WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Meat Beat Manifested

Everyone has seen a live visual presentation (i.e. Shakespeare in the Park), and everyone has heard a live audio presentation (i.e. WFMU).  And most people have seen a TV show or a movie (i.e. Beavis and Butt-Head, Baby Mama).  Some people have even been told they're being treated to an audiovisual presentation (i.e. Dark Side of the Moon Laser Light Shows). Until last week, I didn't think anyone had made an live audiovisual presentation that really truly was aural and visual at the same time, together.  Then I saw Meat Beat Manifesto on Saturday at the Highline Ballroom.

Zillion-dollar budgets can give electronic music performers like Daft Punk and Kraftwerk an edge in creating visceral visual thrills at their concerts - you can't really do much more for a techno fan than have real robots playing a concert.  But Meat Beat Manifesto has taken a well-worn and considerably less expensive approach - collaging video behind the performers onstage - and taken it to a new zenith of accomplishment in that medium.

Meat Beat mastermind Jack Dangers and Mark Pistel from the political hardcore band Consolidated stood onstage controlling the otherworldly jungle-dubstep-trance beats and squiggles, and at the far right live drummer Lynn Farmer kept incredible pace throughout the entire performance.  On the far left stood Ben Stokes, the visual programmer for the show, who's worked with everyone from Ministry to Public Enemy to Levi's.  He grabbed video samples of Captain Beefheart, old BBC Radiophonic Workshop-esque explanations of sonic technology, Dali's eye-cutting nightmare, The Invaders, Sammy Davis Jr., Harrison Ford as President James Marshall in Air Force One, Star Trek, Billie Holiday, and even Animal, playing in tandem with a live feed of the drummer.

Unlike so many other video shows, clips didn't just sit lay flat and stuttery in the background.  They were accompanied by audio, and were layered over existing beats, scratched, stretched, and re-sampled in a way that fit in with the theme of the song - video of nuclear bomb blasts dropped to the beat, sounds and videos of Rastas burning weed edged their way into a drugs song (well, at least the one that referenced them the most overtly).  Dangers and Stokes were always working together in the audiovisual realm, as well - you could almost imagine the behind-the-scenes dialogue:  "Jack, I've found about 15 clips of people falling from the tops of buildings, can we work the sound of them screaming into the set?" or "Ben, could you work on finding a video of James Brown playing this one sample I use in this song?" Magic like that doesn't just pop out of a video mixer, or an audio mixer for that matter.

The most impressive part about the whole thing was Meat Beat's mastery in weaving overt political commentary into the show. 

The Feelies and the Hoboken Sound

In addition to the WFMU supported 4th of July concert (link) the Feelies are playing two shows at Maxwell's on July 1st and 2nd. Thanks to the time sensitive email from Brian Turner I was able to buy a pair of tickets before they sold out, in I think an hour. In anticipation of all this fantasticness I post an edited excerpt of something I found on the internets a few months back: A 1985 documentary on 'The Hoboken Sound.' (link)

Chaka Khan Vs. the Bee Gees

Now that Simon Pegg has gotten somewhat of a foothold in American consciousness, thought it would be a good time again to bring up his great late 90's UK sketch series Big Train. We posted a clip a couple years ago where Chairman Mao rises from his death bed to inexplicably (and quite convincingly) front Roxy Music; here's another of a Wild West shoot out between Chaka Khan and the brothers Gibb.

Besides Simon's ascent to movie stardom, this show should also be lauded for the sheer genius of people like Kevin Eldon, Mark Heap, Julia Davis (whose lead in Nighty Night may have been the single most screwed up character in a show oddly imported by Oprah's channel), and Catherine Tate (currently enjoying her own sketch show on BBC now, here's a clip); this crew all filtered into other great shows like Brass Eye, I'm Alan Partridge, Look Around You and Smack the Pony. May they all continue to thrive, and not move to Los Angeles to be harrassed by Courtney Love.

The Hasil Adkins Rejection Letters

This week marks the arrival (April 29, 1937) and unfortunately the departure (April 25, 2005) of The Wildest One Man Band Hunch Machine that ever stalked the planet. Hasil "The Haze" Adkins wrote, performed and lived out his wild-ass rock & roll dreams with a sincere ferocity unmatched by fellow humans north or south. Rattling the walls of his Madison, West Virginia shack, Hasil would croon sweet odes to commodity meat and serenade the fickle moon above with his hot dog reverie. Early on, he'd mail out his home-recorded concoctions to the country music stars of the day, hoping to place a song or grab a plum spot on a traveling package show. Like the rest of the world, Nashville would have to wait a few decades to get hep to Hasil's chicken walk-inspired genius.

She Said (Streaming Real Audio link)

Here's three rejection letters from three equally talented performers. (Thanks, Norton Records!)

White Mic Fever!

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.

Another WFMU Free Music Series Concert! The Ex with Gétatchèw Mèkurya, Either/Orchestra with Mahmoud Ahmed and Alèmayèhu Eshèté, Extra Golden: August 20th

(photo left: Konstantin's Flickr page)

When WFMU was first presented with the ability to put on some free NYC concerts via the New York State Music Fund grant, the obvious first notion was "who would we like to see in NYC that has never played before?" So we wound up the ball and sent the pitch over to Lincoln Center's Bill Bragin: how about Holland's greatest punk exports the Ex coming over (which they have in the past on many occasions), but this time bringing over some of their great international musician friends? The ones only Europe usually gets to see (or Ethiopia, if you happen to be there when the Ex make their fabled stops). We passed contacts to Lincoln Center, Terrie Ex got in touch with his fellow travelers, and then the ball was knocked outta the park in a severe way. The result? Lincoln Center's Out of Doors series in collaboration with WFMU's grant giving you all the chance to see the US debut of a major international collaboration for free at Lincoln Center/Damrosch Park Bandshell on West 62nd Street at Amsterdam in Manhattan, Wednesday, August 20th from 6-10 PM. Yes, free. No advance ticketing. On the bill:

The Ex with Gétatchèw Mèkurya (renowned Ethiopian saxophone legend), and if that weren't enough, Lincoln Center added two amazing East African/American collaborations to the bill: Either/Orchestra with Mahmoud Ahmed and Alèmayèhu Eshèté, plus Extra Golden.

If you're a fan of these artists, or Ethiopian/African sounds in general, you know this show is the event you've been waiting for. We've already spoken at length on the joys of WFMU aligning with the Ex in the past; they are among the most freeform and inspiring musicians and people we've had the fortune to experience live and on record. To hear them in full steamroller twin-guitar attack joined by the 73-year old Lion of Ethiopian saxophone is going to be a musical experience we're all gonna remember. More below on the entire fantastic bill (and don't forget the July 4th free Sonic Youth/Feelies show at Battery Park  WFMU is lending support to Downtown Alliance/River to River for!):

Trumpet Love, Part 1

In the last ten years or so the trumpet has been enjoying a renaissance.  There are a number of gifted and innovative trumpet players the world over deconstructing, reinventing and rethinking the instrument in myriad ways.  In the '80s when John Zorn was doing mouthpiece-only duck calls and blowing his sax into a bucket of water, the trumpeters were still playing somewhat straight.  I suppose it was only a matter of time.  What follows is a sample of the breadth of solo trumpet sounds percolating away.  (And if you're interested in delving even further, the astonishingly knowledgeable community over at Bagatellen has accumulated a lot more info such as this.)

First up, Mazen Kerbaj, everyone's favorite Lebanese avant garde/improv trumpet-playing cartoonist.  Aside from doing his very cool blog, Mazen is active in improv in his native Lebanon where he runs the Al Maslakh label, as well as in Europe where he often plays with avant-jazz and improv luminaries.  You may remember his duet with the Israeli army a few summers ago, when he played along with the bombs dropping around his home (Brian Turner's Trumpet vs. Bomb Beware of the Blog post here).  His solo record, Brt Vrt Zrt Krt, is worth checking out as it has a more rhythmic sensibility than many others we'll hear.  And, yes, the title is onomatopoeic. Mazen Kerbaj - Tagadagadaga (from Brt Vrt Zrt Krt) 

Greg Kelley is active in the noise scene both alone and with Bhob Rainey as the inimitable duo Nmperign.  He is a veteran of several No Fun Fests and has done "jazz" records with Flaherty/Corsano as part of Cold Bleak Heat.  While many of the artists profiled herein tend to have a disdain for the traditional, Greg Kelley may be my favorite of the bunch due to his punk aesthetic and general fuck-you attitude when it comes to genre.  Ostensibly borne from jazz, Greg's playing is nothing if not singular.  I am especially enamored of a little record he put out called, If I Never Meet You in This Life, Let Me Feel the Lack on Rossbin, as well as his duo with Alex Nielsen from a few years back on the always messed up Ultra Eczema label, entitled Graveside Doles.  He's put out a ton of stuff worth exploring.  This track comes from a statement-of-purpose record simply called Trumpet.  Greg Kelley - (02.30) (from Trumpet)

Ben Franklin Airbath: Philadelphia FMA sampler (mp3s)

Philadelphia's got a lot to be proud of. According to Philly Boy Roy, well there's hoagies, Rocky, Frank's Soda, them Eagles, Dead Milkmen, them Hooters, and laser GG Allin. With Mr. Ziegler's endorsements duly noted, what follows is a sampling - by no means comprehensive - of some of the other Philadelphia artists you'll be able to hear on WFMU's Free Music Archive.

Mp3s from Bad News Bats, Boogie Witch, Clockcleaner, Fursaxa, King Kong Ding Dong, Mincemeat or Tenspeed, Mountain High, The Original Sins, Phil Moore Browne, Sonic Liberation Front, The Strapping Fieldhands and Kurt Vile after the jump. Feel free to suggest more by email or in the comments.

Has Andy Breckman Ever Faced a Crowd This Tough?

From Cracked.

Great Moments in WFMU History #22

Upsala Sells WFMU - by Ken Freedman & Liz Berg

In late 1993, it became clear that Upsala College, the university that owned WFMU’s broadcast license and housed its studios, was on the verge of implosion. Seeing Upsala’s financial demise as a golden opportunity rather than the end of WFMU as he knew it, Station Manager Ken Freedman offered to purchase the station’s license from a reluctant Upsala administration.

As the college’s financial problems escalated to desperate, Ken convinced them to sign an agreement stating that he would run the station on their behalf and Auricle Communications, a non-profit group made up of DJs, listeners, and volunteers, would manage the station.

Finally Ken received a call from Upsala’s Vice President of Finance, who asked him “How quickly could we sell the station to you?” “Right away,” was Ken’s reply, even though Auricle did not have enough money to do so. A generous listener-donor loaned us the funds, papers were signed, and a rush order was sent to the FCC. Upsala’s final payroll barely squeaked by on funds from Auricle’s purchase of WFMU, and the college declared bankruptcy 2 weeks later. June 22, 1994.

Illustration by Danny Hellman

Yodel! (MP3s)

[ There are 18 MP3s in this post. All but one feature gratuitous yodeling. Some even include bird impersonations. Don't say you weren't warned. ]

Applied chaos theory in the information age? Whatever you want to call it, it happens to me quite frequently. Stuff somehow makes its way onto my hard drive, and I have no clue where it came from. So I had this MP3 compilation called "Yodel!" lying around for a while, and the title and artist information all seemed very suspicious. (Like a song called "oooooooooo" by "That DUDE" or such.) It doesn't seem to be ripped from one of the countless commercially available yodeling compilations, which makes it a bit harder (at least for me) to figure out what these songs are actually called and who performed them. I was not 100% successful, but I am confident that you can help me fill in the blanks. In exchange you get lots of free yodeling. Here it is, with all the (hopefully correct) info I could gather:

01 Wilf Carter (Montana Slim) - Alpine Milkman
02 Cackle Sisters - Arizona Yodeler
03 Cackle Sisters - I Left Her Standing There
04 Cackle Sisters - Go To Sleep My Darling Baby
05 Unknown - Yoodling (?)
06 Wilf Carter (Montana Slim) - Swiss Moonlight Lullaby
07 Sons of the Pioneers - Devil's Great Grandson
08 The Louvin Brothers - Satan is Real
09 J.E. Mainer's Mountaineers - Yodeling Mountaineer
10 Tex Williams - Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)
11 Unknown - The Drunkard's Hell
12 Unknown - Springtime in the Rockies
13 Eddy Arnold - Cattle Call
14 Patsy Montana - I Want To Be A Cowboy's Sweetheart
15 Unknown - Unknown
16 Wilf Carter (Montana Slim) - When The Ice Worms Nest Again
17 Tex Williams - Never Trust A Woman
18 Erika Eigen - I Wanna Marry A Lighthouse Keeper (Honestly, I have no clue why this was included, but I didn't want to destroy the artistic integrity of the original compilation...)

Standouts are definitely the three songs by the Cackle (DeZurik) Sisters. You can get much more music by them at the 365 Days Project. And please, if you know any of the missing artists/titles, leave a comment.

Disco vs Metal: The Final Countdown

A decades-old question was finally and definitively answered at Canal Room in New York City on April 19, when Mini Kiss and Tragedy threw down in a battle royale to determine once and for all which is more powerful, the dance floor or the depths of hell.

It wasn't quite billed as such, but it was still hard to see a double bill of a KISS cover band and a Bee Gees cover band as anything else. Mini Kiss is a tribute show put on by four midgets. Tragedy do heavy metal versions of the better-selling of the Gibb bros. repertoire. The tallies after the jump.

Archie Club News #16

Throughout the nineteen sixties, seventies and eighties, most issues of Archie Comics featured a two-page spread titled Archie Club News. The banner at the top of the page announced, "ARCHIE CLUB MEMBERS send in your reports and be eligible to win cash prizes in the Archie Series Magazines." The results of this venture were generally irrelevant notes sent in like, "Dear Archie, I want to tell you about the snow owl." Often what was sent in appeared to be part of a class project. Elementary school children were in the process of learning how to write letters and encouraged by a teacher to send something Riverdale way. Sometimes the letters were weird or even profound and other times prophetic or just silly. The following letter originally appeared in Archie #211, August 1971:

Dear Archie,

This year Edgewood has it all together. Especially with our new group The Subjected Soul's. We are a small group who can copy any group in the recording business. We try to do the best we can. Sometimes many of us get nervous because of the new people we see and old ones we know. But we keep on pouring on the sound of today.

We dig playing for little children at Elementary schools and Catholic schools. We get so many requests. We once had the crazy idea that we could be the first colored group on cartoons, and could prove that the blacks and whites and blues, reds, pinks, and greens and many other colors can get it together. And prove that we all can make it groovy.

L. Davis
710 Laverne Avenue
San Anotonio, Tex 78237

L. Davis' letter won 2nd prize of three dollars for this issue.

Ride The Cyclone!

The Inflatable Church

 

This is so moronic but, then again, so endearing to my implacable love of kitsch.  You and your boo can now get hitched in an inflatable church.  Perfect for those English, Belgian, Dutch and Spanish couples who won't be celebrating Earth Month and assembled by the European promotional structure manufacturers Innovations Xtreme Inflatables, this monstrosity is also a 2004 Guinness Book inductee for being (according to the incredibly vague search engine synopsis) "...the world's largest inflatable church in the world".  The damn organ is even inflated and they airbrushed the stained glass windows.  Could lazy be any more as lazy does? 

Fxxk The Humans!

This week, animator/comic genius Brad Neely dropped a new short musical animated piece. I wrote a bit about Neely in a previous post, and he is popping up on screen as one of the subjects of the new film We Are Wizards, which examines the subculture around the Harry Potter books (the film played at the NY Underground Film Festival earlier this month, as is in the Independent Film Festival of Boston this weekend).

His new cartoon is musical ditty in which "all of the woodland elves, satyrs and hobgoblins are finally coming together for a ragtime protest ditty against us Homo sapiens." They have a rather impressive list of all the things we get wrong.

Dirty, crude, juvenile, and completely reprehensible. And catchy as hell...

NSFW video after the jump.

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.

WFMU's Myspace Band Friends, Vote for yer faves, Round 7!!!

Good morning people! Got some more music goodies this week for you to vote yay or nay to, courtesy of WFMU's hefty list o' buddies at a certain social networking site of which you may have heard. We've got Japanese collagists recycling Missy Eliot, The Ramones recycled by Christians, North American musicians named after recycled French Existentialism 101 exam terms, a track from the guy who put together the Sublime Frequencies "Choubi Choubi" compilation of folk and pop from Iraq, a song named after the capital of Iran, a New Jersey collagist named after a line from one of the greatest teen comedies ever, an atmospheric piece from Germany, and a straight out rocker, just for good measure. Consider it the Earth Day Special... or not....!!!

The band or bands who get the most "Pump it" votes each week will be forever exalted on my FIRST EVER MARATHON PREMIUM called "In MySpace, No One Can Hear You Scream" (you can still pledge to this year's marathon here). Last round's favorites were The Bran Flakes, Slasher Risk, and The Little League! Congratulations, band buddies!!

Who will be next? It's up to you!!!

I Believe That (Stoned) Children Are Our Future

While Dr. Seuss may have quietly but most assuredly extolled the virtues of LSD, some kids' authors are being a little less subtle when it comes to the Sweet Leaf. Follow the pictoral excerpts from the new publication It's Just A Plant and get involved in your kids' choices. Bryce thinks maybe this kid has already made her choice. However, I think what really should be outlawed is taking your kid bike riding wearing Sgt. Pepper garb, but who am I to judge. (Thanks for link, Tom Lax.)