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Don't miss out on WFMU's 3rd annual Radiovision Festival this Saturday, October 19th, at the Scholastic Auditorium (557 Broadway) in NYC! Tickets here.
Radiovision celebrates radio's future as it takes on new forms in the
digital age for the medium's fans, tinkerers, and future thinkers.
Carrier Belleuse Pierre La Maison De Musique (Public Domain)
This April, WFMU and the Free Music Archive are challenging artists everywhere to create new recordings and contemporary arrangements of historic compositions available in the public domain. We’re calling this our Revitalize Music Contest.
To inspire entries, we’ve handpicked a selection of out-of-copyright songs with compelling lyrics, beautiful melodies, and unusual stories. Keep in mind that unless materials are listed in our contest repository, the recordings of performances we link to are still within the scope of copyright. After learning about the songs and contest rules here below, you can browse our pool of entries and submit your own here.
An old Mormon hymn with a beautiful melody that first came to our attention when Haruomi Hosono (of Yellow Magic Orchestra) recorded a version. You can stream this version for inspiration. It features lyrics by Jeremiah E. Rankin (1828-1904) and music by William G. Tomer (1833-1896).
In addition to showing up constantly on TV, movies, and when you open musical jewelry boxes, this song has been recorded by Bing Crosby, Roy Orbison, and (our personal favorite) Justine and the Victorian Punks. It was originally a parlor song by Stephen Foster (1826–1864) that was published posthumously by Wm. A. Pond & Co. of New York.
A comic song that was performed by Al Jolson in his show The Honeymoon Express. It's also notably been sung by "outsider" musician Tony Mason-Cox, an Australian insurance agent who believed himself to be the reincarnation of a black slave from 19th Century Alabama. It was written by Billy Merson.
Felix Arndt (1889–1918) wrote this novelty ragtime-style piano roll as an engagement gift to his fiancée (and later wife), Nola Locke. He died just three years after it was published, and lyrics were later added by James F. Burns.
One winning song from our pool of entries will be given a Rebecca Black "Friday" treatment. We’ll be hiring a music video professional to create an original music video that showcases the winning song and shares it with a wider audience.
Our judges include Edward Guo (Founding Director, IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library), April Ledbetter (Dust-to-Digital Record Company), Laura Cantrell (Singer-Songwriter), Joel Meyer (Executive Producer, WNYC's Soundcheck), Adam Green (Editor, Public Domain Review) and Ken Freedman (Station Manager, WFMU). They'll be evaluating entries based on originality, creativity, artistic merit, adherence to the "Revitalize Music" theme, and general musical appeal. For the songs we’ve chosen above, we welcome exact covers, in-exact covers, repurposed elements, mashups, stems, and everything in-between.
SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Entries should be comprised of music that you create yourself, material that's in the public domain, or other material that you have express permission to use. Keep in mind that most recordings and performances of these public domain songs are still within the scope of copyright.
Entrants must create accounts on the Free Music Archive in order to submit to the contest. This way we have your info. You can sign up here.
Entries must be in the form of an audio recording and in MP3 format, stereo bitrate 192kbps or higher (256kbps preferred).
Entries must be submitted using our form here. You can submit as many entries as you'd like.
Songs enter the public domain when their copyright expires or if the song’s author has forfeited rights and dedicated the song to the greater good. The Public Domain Review explains the public domain eloquently as an "invaluable and indispensable good, which - like our natural environment and our physical heritage - deserves to be explicitly recognized, protected and appreciated."
MORE ABOUT CC0
While most songs enter the public domain because of old age, Creative Commons offers a CC0 Public Domain Declaration that allows artists to dedicate their work to the public domain. It seems fitting that entries to the contest will breathe new life into the Public Domain by returning to whence they came. These new works can then be more easily shared, remixed, and built upon during the contest and after the contest ends. We imagine these entries being used in video projects, coursework, video games, podcasts, and beyond.
Using CC0, you waive all copyrights and related or neighboring rights that you have over your work, such as your moral rights (to the extent waiveable), your publicity or privacy rights, rights you have protecting against unfair competition, database rights, and rights protecting the extraction, dissemination, and reuse of data. More information here.
We are now more than a decade into the technological revolution that turned the music industry upside down. Initially, it felt like there was so much possibility, that the internet might be the great democratizer, that it could empower artists to take more control over their careers, and ultimately allow them to see more of a percentage of income from their music. There have been some success stories, but it seems the vast majority of artists today are struggling even more, making less money yet paying more middlemen.
Recently musicians have begun to be more open about discussing their shrinking percentages in this music industry food chain. There’s been articles in the past few months about major indie artists that are unable to pay for their own health insurance, bands frustrated with payments they receive via streaming services, and apparently now Cat Power is even facing bankruptcy. When artists are willing to publicly talk about money it means that things are definitely taking a turn for the worse.
People often like to talk about disruption when discussing the music industry but the initial disruption was the easy part, think of it like screaming fire in a crowded theater, it’s actually putting something together after that chaos that is the difficult and interesting work. Every few years we see a different solution touted as the answer. First it was mp3 downloads, then it was internet radio, and now that the cloud is here it’s streaming on demand. This sort of technological determinism is market driven and frankly isn’t necessarily what most artists need or even want.
When two open digital libraries fall in love... this happens.
For our on-going video remix contest, WFMU's Free Music Archive and Prelinger Archives asked you to show us what video mashups of our collections would look like. From Betty Bop dancing the Charleston to modern jazz, to 1906 San Francisco set to dubstep... our remix children are deeply disturbing, abstract, violent, beautiful, and often half-naked.
We dare you now to find a comfortable chair in a dark room and watch all 122 entries. If you see one you like, log into the website, and click the thumbs up. You can vote for multiple videos, but only once. All voting will wrap up by 5pm ET on Monday, November 25th. The winner of the popular vote will take home an iPad.
So journey on, little monkeys! Vote now, and help natural selection determine the fittest.
Vicki Bennett has been making audio and
visual collage since 1991, when the internet was a fetus and you
probably didn't own a computer. She creates her work with the nom de plume People Like Us.
It's a moniker that speaks to the role of the collective and popular
culture in her work, and a need to belong. Using collage as her medium,
she creates audio recordings, films and radio shows that mix and
manipulate original sources from both experimental and popular media.
Her work has been shown at Tate Modern, The Barbican, Sydney Opera
House, Pompidou Centre, Maxxi in Rome and Sonar, and she's hosted the
WFMU radio program Do or DIY since 2003.
Plus, she's a judge for the Past Re-Imagined As the Future
remix contest with the Free Music Archive. In this Q&A, Bennett shares that she's hoping to see
works that are engaging and transformative. As you comb through the
materials in the Prelinger Archives, she reminds us that these videos aren't just about the past, but also about the present, the future, and something timeless.
What first drew you to the practice of AV collage art?
That
there is a huge palette to choose from which means you can get started
right away. I've been making collages since I was about 16. I found that
I like working with audio and imagery with previously existing
conceptual/contextual associations, because it allows me to redirect the
focus of these associations into new stories, like a conductor or
director. It also appeals very strongly to my surreal, subversive sense
of humour - being able to turn things upside down. Collage has a very
long history and made huge statements, just by taking what already
exists and representing it in a new or different way - it has frequently
been political or politicized. Collage is not just about putting random
images together, collage is about composition, editing, and language.
It exists everywhere since all languages are a collage of content that
already exists.
How has changing technology influenced your practice?
The
coming of broadband, file sharing platforms, and the affordability of
high speed computers and editing software around 2000 changed everything
for me. No longer was I reliant upon finding things locally to work
with or borrowing other people's dat machines or cassette four tracks -
suddenly I could multitrack and edit in the way I always wanted to. I
was waiting for 10 years to do things how I really imagined.
When did you first encounter the Prelinger Archives? How has it played a role in your work?
As
soon as I got broadband in 2000. This really changed not only the way I
thought about making work but also opened my mind to just how much
things were going to change now that people could share, exchange and
converse. This was around this time that Brewster Kahle persuaded Rick
Prelinger to share some footage online for free at archive.org.
Before this I was really in a difficult position sourcing well
transfered moving image - dependent on vhs rips from things from video
and tv. The films Rick shares are beautiful quality with wonderful
images, subjects and messages. I downloaded one film from archive.org
and emailed Rick and thanked him. Then I sent him a big package of CDs
and we started corresponding. We were in touch for years on a daily
basis exchanging ideas and so on. I made many films and two live
performances entirely from Rick's films.
One of my favorite things about the internet is that it encourages serious academic discussions about cats playing pianos. ROFLcon III happened in early May and I just got around to watching a good panel discussion on the Supercut - which is, put shortly, a comprehensive and thematic video montage. The coiner of the term, Andy Baio, and three notable supercutters go over their own work, themes of the supercut and the future of the supercut. Very nice! The video is in four parts, with examples taking up the first half-ish of things.
One point of contention from this supercut obsessed blogger - in part IV, the panel seems to agree that the supercut has run its course as an expressive medium. Disagree! Andy Baio's own Supersupercut is a fantastic example of the use of automation in supercuts. My Supercut-O-Matic software is another example of the power of automation to create thematic montages. Google is now able to crawl through videos and pick out clips of cats. Open source Music Information Retrieval frameworks like MARSYAS can automatically identify specific facets of songs. In the near future, computers will automatically find LOLLY content for us and compile it, putting even the aggregation website editors out of work. I do also think that interactivity will be introduced into supercuts, so that users can move freely through categorized media rather than watching a linear video clip. But hey, maybe I'm crazy.
Certainly the panel doesn't give a very good history of the supercut. The earliest historical example they give is Christian Marclay's "The Clock". If the panel weren't all male, perhaps they would've mentioned Dara Birnbaum's 1978 cut-up of Wonder Woman transforming. To venture a challenge to the internet, here's what I'm calling the earliest supercut - the amazing, brilliant 1965 collage "Argh!" by Folke Rabe and Jan Bark. Listen here and do tell me if you know an earlier example of this concept. I only recently found ARGH! and I'm completely transfixed by its prophetic beauty.
Jliat, the preferred nom de plume (purportedly came to him in a dream) of conceptual artist James Whitehead, is one that makes many people in the noise scene cringe with anger (especially what he calls "rebellious Americans") because of his vehement stance on the concept of anti music. Not only is he a person who has released CDs that exhibit the various different "kinds" of silence, CDs that are not only silent but will make speakers smoke if turned to high volume, classical music midi files repurposed with war sounds, a DVDr boxset of 233 discs containing in total 711 days of audio, an automated program that mimicked the effects chain that Merzbow had at the time of its creation, set to generate (and upload) 4 minutes of random noise every day without human intervention, and so forth.
He has also angered many a noise label for his opinions that devalue the concept of an artist/truth seeker/genius of present day with the resolution that we are in a post modern cesspool. To jliat, we are left with only a few outmoded post ironic creative devices set to a devalued instinct towards limp mnemonic conceptual repetition.
Paradoxically, he has been a consistent reviewer for the venerable publication Vital Weekly over the course of several years, and a shit disturber in a couple of chat forums about noise for a good while too. His reviews seem to come with the resolution that all recorded noise is basically the same (as something that communicates nothing), or it is thinly veiled music, neither of which merit a consistent level of literary acknowledgement/observation.
Instead, jliat, undoubtedly a sophisticated and well-educated man, who as a student at Falmouth School of Art crossed paths with AMM, John Cage, John Tilbury, Harrison Birtwistle, The Music Improvisation Company, and various progenitors of fluxus, electronic and tape machine workshops, etcetra etcetra, will use the admittedly open ended and unassuming medium of noise reviews to wax poetic, expounding upon various realms of art history or just seemingly belching out polysyllabic free association verbage, rather than even attempting to paint an adequate picture of what the listener might expect if she were to purchase the release in question.
With the assistance of Mr. Whitehead, and since Vital Weekly is a publication that encourages the free distribution of its contents, I present to you all or at least a great many of the reviews Jliat has done over the course of several years, in all of its dizzying and convivial, unrepentantly counter-intuitive glory (after the jump).
Crawl is a one-man experimental sludge project from San Antonio TX. With his vocal mic shrouded in a parastacoidean mask, Emperor Crawl drums with one hand while. With the other, he controls a home-built bass string instrument made of actual bones. He likes to build things, he says, and to run sound through a wall of amps. The result is eloquently blackened doom with nods to Khanate's Things Viral and Sunn O)))'s Black One.
I stumbled into Crawl's incredible live performance at Sux by SuxWest, Austin's second-annual anti-sxsw noise festival. I'd originally biked to way out Bernadette's for Rat Bastard and the supremely funky Olneyville Sound System, who were at the top of their game in duo form. Crawl's set was an unexpected highlight of my time in Austin, and left the entire room stunned. After our applause faded into an uncomfortable silence (yo where's the DJ?), Emperor Crawl removed his mask to let us know that he does not have any merch— but! There is this demo recorded in 2010 that you encouraged to download and share:
A photo of Crawl's bass string instrument and video of an earlier Crawl performance after the jump...
A really nice listener hipped me to this programming object called wget (what...I think programming objects are hip). It simply lets you download files from the internet and do cool stuff to em. So I taught my computer using wget and cron to record a minute of FMU's live stream every 15 minutes. It's still running and I'll air the full thing on my radio show tonight, but here's a little sample of what you might've missed earlier today on the radio.
Not surprisingly, it starts off with Joe Belock congratulating all our amazing listeners for putting us PAST our goal for the first time in years! Amazing! It does restore my faith in humanity...kinda...
Hey folks! It's last call to send in your submissions to be a part of the marathon premium for my radio show, "Supercuts Supercut". Here's what you do - download this new and improved software, the "Supercut-O-Matic Plus" and let it automatically cut a music playlist of your choice into Gysin-sized amounts. Send me the results (contact info's in the software) and my favorite submissions will be published and distributed to FMU's generous donors. For a sample of what you can make with this software, check out 10 seconds from every top 100 hit ever.
The first release of Supercut-O-Matic limited users to 10 second clips, but this version has many more options for customizing your cut-up - you can control how long each clip is, the crossfade length, and control several features of the song analysis mechanism. It's really easy to use and works its magic in a few minutes.
Supercut-O-Matic Plus for Windows(note: This only works if your file path has no spaces in it - ie, "c:\myfolder\myfile.mp3" rather than "c:\my folder\my file.mp3". I'll fix that bug asap...)
But wait! There's more! I've already received a bunch of amazing submissions. This is a great CD and it's getting better every day. But for you to hear 'em, you have to pledge to my show. Help me reach my goal before the marathon ends Sunday! Hit pledge below. Hit it!
In 1959, Billboard began releasing their annual charts of the top 100 songs of each year. Here are mp3s with 10 seconds of every single top 100 song ever. Follow the lists along with the music on this site. There are some errors here, so bear with me and do point out major imperfections in the comments. If you've been following my column in the past, all of these mp3s are improved versions, with crossfades in between tracks and smarter choices of clips.
I produced these supercuts with a software that Frederic Cornu and I developed together. Fred is a genius and I'm eternally grateful to him. This software is VERY SIMPLE to use and 100% FREE. It simply takes a music playlist of your choice (from iTunes or a similar program), finds the loudest point of each song and stitches all the songs together. These supercuts are useful to condense information and I think they're totally beautiful too.
In a few minutes, you can easily make supercuts of your music collection, even if you are a luddite. Download the file below, unzip the folder and click "Run Supercut-O-Matic"...there'll be a button to press in the program to give you further instructions.
UPDATE! You can get improved versions of the Supercut-O-Matic at this link. The new version gives you more options, such as changing the size of each clip, the crossfade, and more!
Once you've made your files, send them to me (contact info is provided in the program's helpme file) and I will release YOUR MUSIC on a CD! Do you have a completist collection of yodeling music, blues singers, minimal-synth, presidential speeches or tuba solos? Use Supercut-O-Matic and SEND ME THE RESULTS! Please do contact me with any feedback.
"Supercuts Supercut", a CD with the best submissions I get, is available to anybody who pledges $75 or more to my radio show in the current WFMU fundraising marathon! Use the widget below to pledge to the greatest radio station on the planet and help us broadcast for another year. Also, if you pledge $30 or more to my show, I will remix a top 100 song of your choice LIVE on the air.
Last week the web was wriggling with outrage over The Disney Store Corporation offering for sale a Mickey Mouse™ T-shirt in the graphic style of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures albumcover -- not that the iconic white-on-black waveform image (plucked from the Cambidge Encyclopedia of Astronomy by drummer Stephen Morris) was any stranger to absurd marketing schemes.
The day after last week's inspiring protest against overreaching anti-piracy laws, the US Department of Justice demonstrated that they don't need those laws, anyway. They just went ahead and unilaterally shut down Megaupload, the world's most popular cyberlocker. Rumor has it that similar sites like MediaFire and 4shared are under investigation and have been deleting files, while FileSonic preemptively disabled all sharing features.
As a result, much of the history of recorded sound has been made inaccessible to the public. I'm talking, of course, about the music blogosphere. The best music blogs aren't pirates. They are libraries, sound archivists and music preservationists sharing recordings that would not otherwise be available. And now sites like Global Groove, Mutant Sounds, and Holy Warbles have lost large swaths of the material they'd salvaged from obscurity.
I watched part of The Crow last night (yeah, just part...we had to turn it off it was so bad) and was struck by how much of a solidified, historical aesthetic the '90s already has, just as much as the '80s or the '70s are a static time capsule of cultural silliness. Yes, it was when I saw the faux-wet goth haircut of that "Craven" guy (real subtle name there, excellent foreshadowing) that I experienced the Proustian recollection and realized that I'm no longer "becoming a man", I'm just "a man". The time of Jnco jeans and Darias is over. And it was a simpler time, was it not? No 9/11, no three simultaneous wars, no economic disaster and no Snooki. Listen to these mp3s and pine for these more pastoral days of yore. Read along with the clips here.
Find the rest of my "Ten Secs of _0s" column here, and listen to my radio show here. Next up is the exciting conclusion...Every Top 100 song ever! Plus I'll release the software I used to produce these chartsweeps along with a contest to showcase your supercut on my upcoming FMU marathon premium!
I love the '80s because pop music culture was uniformly co-opted by capitalism throughout this decade. In the '70s, you may have ended with wonderfully vapid concepts like disco, but you started with those pesky hippies trying to "change the world" with their "ideals". In the 80s, we start with disco and end with dance music that has a slightly different groove, slightly different synth presets and slightly different haircuts. The '80s is the decade that really proved American culture has nothing new to offer after the tremendous cultural explosions of the mid-century. Now we're ready for our utopian future where music and culture need not change outside of acceptable parameters. Enjoy the slow transition of dance music into grooves accentuating 16th notes and hairstyles accentuating a culture which had fully become out-of-touch with political realities.
You know Megaupload. It's one of those sites you sometimes encounter en route to download stuff. Ads pop up, and you try to avoid purchasing a Premium account, even though if you'd just give in then your download would be done by now.
Megaupload is different from Rapidshare, Hulkshare, and other similar sites because they have this new song w/ video endorsements from P Diddy, Lil John (pictured), Will.i.am, Alicia Keys, Kanye West, Chris Brown, The Game, Mary J Blige, Kim Kardashian, Floyd Mayweather, Jamie Foxx, Russel Simmons...
It's a video that the participating artists' labels don't want you to see, because it doesn't fit with their depiction of Megaupload as a "rogue site". The RIAA and MPAA have already convinced Google to censor "Megaupload" searches, and if SOPA and Protect IP pass they'll banish megaupload from the web once and for all. Since this video seems to imply that some of the world's best selling musicians think differently, the major labels tried to censor it under the guise of a DMCA copyright infringement notice. They did not succeed. So go ahead and let the soothing sounds of this song-length mega-mercial wash over your brain, and/or check out the additional celebrity endorsements at Megaupload's website (which looks to have been purged clean in anticipation of this viral campaign).
Some of us may remember earlier incarnations of Megaupload with more obtrusive ads and general sleaziness. In fact, the site was founded by Kim "Dotcom" Schmitz, a notorious sleaze. After his convictions for credit card fraud, computer fraud, insider trading, and embezzlement, Dotcom procured a fake Finnish passport under the name "Kim Tim Jim Vestor" and took up shop in Hong Kong as director of several "Mega-" companies. These include not just Megaupload but also Megavideo, MegaLive, MegaPix, Megabox, and Megaporn.
The Free Music Archive is looking for a freelance eveloper experienced with PHP, MySQL, Javascript and HTML/CSS. If you have the serious web dev chops, bring them to our headquarters in the magic factory that is WFMU. It would be great if you’re local to NYC, but we will consider remote applicants, too.
Please drop a line to dev -at- freemusicarchive -dot- org and give us some idea of your best work with urls, including your github account if you have one. If there are any music sites or apps that you like to use on a regular basis that might inform your work on the FMA, please be sure to let us know.
ABOUT THE FMA: Inspired by Creative Commons and the open source software movement, the FMA launched in 2009 with support from the New York State Music Fund, and has been covered by Billboard, Pitchfork, The Wire, New York Times, Spin, CNET, Mashable and many others.
We’ve come a long way, but we have even bigger plans on our roadmap including implementing a recommendation engine, mobile-friendly players, social network integration and lots more.
One of the 50+ projects to spring from this weekend's Music Hack Day, Free Music Archive Radio is essentially the template for a Creative Commons Pandora. Enter the name of any artist, and FMA Radio taps into the Echo Nest's musical brain to generate a similar playlist from the FMA's curated library of 40,000+ legal mp3s. Tweak your station further with Mood and Style parameters, and/or Creative Commons license filters.
Despite the fact that it's just a demo (works best on Chrome, not so well on Firefox) FMA Radio has already been written up in evolver.fm, the Dutch blog Muziek & de bibliotheek, and Germany's Progolog. Its awesomeness is enhanced by the fact that it's html5 (plays nice with iPhone/iPad), it's open source, and it was built over the course of 24-hours (whoa!). I spent much of the weekend hanging out with FMA Radio's creators Jeremy Sawruk, Robby Grodin (ConductiveIO) and Julie Vera, the Music Hack Day veterans whose previous projects include Sawruk's Feedtunes (turns Twitter trends into playlists based on song lyrics) and Grodin's Toscanini gestural interface. In addition to releasing open source code, Sawruk and Grodin are Creative Commons musicians, and they've really done an incredible service to the community via FMA Radio.
Music Hack Day is a series of music/tech gatherings fueled in large part by APIs. After the big news last month that FMA's API had been revamped and mapped to the Echo Nest's Rosetta Stone leading up to WFMU's Radiovision Festival, this weekend introduced the FMA to the mother of all music hacking events. It was fantastic to take part -- some highlights after the jump:
Mp3s are just a list of times and volumes - if you convert an mp3 into a text file, you can read music that way. I do think that when you lay out time in this manner, as a static list of numerical values, that you can easily see how time travel is possible. If you rearrange these times, for instance, in order of volumes rather than times, you are shifting the order of time itself. It's true! Yes. When you hear these songs of the '70s and re-experience old memories, you are actually in the past. Do not lie to yourself and dishonor the realities in your mind - you are constantly reentering the past and also you travel into the future constantly.
Consider this: if cause and effect is behind all activity in the physical world, then you can simply make a list of times, position and velocity of every particle - and that's actually an accurate description of the physical world. You can store all of history in a digital file, a table of values. Then you could also rearrange those time values in any order, since that list has no particular order it must be read in. The appearance of time is an illusion of perception. Lift the veil, my friends. All songs are being played in all orders forever in all directions. Furthermore, they are being remixed in all conceivable ways all at once. Listening to chartsweeps and cut-ups in general is moral because it is closer to the truth about the unreality of "time" than any other kind of music.
To hear all the hits of the 60s, click here. To hear 1956-1959, click here. I'll tackle the '80s in a few weeks!
Marty McSorley showed me this CD a few weeks back, and I was completely blown away - as powerful as this simple concept is, there are precious few examples of appropriation music that simply take a crappy song and blow it out. To me, there's no better possible music than this! Can't Vs. The World, posted in its entirety here, was an early project of Jessica Rylan, who's gone on to collaborate with tons of top-notch improvisers, participate in the bent festival, learn to build synths as an electronic music MFA, and release a ton of...well, releases.
Rather than describe Can't any further, here's Jessica's own thoughts on the project...
Honestly, that cd is my favorite thing I ever did. Which is kind of weird I guess, it's so simple-minded. But it really described 100% how I felt at that time in my life, and it was immediately understandable by pretty much everyone. As opposed to a lot of my other music, which seems to confuse people.
The original idea came to me in 1998 when I used to work at a free health clinic giving AIDS tests. I also had a night job djing and sometimes booking shows at a prostitute bar. There was a little mall behind the clinic and I would go in there most days to get lunch from a burrito cart. One day I was standing in line, super hung over, and totally depressed about my awful job and the omnipresent misery in my life. They started playing "You're the inspiration" by Chicago over the p.a. - not loud at all, but from tinny speakers way up on the high ceiling. And I just had this wave of horror come over me - I hate that song so much, the lyrics are cloying and the guy's voice is so grating - hearing this song was physically painful in a totally different but much more upsetting way than the Merzbow show that was still on my mind from 1996. And then the music just blew out in my mind.
