Here’s something Tommy Hollywood and I mixed up the other night when we co-hosted The Outside World.
The Rupture happened while we were doing the radio show?. Was anyone Left Behind to listen to it?
Those of us still here can listen to it now.
It was an old Christian record entitled The Rapture, some sounds from War of the Worlds (the 50’s movie), stellar noise, bug noises, Tommy synth loops, elks mating and so much more.
Here’s a live mix I did in real time of the heavily saturated media coverage of Michael Jackson’s memorial at The Staples Center. I started rolling with the press’ breathless reportage of the motorcade and all the fan reactions and the like. I also mixed in live sounds from a Southern California HAM radio repeater station and some looping sounds from a Buddha Machine 2.
It was recorded using the exact same methods as my live Obama Inauguration mix here.
I ended it just prior to the beginning of the memorial service. The mix isn’t meant to be disrespectful of Michael or his fans; just my way of processing the craziness of our media. It’s a little long and probably not too terribly interesting as music goes but is a time capsule, of sorts.
Listen
Download
We made an historic link up with the notorious Weatherman (voice of many classic Negativland recordings) up in Seattle, where he and his visiting friend Active Ingredients supplied a steady barrage of found-sounds, police scanner radio and electronic gadget noises. On our end in KBOO studios, Tommy Hollywood supplied ambient keyboard sounds and selections from his voluminous collection of field recordings. I ransacked my own collection of found tapes and sound-bites and played distorted ethno sounds through my laptop. All this was ably co-engineered by Devin, who manned an additional mixer to bring together the arsenal of laptops and effects units. The air-room was overrun by equipment and cables.
(l-r)DJ ManRich and multiple laptops, The Weatherman and Active Ingredients.
The original conceit of the show – that being the cleaning of The Weatherman’s house in conjunction with the cleaning of KBOO studios – wore away, as both parties were more concerned with getting this complicated undertaking on the air than doing impromptu radio theater.
We did it and made chaotic noise for the better part of three hours. We both learned a lot about making this kind of collaborative radio over vast distances. I liken it to the historic Apollo/Soyuz dockings, only with silly noises and samples from bad porno movies.
Listen:
(3 hours, 244 megs. @ 192kbps)
Download
We plan on doing it again soon, now that we know how to do it. Perhaps we’ll do it when Active Ingredients returns home, making it a Tri-State radio Massacre; with him being in Northern California; the Weatherman being in Seattle WA; and us being in Portland Or. Who knows?
This all went down on KBOO, 90.7 FM in Portland. Listener sponsored community radio.
I have been flummoxed by, but so far unable to write anything about Microsoft’s hideous product Songsmith. It is the death of music and the end of art. It is what the world will sound like when every last real, individual human is replaced with soulless replicants (next tuesday, at this rate).
But some genius by the name of Johannes Kreidler has used Songsmith to score the soundtrack to our crumbling economy and declining society.
Watch it here:
I did and laughed until I cried. Then I cried and cried.
Found at WFMU’s Beware of the Blog, the Boing Boing for music geeks.
Apropos of my last post comes this amazing site of David Lynch inspired mashups, featuring MU heavyweights RIAA, Colatron and others.
The site’s pretty dense, but there’s lots of audio and video to sample and more than one download option.
Thanks again to Music for Maniacs for pointing the way!
Over at Negativland’s new, snazzy website, The Weatherman (aka David Wills) has been releasing tons of his famous family tapes for your listening enjoyment. These tapes have been the basis for many songs by Negativland, Over the Edge radio shows and many of his family’s unique phrases have been incorporated into the lexicon of Negativland/OTE. Many of his family tapes figure prominently in the releases The Weatherman’s Dumb Stupid Come Out Line and The Willsaphone Stupid Show.
Right now he’s got up a very lengthy, two part tape featuring his family playing Scrabble together and other surprises. It’s strangely hypnotic. I suspect it probably sounds like most people’s family and one could easily all asleep listening to it and be transported back in time to some weird childhood memory. The Weatherman’s Grandma sounds uncannily like mine, who passed away in 2001.
It probably helps that I’m listening to it with Viragelic playing in the background.
Consider it ambient Christmas spoken word.
Radio supergenius Rolf Semprebon and his band of radio theater acrobats perform amazing feats of radio play daring-do once a month on The UBU Hour.
The productions are pretty amazing, with rich sound effects and editing and fine voice performances from the talented cast.
They’ve taken on no less than the Neo Con agenda, the second coming of Jesus and the Bush Family.
My favorite is The Man Who Didn’t Give a Shit, a dense, highly scatological saga about a man’s inner turmoil as to whether he sacrifice his values to rise to the top in his company, with shit.
It’s like a filthy The Fountainhead, as co-written by Franz Kafka on Ex-Lax.
I’ve run into Rolf at the station at odd hours, merrily cutting and pasting away and he promises more on the Moron Saga of Dubya Tush and the Tush family, and more filth.
Check out their nearly complete audio archives here.
The UBU HourThe first Monday of the month, from 11 pm to Midnight.
Experimental radio theater with dada/surreal elements…On KBOO, 90.7 FM in Portland OR
Pal Ninah Pixie sends me the following:
Brand-New WEB RELEASE from BIG CITYE ORCHESTRHAE
LULLABY
NOW AVAILABLE from the UMBRELLA NOIZE COLLECTIVE
download full tracks + album cover art:
- Passing Note
- uBung
- Virginal
- Wind Chest
- Wood Wind
- Faster
- Chance Music
- Tirez
cast: dAS, Ninah Pixie, Andy Cowitt, Michael Wertz, Cliff Neighbors, Melissa Margolis, Insect Deli, Dark Muse
cover art & design: Michael Wertz (www.wertzateria.com)
A couple of commissioned pieces from Negativland that they did for New American Radio in the late Eighties/early Nineties. Both pieces saw later release in truncated forms, yet neither has ever come out on disc in the form offered here. The most radically different ( and longer) of the two is Advertising Secrets, which is vastly different than the 7″ that eventually came out on Eerie Records. Guns isn’t that different, but varies somewhat in mix and sequence and doesn’t have the Then and Now/ A-side/B-side orientation, as it appeared on the SST issued vinyl EP.
Advertising Secrets utilizes a big chunk of the already bizarre concept album TM Productions: Tomorrow Radio as a launching point, so it’s doubly weird.
From New American Radio:
Don Joyce and Negativland: Guns! (1989)
A dense, pulsing “action song,” whose verses deal with America’s intimate relationship with firearms: “The gun and the Bible carved this nation out of the wilderness,” a man exclaims. A tradition unfolds that links the voices of the past as we know them through television cowboy movies and gangster films, to the modern Annie-Get-Your-Gun, the business woman of the ‘eighties with her handy sub-machine gun. An evolving patchwork of movie excerpts and TV ads, statements and information about guns, and of certain phrases repeated like bullets.
Commissioned by NEW AMERICAN RADIO.Negativland: Advertising Secrets (1991)
A dynamic blend of rhythmic elements and original audio constructs — actual ad jingles, lines and phrases — commentary by and about advertisers — books on tape materials about how commercials are conceived and created — plus various out-takes from commercial productions which depict the sophisticated process (and elaborate cynicism) of the professionals involved. “My motivation is to inspect and depict some of the paradoxical aspects of media advertisement which both attract and repel me as an artist in America — a society whose entire economic well being rests solely on consumerism and the need to manufacture want.” (Don Joyce)
Commissioned by NEW AMERICAN RADIO.
Note: I posted these separately last Summer, but am re-upping them by request.
