."

But sometimes I can't prevent myself from making superstitious connections: the 001 Collective, a contemporary collective of musicians who are distributing their music for free using powerful peer-to-peer technology, were meant to cross my path. And yours too, I reckon.

It happened the day after New Year's. Google alerted that my name had made a new appearance on the web and after investigating the link I was left completely mystified. My name was nowhere to be found on the entire website But "secret download society?" How could I (I who am professionally charged with the task of discovering and licensing free music) not click through?

What I found on the other side of that link is the 001 Collective and I think it's a combination of a few social forces that haven't stood in the same room together. It's a music blog / BitTorrent index / record label / authentic freak folk / new twee / 8 bit scene. Unlike a lot of other interesting music sites on the web involving experimental distribution, this is a group whose first orienting principle is aesthetic and cultural alignment. No one's looking for an ad-driven revenue stream or seeking VC funding. They're just getting their art out there the most hyper-efficient way they know how.

You don't really need very much money to start a label-esque collective these days: It just takes one computer geek. This one's name is Secret Owl. (Or no, Luke Morris. But he makes wonderful music under the name Secret Owl and for all I know, he writes PHP under the name Secret Owl too.)

Jeffrey Davison's Favorite 2007 Releases

Susan Alcorn - And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar
Olde English - Spelling Bee
Meg Baird - Dear Companion - Drag City
James Blackshaw - Cloud of Unknowing   Tompkins Square
Tom Brosseau - Cavalier - Fat Cat
Vic Chesnutt - North Star Deserter - Constellation
Clogs - Lantern - Brassland
Colleen - Les Ondes Silencieuses - Leaf
Nancy Elizabeth - Battle and Victory - Timbreland
Ron Franklin - City Lights - Memphis International
David Garland - Noise in You - Family Vineyard
P.J. Harvey - White Chalk - Island
Sean Hayes - Flowering Spade - Ambient Egg
Michael Hurley - Ancestral Swamp - Gnomonsong
Glenn Jones - Against Which the Sea Continually Beats - Strange Attractors
Lewis & Clarke - Blasts of Holy Birth - La Societe Expeditionnaire
Samara Lubelski - Parallel Suns - The Social Registry
Paul Metzger - Deliverance - Locust
Sean Smith - Sacred Crag Dance Corpse Whisperer - Isota
Tiny Vipers - Hands Across the Void - Sub Pop
Mike Wexler - Sun Wheel - Amish

Some Favorite Reissues:

Paul Adolphus - The Dawn Wind - Shadoks
Vashti Bunyan - Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind - DiChristina
Loren Connors - As Roses Bow - Family Vineyard
Karen Dalton - Cotton Eyed Joe - Megaphone
Fraser and DeBolt - s/t - Fallout
Asa Irons & Swaan Miller - s/t - Important
Wizz Jones - When I Leave Berlin - Sunbeam
Lambert and Nuttycombe - At Home - Fallout
Propiniquity - s/t - Numero
Silmaril - Voyage of Icarus - Locust
Michael Yonkers - Grimwood - DeStijl

We Are the Arm, Live @ WFMU (mp3s)

Last October, Liz Berg invited the nice boys from We Are the Arm to play a live set for her show. Maybe it was something about their very neatly parted haircuts, or perhaps their deeper-than-presets way around a vintage synth, but something suggested to us that these guys would be game for joining our new project to license work for the Free Music Archive and to post selected live studio sessions on the WFMU blog.

Today we bring you the mp3s from the We Are the Arm live recording, free for legal download (thanks to the legal assistance provided by the creative commons licenses).

We are The Arm, Live @ WFMU

1 - Soft and Together Theme
2 - Loaf Times
3 - Jazz Bulb / Nice Look!
4 - Track What Makes a Plaza?
5 - Realming
6 - Sweet and Sour Dreams

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Now that the 365 Days project has come to its end, we're going to fill the empty place left in your abused ear canals with more live music recorded at the station as well as free mp3 downloads from new records enjoying heavy on-air rotation. Stay tuned.

Crank Dat: The Varieties of YouTube Dance Experience

This is an image of a fictional hip-hop video posted on a fictional YouTube, as captured from my screen moments ago while I was viewing it on the real YouTube. It's from the opening scene of the video for Soulja Boy's "Crank Dat," a song that plays a central role in the most important hip-hop story of the decade.

I'm sure you've heard the song. It reached the point of near ubiquity over this summer; the simple steel drum beat could be heard coming out of every 5th speaker in the United States of America at any given time.

The video can be seen as a modern triptych that illustrates each of the components in our weird new media celebrity landscape.

Panel 1: The opening scene is set in the "Collipark Residence," the offices of a record label (named after a region in Atlanta called College Park)  famous for breaking many of the big "crunk" acts from the past several years. Mr. Collipark sees his kids dancing and singing Crank Dat and looks up this new phenomenon on his computer. After seeing that Soulja Boy has developed a web-based meme, he instant messages the artist. Soulja Boy responds: "meet me at my crib." The message here being, get out from behind that desk, industry man. We've got something cooking over here. This stands in huge contrast to the launch of an artist like 50 Cent, who was famously depicted being bionically enhanced, packaged, and delivered by his gatekeepers, Dr. Dre and Eminem.

Panel 2: Kids are seen watching the Soulja Boy video on a variety of devices, including laptops and cell phones, and Soulja Boy logs on to see a number of fan-submitted dance videos thriving in the wild, without distribution help from Mr. Collipark. Come see me at my crib, indeed.

The presence of cell phone videos is also very interesting. It's the most significant announcement of the arrival of "convergence culture" I've seen yet. The future is here and its distributing itself very quickly.

Panel 3: Soulja Boy dances under very good lighting and wearing expensive clothing. He signs a record deal and gains acceptance into mass culture.

But there's more.

The Hypersonic Soundbeam

After years of reading puff pieces about the coming of the "Hypersonic Soundbeam," a device designed to send targeted blasts of sound waves that can be heard only be selected recipients in an audio environment, it has apparently made its debut in the public sphere, right here in New York. As part of a billboard marketing campaign for a television show.

A&E has placed a billboard (on Prince St. between Mulberry and Mott) that shoots sound waves designed to resonate against your head, giving the passerby a distinct feeling that the advertisement is arising from within their skull. The television show is is about ghosts, so that means this is a witty kind of progressive marketing stunt and not just totally fucking creepy, right?

IRI Technologies, one of the many companies vending this device to the industry, highlights the invention's utility like so: "The Hypersonic Sound Waves travel silently through space, up to 300 feet away, then convert into an instant sound source whatever surface [including your skull! -ed.] they impact. Amazingly, if you aim this magical device at a person, their head will become a speaker, and they will hear your message "inside" their head."

The patent owner of this little baby is an American Solo Maverick Inventor in the old model - he cooked this idea up and built a prototype without the help of a corporate research team. Woody Norris is, as an interview posted to his website will have you know, "no techno nerd." And he's humble about the source of his inspirations, observing that, "I didn't invent that [medical sonar imaging device]. It happens and I observed it. And so I claimed it. You know what inventing is -- I heard this from somebody else -- 'It's an accident observed."

So once you have "accidentally" invented this mind-sound-beam patent, what do you do with it? The advertising market seems to have been on his mind long before he brought this market. "To Norris's way of thinking, however, a shop with 100 confined spheres of sound is preferable to one where 12 speakers are blaring over each other."

I guess that's the logic of the needle exchange as well: If they're going to be doing it anyway, we might as well keep it neat.

Well, this new mind-wave billboard sure is neat, huh? Fuck, could we work on a way to just beam the whole TV show right into my skull as I'm walking past?

My Systm!!!1!

Internet, check out my "MY HIFI SURROUND SYSTEM" / "marantz collection" / "CM1 Drive" / "Dimed Marshall JCM800 2203!"

(Via Cory.)

$700 Hacienda Kicks

This shoe costs $350 dollars. If you want a second one for the other foot, that'll be another $350. There are a few factors involved in the pricing of this haute-footewear specimen: the limited edition (250), the plummeting dollar (retail: £345), and famed Madchester nightclub, The Hacienda, for which the shoe is named.

Adidas' luxury brand Y-3 developed this hot property in collaboration with Peter Saville who did a great deal of album art for Factory Records, Ben Kelly, the architect who designed the Haçienda interiors, and Peter Hook, bassist for Joy Division and New Order. Not sure exactly what input Mr. Hook might have had but it's nice to put him on the press release, if nothing else.

This generational psychographic must be the absolute most fun to market to, ever. We're especially keen on counter-couture, completely vulnerable to nostalgia and rare collectibles, and newly flush with disposable income after deciding that bearing young is just a totally environmentally irresponsible move, man.

But damn those are some beautiful sneaks. The FAC51-Y3 is pictured at right perched upon a slab of metal flooring and with a hunk of pillar removed from the original nightclub.

 

Happy Mondays - Step On

Loch Lomond, Live at WFMU (MP3s)

Since moving to New York this fall, Portland, OR seems to be slipping further away from me by the week. I'm not sure I can remember the bus routes anymore. Hearing that Loch Lomond, a Portland-based chamber folk ensemble signed to Hush Records, was touring New York this week gave me the chance to have them over to our studio and be aurally reminded of all the bike lanes and good coffee that I've done without.

Loch Lomond is comprised of a precious gaggle of players led by Richie Young, a young man who could walk amongst deer and not frighten them. They stir up a lush and intelligently sentimental sound that fans of Stuart David-era Belle and Sebastian will enjoy.

This is what became of a few enjoyable evening hours at WFMU this weekend. They dragged a variety of stringed and reeded instruments and played the drums very lightly. (Thanks for the engineering support, gang.)

Bird and a Bear
Tick
Song in 3/4
Carl Sagan
Elephants and Little Girls
Stripe II
Witchy

They played a show at The Knitting Factory last week but don't worry - you haven't missed your chance to see them live in NY. They're playing two shows in Brooklyn this week: Thursday (tomorrow) at Union Hall with Tiny Vipers and Jill Barber and then 8 PM Friday at SoundFix Records with Dappled Cities.

Software on Wax

The keeper of Kempa.com wrote a wonderful article detailing the history of 70s and 80s era computer games distributed on vinyl as super-precious bonus track. The programs were recorded to isolated locked grooves as messy noise blasts meant to be recorded to tape and played back to a personal computer. Read on for details on what must be the geekiest promotional exploit ever, pioneered by Pete Shelley of the Buzzcocks, The Thompson Twins, The Stranglers, and more.

 

Mount Eerie, Seven "New" Songs

Some years ago Phil Elvrum put an end to his much lauded Microphones project and named his new one-man-band after an area in Anacortes, WA called Mount Eerie. Since then his songs have become more natural and the recordings less meticulous and fetishistic. In a good way. (He's also taken to self-releasing on vinyl only and in limited quantities.)

Back in 2004, when Pitchfork still cared, Phil's first release as Mount Eerie was a CD-r that he sold at shows in Japan. He's since decided to give these tracks away for free on the internet. About this, he writes,

"The release was in an edition of 196 CDRs and sold out on tour.

Somehow people in North America found out about it and thought they really wanted it because of the low quantity. Now it is available forever for free. No more romance!"

For those of you living in New York and in need of more romance in your life, Phil is performing tonight as Mount Eerie at the Lutheran Church of the Messiah, 129 Russell St @ Nassau, Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He's also "selling many exciting and “expensive” things at all these shows. If you have money bring as much as possible to the show. You may want to buy something."

"Something" may include this amazing 64-page book / picture disc documenting Phil's mythic love for the spookier bits of mother nature.

He'll be joined by Geneviève Castrée, a young French Canadian woman performing (en Français!) as WOELV. (I really like how many artists from this scene manage their identities like comic book superheros.)

Mount Eerie, Seven New Songs (2004)

Wooly Mammoth's Absence
Do Not Be Afraid
With My Hands Out
2 Blonde Braids
My Burning
November 22nd 2003, 4:45 PM
Cold Mountain Song 286

(These Mount Eerie songs are provided under the following Creative Commons license)

WOELV

DRAPEAU BLANC” de/from “Tout Seul dans la Forêt en Plein Jour, Avez-Vous Peur?”
LA CORDILLÈRE DES HOMMES” de/from “gris”
RAFFINERIE

Nano-radio

Science has not yet abandoned the field of FM radio innovation: researchers at Berkeley have just created the world's smallest radio, made from a single carbon nanotube (meaning this little guy is only some few atoms wide).

Rather than rely on electrical current to receive the transmission of radio waves, the nano-receiver decodes the mechanical vibrations of this teensy tube in order to operate.

The scientists involved were able to play DJ to consecrate the moment of the first nano-transmission. Their tune of choice? Eric Clapton's Layla. (Guys, need a hand making your next scientific breakthrough a real moment to remember? Contact us here at WFMU - we've got the anti-social epiphany + gravitas thing down pat.)

Wonder how this might affect your listening habits in the future? The researchers involved suggest that, "The nanotube radio's extremely small size could enable radical new applications such as radio controlled devices small enough to exist in the human bloodstream..."

Now how's that for a marathon premium? Read more about this breakthrough here.