WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Ten Secs from Every Top 100 Song 1956-1959

Here's an hour long teaser of the datadump I'll be unloading on this blog in the next few weeks.  Listeners of my radio show know I've been obsessed with Hugo Keesing's Chartsweep of every #1 hit for too long now.  After I made an homage to his work with a sweep of every #1 easy listening hit, I really saw the need in our society to have every large database of music cutup into tiny, bite sized pieces, but realized I didn't have the time to do it.  So now that unix has turned 42 (happy b-day, big guy!!), I wrote a little patch using SoX to grab the hook from every mp3 in a folder and stich em together.

While pretty much everybody can identify and appreciate the hook from any individual song (it's the one part you remember of that song you hadn't heard in years!), definining the hook concretely is a tricky problem.  It's usually the title of the song, but not always.  It's usually at the beginning or end of the chorus, but not always.  So when I wanted to teach a computer to grab the hook of a song I had to ask the deep question, what is the hookiness of these hooks?

With no real answer, my cheapskate workaround is that the hook of the song is almost always simply the LOUDEST part of the song.  Super easy to teach a computer to do that, since an mp3 is nothing but a list of how loud sound is at a given time.

Yes, it's true, in this Darwinian yelling match that births the concept of a "hit song", there's no room for saving the hook for a quiet, subtle moment in the song.  I'd go so far to say that any song that DOESN'T put the hook at the loudest part of the song is possibly communist.  So even though these chartsweeps aren't nearly as pristine as Hugo Keesings, but they do get the point across pretty well.  And as an added bonus, this program weeds out those songs that are immoral and unamerican.

I'll be posting a decade of chartsweeps every...eh, week or so, in the coming weeks.  Stay tuned!

Top 100 of 1956

Top 100 of 1957

Top 100 of 1958

Top 100 of 1959

E.S.P. TV's Psyched Out Forma Footage

I recently became acquainted with E.S.P. TV's trippy live video manipulations at The Index Festival, an insanely well curated festival of experimental music.  On one night of the festival at the longstanding downtown avant-haven Milennium Film Workshop, knob twiddling excursions from folks like Shelley Burgon and Twistycat were made a lot more visually exciting by placing the musicians in front of a green screen and superimposing faded out zebras (or what have you...), shifting geometric patterns and video feedback loops.  

It seems like only Twistycat's footage from Index is up online at the moment (and is posted below), but ESP seems to post every episode of their shows on Vimeo after editing them down and airing them on Public Access TV.  Episode 5 is below as well, with a Forma performance introduced by Sam Mickens, Ana Lula Roman w/ video artist Matthew Caron and video shorts by Aaron Nemec, Derek Larson and Scott Kiernan. One of my favorite bits appropriates an episode of Cheers and superimposes measurements of lengths pointlessly over everything.  Long live analog electronics!!

Watch a Bunch of Drunk Hicks Jump Over Fire

Many thanks to John Fell Ryan for showing me this one.  As Davy Rothbart, of Found Magazine, says on the back of the cassette, "Memorial Day 2000 is the finest find in the history of found stuff."  Twig Harper and Carly Ptak apparently found this home video at a Michigan yard sale of a memorial day bender in the woods.  Watch drunk hicks drive around in the mud in their trucks, jump over fire, set things on fire, wrestle in the mud, force each other to puke...every moment is magical....oh yes.  Twig and Carly, of course, are Baltimore's noisegods Nautical Almanac, and used to sell this video at their merch table.  Watch this one again and again, "the fuckin whip shit of all fuckin shitter bongers".

Uhhhh.....NSFW.

 

 

Too Soon? (video)

Translations anybody?

 

Oh yeah, Time magazine voted us one of the best blogs of 2011. Surely not for posts like this one...

Rainy Day Youtube K-Hole: Coupé-Décalé

If there's anything that brings this divserse nation together, it's sitting bored in a room paying half-attention to the first 30 seconds of pixellated video clips.  I actually found out about these amazing videos while meandering around Bushwick, Brooklyn with a friend on a sunny day.  Across the street from the music venue Goodbye Blue Monday we found this amazing West African restaurant.  Dunno, the okra had that mucously texture that okra can have.  Pretty alright.

BUT they were playing all these amazing new Coupé-Décalé (a style of dance music originating from the Ivory Coast) videos playing from a computer on a big screen TV...shoot, what's that open source video player that MIT released called again?  I wrote down all the names I could and got myself into one hell of an E-K-hole!  Surprisingly enough, it seems like most of these musicians haven't been played at all on WFMU yet.  Here are a couple of my favorites...I'd advise clicking on the related videos and drinking coffee until you get the jitters.

 

Dog Dick + Sewn Leather = Dog Leather

You know how really hot girls usually only hang out with other hot girls?  Didn't that always seem disingenuous or something when you were in highschool?  Like they weren't friends for the right reasons?  That's because you were a weird nerd.  If you were cool you would have been hanging out with them too and not caring about what's right.  Just being real here.

This is a lead into the concept of SUPER GROUPS.  Just heard about this band called High Society.  It's Etienne from Real Estate, Justin Frye from PC Worship, Jonathan Coward from Shams and Darren Ho from Driphouse.  Fuck, those are some hot girls. I don't think they practice much, but hey, good for them.

Here's a brand new music video from two crazy people that have toured together a lot and for some reason never thought to combine forces into one super group before recently.  DJ Dog Dick, Baltimore sometimes-member of Nautical Almanac, and Sewn Leather, who used to be "from" Iowa City's noise scene but has been "touring" (ie, quasi-homeless) for too long to be from there anymore, have this new thing called Dog Leather.  Pretty awesome.

The American People's Favorites Of 2010

Dear music nerds,

While you were thinking about the recent resurgence of tape culture, most of the American public was listening to musicians you've never heard of.  In the event that you are among squares this new years, you'll need to be prepared with a completely different set of references.  Here's a primer: a reverse chronological chartsweep of the #1 hits on the Billboard adult contemporary charts in 2010, starting with Mariah Carey's "Oh Santa!".  But don't stop there!  Listen to the current top 15 to really feel hip to the moment.

The Best Music For Adults In 2010

I made this chartsweep myself and I will be offering this entire chartsweep back to 1961 as part of my marathon premium for my radio show early next year.  Oh yes, all your dreams are coming to you soon.

Here.  Watch this Shania Twain music video until you figure out mass culture.  (seriously though, this is a great song) 

Robedoor Live at WFMU

A couple weeks back LA noise titans slash cultural lynchpins Robedoor did me the honor of recording a live session in WFMU's studios during a rare and excessively brief East Coast tour. Although Robedoor began as a two-piece drone band with dozens of releases on just about every cool noise label out there, the recent addition of Geddes Gengras as a drummer has brought the band closer to the unholy realm of doom metal.

Alex Brown supplied (among other things) keyboard riffs that form the backbone of the jams - his rig is so bass heavy that I actually couldn't tell whether he was up too loud in the mix or whether the floor was just shaking. Britt Brown played guitar and vocals, with a slew of pedals to throw off any semblence of the concept of a "song". The track "I thought you were the Devil" is off Robedoor's recent LP on Important Records, Burners. Parallel Wanderer, by far the longest track in this session, will appear as a full side of a yet untitled upcoming LP. This seems to be following Robedoor's usual method of writing songs: jamming it out with live improv until the completed song idea emerges from the murky depths.

Or maybe the secret to Robedoor's success is putting beer in every meal they eat? Alex runs an excellent and hilarious food blog called Hot Knives that seems to indicate a predilection for hoppy breakfast dishes. Speaking as somebody who loves nothing more than the rhetoric of high end menus, the Hot Knives archives are great because you get classy dishes with rock and roll commentary. For god's sake, he teaches you how to make the "über pre-choucroute", Kimchi from scratch!

Then again, Robedoor's ability to touch on a hundred genres at one is probably because Robedoor members are so involved with underground noise culture. Britt Brown runs Not Not Fun records, which has released a ton of material from many perennial WFMU favorites. I'd explain more, but there really aren't words. I'd recommend blasting this live session over your best sound system while nerding out to lists of releases from Not Not Fun and Robedoor on discogs.

Thanks to Jason Sigal for these photos and for help with engineering the recording.

Your Evening's Internet K-Hole: The Archies' Music Videos

 

 

I don't know what's wrong with me, but lately I've been listening to tons of Bubblegum and feeling like a total badass even though it's the goofiest music imaginable.  It's kinda like that scene in Reservoir Dogs with "Stuck In The Middle With You".  Not saying I'm planning on murdering anybody, but....you know what I mean...right?  You know I'm not actually going to murder somebody...haha....uhhhhh........ummmmmm.......I don't know what you're talking about I never heard of him in my life....go away....I said go away dammit!

There are a ton of excellent videos up on Youtube by the Archies, a fictional band that played songs on the Archies cartoon series.  I wouldn't argue that the song writing quality is up there with Kasenetz-Katz, but it's definitely an addictive internet k-hole more fulfilling than playing Snood for hours.  If you're hankering for more Bubblegum sounds, check out Ohio Express, 1910 Fruitgum Company, Edison Lighthouse, Margo Guryan, The Lemon Pipers, hmmmmm....that's all I can think of off the top of my head.  Oh yeah, and what the fuck is this thing I found in the related videos?  Really?  That happened?  How come I was never told?

Incorrect PR Vol. 3: The Wake Up Kings!

Thanks to Bennett for sending me this pitch from the wakeup kings. This music is actually conceptually on par with Satie.  Just wish I had a smartphone so I could program one of their songs for every day of the week as my alarm.  Check out their website for more nonsense and a full album of streaming mp3s, only part of which is below.

Strange Place
Cancelled

THE WAKE UP KINGS! are here to wake YOU UP! While other wake up technologies use BORING nature sounds and BLARING beeps that have NOTHING to do with your transition from the world of SLEEP to the world of AWAKE, THE WAKE UP KINGS! wake you up with songs that are ALL ABOUT waking up! And we're not talking some sort of vague message about how it's good to wake up, these songs are SPECIFIC to all sorts of situations you might find yourself waking up in! 

AND if there's a kind of WAKE UP song that you need that we don't currently have, LET US KNOW and THE WAKE UP KINGS! might even MAKE IT! 

PLUS, THE WAKE UP KINGS! can come to you! For a SMALL fee of $400 + travel/accomodations, THE WAKE UP KINGS! will come to your home/school/place of business and PERSONALLY wake YOU UP!

Justice Yeldham Live at WFMU Video Carnage

It was a high honor to have Justice Yeldham on my radio show a few weeks back and if you are anywhere along the route of the rest of his (last ever?) American tour, I can't give a higher recommendation for how to make a weird night.  Really.  We're talking best live set in noise on the entire globe.  Check out the archive of the full set on my radio show and hold your breath for the full set to be uploaded onto the Free Music Archive.  Thanks to Loic for filming...sorry I F-ed up the levels at the beginning of the interview, dudes!

Bad PR, vol.2: Spinnaface

I had thought that a PR email like the one I got from Dropz was once in a lifetime, but now I'm wondering whether I'll be able to make a whole series out of these kooks.  An email with the subject "I got a spinna for a face" reached my inbox.  The email began with the cordial greeting, "Yo whats spinnin!?!!?!  My name is Spinnaface. I got a spinna for a face and my face is a spinna!"  Uhhhhh.........what?

The full (and completely ridiculous) email text is below in this post.  I was already going insane over just the PR email and then my friend found this music video of his.  This shit is nuts - he DOES have a spinna for a face and his face IS a spinna!  This gimmick, man, this gimmick!  There's no reason SNL shouldn't parody this guy other than that he's already parodied himself so perfectly.  You can get lost in the shiny, chromed-out depths of this man's persona - check out his website here.  There are a ton of live videos, most of which are hilarious.  Part III to come when the heavens open up and bestow another gem like this upon my inbox.

Here's the full text of the PR email blast:

Yo whats spinnin!?!!?!

My name is Spinnaface. I got a spinna for a face and my face is a spinna!

I am an independent musician from Portland, OR. PDX! I make funky-electro-disco-hiphop music. I do public appearances, get it crackin as a hype man and do an original form of DJing with a custom touch screen and various midi controllers, all while keepin my face spinnin.

I will be out in NY this month from the 18th-25th. I am hoping to get involved with any show or party opportunities. If you know of any last minute shows or parties I can get down with than please hit me up! I am not trippin on any pay, just want to paaartaaaayyyy!!!

I know this is crazy last minute and most likely too late to get involved in anything this trip but I will be back in NY on a regular basis and would love to know about any future opportunities to get it crackin!

DROPZ DROPS DROPZ11 & THA KING A POP JUNE 25TH

 ...was the subject line of the most poorly written PR email blast I've ever received.  If I may quote,

“Michael wrote some songs about other people, so I was thinkin‘why don’t someone write a song about Michael?’ He’s the king a pop. So that’s why I called it “Tha King A Pop” If you can write a biography in a 5 minute song…then do it. So I did it. Like ‘If I could be like Mike’ the other MJ…Michael Jordan & Nike.  Their motto is ‘Just Do It’. So if there’s a job to be done and nobody else is doin’ it…then just do it. So I did it,” says Dropz."

His Myspace page is more hilarious and very confusing.  Why does he have over five million listens but under five thousand page hits?  If I may quote from that...

Wherever DropZ iz that IZ tha scene Im tha face on tha full moon eclipzin sonz a bitchez Im whateva U thinkin & Im your innocent conscience What U get iz what U see until proven guilty Ima playa luvaz bezt friend & a hataz worzt nightmare Tha lazt club hatin DropZ kicked me out Nex month they rubble on tha ground & thatz tha factz I can shout Listen 2 tha wordz I say & U WILL have a HAPPY DAY! Luv iz all it iz---DropZ.

But the real winner is his music video "Tha King A Pop", which is the below tribute to Michael Jackson.  A friend made the remix to the right.  We're all obsessed with this song.  I can't stop singing it.  I replace the word "Michael" with "Oscar", my cat's name, and sing it to my cat while holding him and spinning around.  This song is infiltrating the minds of so many people I know and doing terrible things to all of us.  Dropz is a total outsider.  I also played this song for a really long time on my last radio show.  The full text of the promo email that started it all is below in this post...

Chris Jordan's Fascinating Photos of Decomposed, Trash Filled Birds

While looking through photo sets of dead, oil soaked animals washing up around the Gulf Of Mexico, a friend told me about the photographic work of Chris Jordan.  He has taken numerous pictures of decomposed birds whose stomachs contained lots of small bits of plastic trash.  "[M]ade in September, 2009, on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking."

Though the photographs are shot in a deadpan, matter-of-fact style, they are ominous, gruesome and fascinating.  The full gallery is here.

Flicks From Eye And Ear Festival III

Aside from throwing weekly dance parties, regular noise shows and playing a suitcase crammed with pedals in bands like Chaos*CM*Magik and Ghost Moth, Todd Brooks has this teensy little side project...the Eye And Ear Festival, a two-day blowout with 39 local NYC bands held at The Knitting Factory.  The third year of the annual festival, held last weekend, included a healthy slice of the city's infamous, soon-to-be infamous and too-good-to-become-infamous bands.  Given a complete familiarity with Brooklyn's underground and curated with great taste to boot, Eye and Ear is a wake up call both to music nerds and to any industry d-bags who thought LCD Soundsystem was the "now NY sound".  Which is not to say that any one sound or style was represented in the festival.  Todd Brooks told me that after moving to New York several years ago, Carlos Giffoni's noise-centric No Fun Fest inspired him to do a similar project including a greater variety of musical styles.  Below's a slide show from day one, and you can also download a mix of the festival's bands here.

The more abstract acts of the night really underlined the fact that noise in NYC right now is anything but harsh (guess the New Yorker missed that memo, btw).  Hexbreaker Quintet is one of the better known bands spearheading the trend of mellow, spacy, synth-heavy explorations with imagery of science fiction and mysticism.  C. Lavender has been getting some attention lately with similar sounds, and performed with a beautiful Soviet era synthesizer. I really loved Human Resources' set too.  This guy sampled live radio static and cut it apart into beats and then just went way out on these awesome stoned jammer solos for a while.

A lot of the dancy acts of the night were totally Italo-ed out.  Love Like Deloreans' synth jams were a pair of spandex pants away from Giorgio Moroder.  Konnichiwa had a similar vibe, but with a ton of ridiculous drum samples, synth patches and charismatic vocals.  Though Fostercare was just as much indebted to the 80s, his dark songs were infomed more by industrialists like Skinny Puppy or SPK.

Bands like Pop. 1280 and Twin Stumps seem to be the currently acceptable forms of hardcore for non squatting crust bags.  To me, it really feels like these bands are coming from a nerdy, esoteric musical mindset and then deliberately deciding to make primitive music...or possibly the singer from Twin Stumps just needs an outlet for his really really sadistic bent.  Liturgy sounded like Burzum minus the mental illness - even though drummer Greg Fox uses blast beats for the entire set, the band paradoxically manages to sound slow and light...like they're not even playing black metal at all but chanting buddhist prayers.  I missed the second day, unfortunately, and was particularly bummed to miss No Fun Acid, Carlos Giffoni's new acid house project.  On the whole though, I saw way too much good music to digest in one day.  Kudos and thanks to Todd for throwing this event and supporting emerging NYC music.

Photos: Street fair nextdoor w/ sick bmx action; C Lavender (foto by Wm. Berger); Fostercare; Living Days; Hexbreaker Quintet; Twin Stumps; Human Resources; Passions; Twin Stumps; Liturgy; Konnichiwa; Konnichiwa; Love Like Deloreans; Follower; Dubknowdub; Dubknowdub; Pop. 1280; Eli Keszler; Todd Brooks in a pensive moment...

Shiraishi / Obsorne / Shurdut Live at WFMU

When I first heard the trio play a live set a few months ago at Shea Stadium, I was completely blown away.  With Hexbreaker Quintet headlining, I was expecting a night of low-key, mellow drone, but everybody in this trio was furious.  Jeffrey Shurdut's guitar squealed with high-pitched feedback, matched with wild soloing at the top of the neck.  It was a perfect analogy to the high, nasal tones of Tamio Shiraishi's saxophone.  I was just staring at Shiraishi like he was a golden god, dressed completely in white and occasionally bending over to shout raspy Japanese phrases into the mic.  Brian Osborne's drumming filled out the sound of the other two and placed the band solidly into the free jazz realm.

Although this is a new trio with no previous recorded material, all three players are veterans.  Tamio Shiraishi relocated to NYC from Japan several years ago after having collaborated with many of Japan's best improvisers (check out this video of him with Keiji, Otomo and Tori).  Brian Osborne and Jeffrey Shurdut have already collaborated together in their band George Steeltoe Ensemble, with a few records out on Osborne's own imprint, Heat Retention records.

What was incredible about the live set the trio gave on my radio show a few weeks back was how much more dynamic depth the band was able to achieve.  This set is more meditative than I expected, dwelling at times in near silence (for a few moments, the only sounds heard are the squeaks from a chair that Shurdut asked the engineer Bill Bowen to mic).  Though Shiraishi dwells entirely in the high regions of the reed, an effect produced by biting the reed, his characteristic sound reveals itself anew in the varied contexts of Osborne's and Shurdut's meanderings.

10 Live on WFMU

When Japanese laptop noisician Marqido came through Rob Lim's Janitor From Mars program five years ago, Marqido probably never would have foreseen the musical direction he would take when returning to my program last week with his duo 10.  South Korean crooner Itta began collaborating with Marqido several years ago after Marqido toured through Seoul's experimental venue Yogiga.

As 10, the duo is just finishing up their first American tour, promoting their recent album, Kitsch.  Fans of 10 will be surprised by this live session (or by any of their live concerts for that matter), since 10's electro-pop is highly improvisatory.  Each of the three performances I've seen personally in the past weeks have been completely different.  Wave No Wave is taken at half tempo on this recording, for instance, and all the songs are significantly lengthened.  Marqido makes great use of an optical theremin (which is already at the top of my Christmas wish list) and feeds Itta's vocals and both members' keytars through Logic on his laptop.  10 has been one of my favorite mutant-pop bands for a few years now (especially their album Nomad), so it's been particularly illuminating to see the free improv that underlies the pristine, taut pop on their recordings.

10 is also featured in an article by me just published in May's issue of Wire about experimental music past in present from Seoul, South Korea.  Read that shit, there's magic all up in that bitch.

Rockin' New Brunswick '83 (video)

Oh god...all the TV channels are carrying some boring fucking meeting...apparently it's important since Obama is there and he's super famous and everything, but he's just talking about buying apples and oranges and telling some anecdote about his old junker car.  Obviously I'm buying apples because citrus tastes nasty to me and I don't care about cars since I take the subway.  So I'm changing the channel.  I feel like it's a lot more productive to watch this video about New Brunswick's music scene in the early '80s instead.  Know what I mean?

Rockin' Brunswick - 1983 from Joe Machos on Vimeo.

Judge Judy: Teeth Mountain v. Shams

Lord, this one sounded too good to be true when I heard it was in the works a few months back.  And it also helps confirm my suspicion that all the stuff on Judge Judy, Maury, Springer, what have you, are totally made up.  On Monday's episode of Judge Judy, Teeth Mountain's Kate Levitt accused Jonathan Coward, AKA Shams, of killing her cat by throwing a TV on top of it.  The witnesses are Andrew Burt from Teeth Mountain and Narwhalz, who unfortunately doesn't speak much in court but who distinctly refers to Judy as "Mama".  For you animal lovers, this story is not true - although Shams does fuck around with dead birds on stage and burn them as part of these...like...satanic rituals or something.  I'm not sure if they're dead when he finds them.

How To Be OK with a Lo-NRG Day (videos)

Top left: Master Scratch Band - Computer Break; Top right: - O'Gar - Playback Fantasy; Bottom left: Hugh Masekela - Don't Go Lose It Baby; Bottom right: Space - Running In The City

No friends? No problem! Just watch youtube clips of Giorgio Moroder, Crash Course In Science, Lectric Funk and the related videos.  Pretty soon it will be four in the morning and you won't even have noticed that you were lonely and miserable, sitting in a dim room in front of a screen watching ridiculous music videos instead of interacting with the world.  Thanks, internet!