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Stairway to Heaven: The Quarter-Note Version (MP3)
Composer Thomas Dimuzio has taken this classic rock tune, reversed it, cut it up into quarter-notes and then reassembled it in forward order to retain the melody. Dimuzio claims that the resulting file contains exactly 666 regions. Anyone want to verify this?
Thanks Rumori!
A handful of mostly-DJ-related newspaper and magazine articles this week:
Tom Scharpling, host of The Best Show on WFMU, got a nice write-up in the "New Jersey" section of the January 1, 2006 New York Times. In the article, Tom talks about TBSOWFMU, his comedic collaboration with Jon Wurster, and his writing career, among other topics. Read the article here. (.jpg, 142K) And, listen here to the phone call from "Pizza Aficionado". (realaudio archive)
Time Out New York recently featured Ed Shepp, host of The Ed Shepp Radio Experiment, in an article about New York DJs-to-watch-hear in the post-Stern-to-Sirius era. The clipping, from the January 12 edition of TONY, can be viewed here. (.jpg, 35k). Click here for the Ed Shepp archives.
DJ Emeritus Irwin Chusid was interviewed by the AIGA Journal of Design in November, about the works of Jim Flora, who inspired this WFMU T-shirt design from 2004. The full interview with Irwin can be read at the AIGA site here. Irwin's archives are here.
Finally, just to prove that you have come to the right place, this very blog has been named one of the Top Five Music Blogs, according to Toronto's EyeWeekly. Need proof? View the mad props here.
Where have you gone, 1991? Here's a short piece of video that triggered my - get this - nostalgia! Well, as Caetano Veloso said in 1972, "that's what rock n'roll is all about", so let's rock.
Here we have the fabulously sleazy-chic Udo Kier as the desperately horny Hans in Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho". Udo sprinkles a little Sprockets on Dean Stockwell's Ben in Blue Velvet, and voila - a bit of lampshade cabaret performance for the benefit of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves that strangely prefigures The Electric 6's "Danger High Voltage" video, which is not very nostalgic at all.
Udo Kier sings about Berlin! New York! Moscow! Tokyo! (wmv download, 10 Megs)
Hello, Everybody—Nice seeing you again.
Having been educated beyond my station (which is Grand Central, where I will soon be living in a cardboard box), it’s surprising that I was never required to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It was just one of those things I always supposed I’d get around to some day, but I never did. That’s why I was so pleased to see that Penguin’s new “Great Ideas” series includes a little volume called The Christians and the Fall of Rome, some 96 pages excerpted from the massive 3-volume Decline and Fall.
There are a dozen titles in this new series of excerpts from great writers, and the covers are so well-designed, and the in-store display is so tempting, that I wanted to buy them all, even the ones I’ve already read. But, Jeez, they cost $9.95 each! There’s really no reason for that. I think the material is all in the public domain by now, and Dover manages to put out similar books in their Thrift editions for, like, $2.00 each. I can’t afford to pay $8 for cover design at the moment, so I only got the Gibbon.
I expected Gibbon to be, you know, the definitive official history, droning on in period prose, but then on page 9 he says, “Every privilege that could raise the proselyte from earth to Heaven, that could exalt his devotion, secure his happiness, or even gratify that secret pride, which, under the semblance of devotion, insinuates itself in the human heart, was still reserved for the members of the Christian church; but at the same time all mankind was permitted, and even solicited, to accept the glorious distinction, which was not only proffered as a favour, but imposed as an obligation.” Ha! It turns out Gibbon was a big ol’ bag o’ snot (and I mean that as a compliment), with lots of slyly worded criticisms of the established religion of his day. I really enjoyed this little book, and think it’s more likely now that someday I will read the whole original work—or at least the longer Penguin abridgement of it.
Continue reading "The Perfect Medium and the Fall of Rome" »
In the 1970's, the BBC came up with the genius idea of transmitting breaking news and rudimentary graphics to TV sets via text encoded in the folds of a normal analog signal. Many TVs in Europe and some in the US are equipped with a decoder, allowing them to pick up the so-called teletext feed. A typical teletext screenshot is on the left, but you can check out more on this site.
Ok, if I almost lost you there with geek hooey, allow me to wow you with pretty pictures in this online gallery of uber-pixelated, retro-happy submissions to the latest teletext art contest. via Video Thing
--- RECENT FEATURES ---
Samuel Beckett: BBC Radio Plays Eight full-length BBC radio productions of Samuel Beckett plays, broadcast between 1959 and 1991. Audio includes: Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (Ireland, 1958); A Piece of Monologue (UK, 1986); Cascando (UK, 1964); Cascando (Ireland, 1991); Embers (UK, 1959); Rough for Radio (UK, 1976); Words and Music (UK, 1962); The Old Tune (Ireland).
Jacques Lacan: Hours of archival material from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901-1981). Includes his 1973 film Télévision (1973), the complete Radiophonie (1970), as well as numerous other lectures dating from 1966-1970. Also included are nine audio recordings of the legendary Séminaire. From 1953 to 1980, Lacan's Séminaire was the laboratory, the work-in -progress for his Return to Freud project. The Séminaire was a singular place and moment, almost weekly, every year from November to June. Without any connection with university, it was public and open to everyone. Curiously, despite Lacan's famous verve for grandiloquence and his matchless improvising oral style, none of the 500 sessions have been cleanly and officially recorded (neither audio nor video) until now, presented here on UbuWeb. (audio and video is in French)
Harold Pinter: BBC Radio Plays 8 hours worth of plays by Harold Pinter aired between 1964-2000. Includes "Moonlight" (2000), "A Slight Ache" (2000), "Last To Go" (1964), "The Birthday Party" (1970), "No Man's Land" (1978), "Betrayl" (1990), "Family Voices" (date unknown), "Landscape", "Victoria Station" (1986) and "Family Voices" (1981).
This post features a few highlights from a few listening sessions from the second weekend in October of last year. I was holed up in an efficiency cottage south of Albany, and it was the last time I really had a few days to scan the bands. As I said before, when I get out of the city is when I try to listen to radio in a more meaningful fashion. For one, there’s more time without the interruptions and diversions of being home. But more importantly there’s less radio noise in lower population density areas which makes picking up distant stations more likely.
I’ve made a couple trips upstate since October, but each time I’ve stayed at a chain motel that seems to be impervious to radio waves. I assume under the concrete the damn thing was a steel building. I have actually featured radio I heard on those trips in this blog series, but if you must know the truth I recorded those listening sessions in a car sitting in the motel parking lot.
I know, I AM a geek. I kept envisioning a cop rolling up and wondering what I’m doing with a slightly exotic radio and a tape recorder out in a parking lot on a winter night. Probably receiving instructions from Al Qaeda...
Anyway, I didn’t really tune into anything especially amazing or unprecedented on that trip. Listening/recording sessions in years past have been more fruitful (and I hope to go through some of those tapes for future posts). But that weekend the noise level wasn't so bad, and the dial was full of voices. And I heard some interesting and disgusting radio, a little bit of which I will share with you here.
On part three of this series, a reader left a comment that he had been given a shortwave for Christmas, and was “kind of disappointed,” remarking that even late at night most of what he was able to pick up was “Christian stuff or Spanish language stations.” And that kind of thing can be a real problem for somebody who is curious about shortwave radio and tries listening to it for the first time.
For one thing, a majority of what you’ll hear moving across the dial (besides static from gadgets and wiring) is either not in English, or is some Christian garbage you wish was in an unfamiliar language. That’s because shortwave in America is mostly Christian propaganda, AND most of the rest of the world uses shortwave for information and entertainment, and most of the world's listeners aren’t native English speakers.
Continue reading "Adventures In Amplitude Modulation - Part 5" »
I've had a tortured relationship to Bruce Springsteen since I first heard his music on the radio. I grew up on Long Island where Bruce didn't get much airplay, probably in deference to our own home-grown musical son, the execrable Billy Joel. I'm assuming Bruce was perceived as "Jersey" and - short of Born To Run - I don't remembering hearing him much until Born In The USA, which was HUGE on the radio. I couldn't stand that record because - like many people - I wasn't listening carefully and thought Bruce was praising a country I felt had gone horribly wrong under Ronald Reagan (I also hated the synthesizers). Because Springsteen's music tends to the anthemic, which the radio loves and which was anathema to me in my punk rock days, Bruce was someone whose music I actively avoided.
(11 MP3s in this post)
Ever since Mozart made it fashionable to sing German in his opera The Magic Flute, artists all over the world have explored the beauty of the German language. In the following I would like to present some highlights of this tradition. And don't be afraid, I will not post any David Hasselhoff tracks. Though, if you are interested, you can go over to Amazon and listen to a lo-fi 30 second excerpt of him singing "Stille Nacht", the German version of "Silent Night". But honestly, don't do it, for your own sake.
Since I mentioned The Magic Flute already, let us start with one of the stars of American opera, Florence Foster Jenkins, performing the definite version of the aria Der Hölle Rache (MP3). If you like this, you should definitely check out the compilation The Muse Surmounted for more opera greatness.
Next on our tour of is Monty Python's Holzfäller Song (MP3), the German version of the Lumberjack Song, taken from the first German episode of Monty Python's Flying Circus. You probably know that most foreign shows on German TV are dubbed by professional voice-over actors, often very badly. However, Monty Python produced this one episode themselves for the German TV station WDR, all other episodes were dubbed.
Recently I searched The Internet for audio of Fozzie the Bear saying "waka waka". Don't ask me why, just ask yourself this question: Does there exist a situation that cannot be improved by the addition of a puppet bear saying "waka waka"? Don't think so. Anyway, the only result my search yielded was a messageboard where this one guy posted "I've just wasted 52 minutes of my life searching The Internet for audio of Fozzie the Bear saying 'waka waka'!" So I guess it's just not there. Soooo, I guess this is an opportunity!!
mp3 for download: Fozzie The Bear "Waka Waka"
I Am The Source!! Now enjoy this picture of Navin Johnson rejoicing in finding his name listed in the phone book.
.....
Dammit. Couldn't find one. Well, don't look at me -- you go be the source! Get your name listed in the friggin Internet Directory.
Smutty Friday continues.
The FCC publishes words and phrases on its website which it doesn't allow to be published on the airwaves of the radio and TV stations which it regulates. Inspired by this article, I decided to find out for myself exactly how the FCC titillates and panders to the masses, while forbidding broadcast outlets from doing the same. I was shocked (and appalled) by what I found. While the FCC has fined radio stations as much as $25,000 for uttering phrases as harmless as "Sit On My Face," while it has fined CBS TV stations millions of dollars for a quarter-second glimpse of nipple, its own website is a virtual den of filth, perversion and dangerous, bizarre sexual practices.
Here then are the results from the search engine found on the FCC's website:
Beaver - 800 Tits - 101 Shit - 51
Fuck - 43 Alaska Pipeline - 21 ? Boner - 15
Fisting - 14 Cunt - 14 Boobs - 7 Rim Job - 7
Abe Lincoln - 7 Blow Job - 6 Mother Fucker - 5
Golden Shower - 3 Camel Toe - 2 Cocksucker - 2
Happy Meal - 2 Wanker - 2 Felch - 1 Twat - 1
My new best friend is Gonzo. My best "kinky, off the wall friend." My best kinky off-the-wall friend who makes tiny dirty figures. And he wants to make me famous. According to Gonzo, women are big fans of his site, particularly the dirty parts: "The main audience in that section is girls from 18-35, and some up to
55. The guys are more interested in the pro built cars I do. The girls
are much more voyeuristic. Obviously they know I am 55 years old, but
still want advice on everything from sex to relationships, to whatever.
They call themselves Gonzo
girls. They also know most young guys are pigs, only interested in
themselves, a sort of squirt and run affair. They really have no clue
how to pamper or treat a girl. I typically can, and do as much if not
more domestic stuff than any girl I know. It is a level playing field.
I never expect anyone to do anything that I would not do myself, and
sometimes I just do it because they deserve it. In order to keep it,
you have to give it away. Leary taught me that. He was the smartest man
I ever knew. Nothing is wrong, only thinking makes it that way. Come
back to me. THE BOY." I didn't quite follow all that, but I do know that Gonzo says, "Send me some erotic photos, and I will make you famous." He adds, "Always very confidential, I never kiss and tell."
Here's your homework: Suggest a scenario for the Gonzo Amanda action figure (always very confidential, I never kiss and tell, so I suggest you post it in the comments section, which nobody reads anyway), I'll pass it on to Gonzo with some dirty pictures, we'll see what he comes up with, and maybe you can buy your own dirty little Amanda.
Throw it on the Barbie. Ridiculous right-wing pseudo-ruckus over "gender confusion" Barbie.
Underwear is (not) everywhere. Paranoid parents look up Bratz skirts and don't like what they don't see.
All girl action figures. Baby dyke dolls.
Fulla fun. Muslim Barbie. via Nerve
Hugo, girl. Trannie Barbie, Wedgie Bratz, Lezzie Barbie, and Burka Barkie, meet Hugo Chavez, the "dictator-like doll" of the dictator-like dictator.
One-eyed monster. Ragdoll kitty. Totally true.
This blows. Blow-up dolls blown up will give you nightmares. As will the Real Doll Museum, via Fleshbot.
Porn puzzler: Is it a three-way if one of the three is a Real Doll? Or if all of them are frogs?
Continue reading "This Week in Sex: Welcome to the Dollhouse" »
Last Sunday, legendary Neon Boy, Television member, and all around Noo Yawk City music scene
kingpin Tom Verlaine hopped the PATH train one stop to our modest Jersey City studios for an informal chat and guest DJ session with WFMU's Gaylord Fields. On the plate was an extended discussion regarding the nuances of Verlaine's considerable record collection (from which he hauled many gems into the studio to spin today). Tom's a regular customer at WFMU's Record Fairs, so you'll know just where to go when you decide you need to find some of these incredible selections. You can listen to the whole show right now in either streaming MP3 or Real Audio. Tom also just recently had his stupendous instrumental solo LP from 1992 ("Warm & Cool") re-issued by Thrill Jockey Records. You can hear the opening track from that album (Real Audio, from the WFMU archives) by clicking here.
Dip your toe into the pool of self-loathing with the poetry and audio stylings of Boruk Glasgow. Oh, what the hell, dive in - here's his entire 1969 early Seventies album, Blackhole Boogie. As Listener Jim says on his Empty Handed Blog, "Boruk apparently comes from the William Shatner school of dramatic reading, which says that you should accent the wrong syllable when pronouncing words, to give your recitation deeper meaning." To get the sense of Boruk's world view right away, try out Eddie My Love or Nowhere to Hide, or any of his semen-based works (MP3s).
Drink Silence | Ring Cycle | Tinfoil Lad | Alcibiades
Desert Fox | Salad Freak | Arlington Cemetary
Nowhere to Hide | Occult Orgasm | Youth Poisoning
Semen Rock | He | Lubricating Mama | Orgone Bicycle | New York Natural
Mask | Lumberjack Poet | Eddie My Love | Psalm of the Male Sperm
To Know Him Is To Love Him | Solo for a Solo | Today Yahweh | Urban Antelope
{a lot more below the fold!}
Thinking that you'll never be as good a lyricist as Mark E. Smith, or even Stephen Malkmus? I may have a solution that will provide some hope, a conceptual springboard of sorts.
You see, my wife receives a lot of a certain type of spam, spam I've been asking her to save all these many months; as I keep saying, "there's a blog post in that, for sure." The mails are unusual in that they do not appear to be "phishing" for anything, and most of the time do not include any clickable links; they sometimes contain images of watches, software or others items for "sale," but most often no links are provided where one could actually make a purchase. A few of the mails contain a hyperlink that simply says, "Click Here Now"; no one is ignorant enough to fall for that one, are they?
The most interesting features of these mails are their headers (which seem to be randomly generated), as well as some abstract blocks of prose that often appear at the very bottom of the messages themselves. (Upon investigation, I found that much of the prose consisted of nonsensical extracts from Dickens' David Copperfield.)
It's almost as if some deft programmer actualized code to simulate the creative thought processes of Tristan Tzara or Captain Beefheart.
This is where YOU come in—the indie rocker waiting for that shower of ideas to come, so that you can form a band, get some cred and make a video (to be shown on New York Noise.) If we've any hope of stemming the tide of cute-girl temper-tantrum noise rock currently infiltrating the underground, bold new strides must be made in the realm of avant-rock. So get unlazy, pick up your axe (sorry, is that Metal talk?), and write some new songs, with these computer-begat snippets as inspiration.
Me, I'm retired. I'll be here waiting for my promo copy of "Reverend Gonzalez Coachman" b/w "Electrode Frederick."
Immediately below are the headers, reproduced exactly as they appeared; some of them even make sense. I've taken the liberty of highlighting my favorites:
-Not count by jockstrap deacon
-so break go saltpetre
-Is cancel as doldrums
-No clean my obstructionism
-his make to frothy
-Or count a settler heliport
-so need or exception swineherd
-on turnon do vulgarian
-The first time cluj shutdown
-No sign of magnet carrycot
-As count do digit
-He send he bachelor
-his fit a iron polyethylene
-The swim as baptist slanderous
Continue reading "Go Dance It Waist Communal: A Spambox Full of Avant-Rock Potential" »
Regular WFMU listeners are no doubt aware that many great many bands blow through our hallowed halls on a weekly basis, sometimes playing live on the air right then and there, and sometimes recording for a future broadcast. It's not an uncommon sight to find the office staff slacking off in the name of checking out the racket in our 4th floor's live music room, and most recently, a tremendous rumbling was made by Brooklyn's finest metal/noise/screamo ensemble, Made Out of Babies.
Yep, with a hot record on the fine Neurot label (also home to Oxbow and Enablers, who've also made recent live appearances on FMU) and with one of the most fantastically maniacal vocalists any of us have faced in eons, Made Out of Babies definitely commanded our attention on the afternoon they dropped in. Here's a video clip (.wmv file, 5 megs) of the song "Herculoid", from the band's appearance on Diane's Kamikaze Fun Machine. You can see the playlist for the show here, and listen to the entire set in Real Player or MP3, too. European WFMU fans take note that Made Out of Babies will be on your side of the puddle for much of February and March, so make sure you show up. I'd be hard pressed to think of a better way to get well acquainted with the rear wall of a rock club.
Visitors to WFMU are often amazed and amused by Station Manager Ken's collection of velvet paintings adorning the hallways of our Jersey City home. The whole collection is now available for your viewing pleasure here as a set on our flickr site.
Ken started collecting the paintings about 6 years ago, after the chaplain at Upsala College (who was based next door to WFMU on the Upsala campus) donated 5 paintings he had. These first seeds in the collection include the "Vampire Lady" and the "Fantasy" paintings (one of which later became the subject of a 'FMU t-shirt). Ken became interested in the medium and began collecting them, finding many on Ebay. In particular he was impressed by the ones sold by Bill Robison, a velvet painting collector and dealer who traveled to Tijuana, Mexico, to commission most of the works seen here, including the "Velvet Republicans". Ken's favorite in the collection is also his most recent aquisition: Zell Miller, seen above in his Republican National Convention glory.
To the right: JonBenet Ramsey, Dick Cheney, Osama Bin Laden, and George W. Bush. The full collection can be viewed here.
Enjoy!
We've all heard the hype about how podcasting puts the power of broadcasting into the hands of anybody with a computer and an internet connection, but did you know that this freedom applies to The Man as well? That's right, the White House has a whole slew of podcasts available, from Dubya's weekly radio address, to interminable symposia from the Office of National Drug Control. Even The Pentagon, NASA, and the Air Force have their own podcasts! (Alas, no podcast from the NSA. Yet.) The beauty of all this is that all publicly released government material is in the public domain, so this is a remixer's dream. The time is right for a re-podcast of Dubya's weekly radio address - just subscribe to the weekly radio address, remix it and then re-podcast it. It would be perfectly legal, due to the government's audio belonging to the public domain. I drunkenly mentioned this idea to The Professor at the WFMU Holiday party, and he tried to flush my head down the toilet.
Now if only the government could adopt some audio production standards in its podcasts, remixers would have some better working material! I mean, why does Dubya only get 64 kbps in his podcast (twice as much as Rummy and Cheney's chintzy 32kbps allotment) but the drug office is awarded a full 128 kbps?! Where's the justice in that? Wake up and smell the bitrate, people! And can't someone in the whitehouse find a nice quiet room somewhere to record these things in so you don't have to hear the federal ventilation system whirring away in the background?
Here's some samples from the federal government's roster of podcasts:
Sample Podcasts (MP3s):
President's Weekly Radio Address: Sample 1 | Sample 2
Pentagon Channel: Dick Cheney Podcast | Donald Rumsfeld Podcast | Rucksacks and Rations
Office of National Drug Control: Podcast 1
(Thanks, Listener Ken in Denver!)
The legendary, ever-eccentric Bonzo Dog Band are set for an on-stage reunion this month in London, with member Neil Innes' other "band" the Rutles as opening act. It will be a one-off remembrance of their past (and especially a tribute to leader Vivian Stanshall who died in a fire in 1995) rather an extended affair, and will be documented on a future DVD release. To celebrate, Sonic Pollutions offers this strange clip of the band doing bizarre calypso ditty "Look Out There's a Monster Coming" (avi, 35 MB) on 1968 UK TV's Do Not Adjust Your Set. Note Monty Python's Terry Jones in the introduction.
