New Look, New Thrills. Now the Excitement Really Begins….

Updates, Etc.

I have updated my look a little bit.
You can still glance at wonder at this blog’s namesake here.
I re-upped my hodge-podge of an audio experiment retrospective album here.
Kevin of Eclectic Grooves (Check out his amazing Ornette Coleman boot while there!) fame let me know that I had neglected to link to the audio file of part two of my radio extravaganza here. It’s fixed now, and has even more vaganza than before.

I am on vacation for a spell, here at my mountain enclave. A black bear got into our garbage can and spread about two weeks of garbage across the lawn (we aren’t voracious consumers, so between composting - no doubt the big bear attractor - and recycling, we only generate one can of garbage every two weeks). Hopefully none of my neighbors will decide to shoot him or her, although our cats are going apeshit.

If time allows, I will edit up the Laswell special and put bits of it online, for those of you who are up for the download.

Big City Orchestra

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:

1. Passing Note
2. uBung
3. Virginal
4. Wind Chest
5. Wood Wind
6. Faster
7. Chance Music
8. 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)

Don Joyce and Negativland

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.

Go get them here.

Note: I posted these separately last Summer, but am re-upping them by request.

un

Laura’s Brain

Something I made with my Kaoss Pad.

Is it done yet? I don’t know.

Guest vocals by Laura Bush.

Enjoy. 

Some Brian Eno Demo Fragments from My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

  I have upped a small bundle of early demo versions of songs that eventually made it to MLITBOG. Eno played these on the radio in an interview (worth listening to in itself) during the period he and Byrne were recording it.
Some songs are early sketches of songs that appeared on the album and in the interview he alludes to the song that would become ‘America is Waiting’ (he was calling the stripped down instrumental “Garbage Disco‘, at the time) was recorded by him prior to the Byrne collaboration idea.

Obviously there was no need to include these on the  latest reissue, as they are simply the skeletal workings of the actual songs.

But not to get your hopes up, kids, it’s but three really small excerpts, but I thought you’d find them interesting, nonetheless.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=L4IKEEE5

I also have the remix contest source files, if anybody is interested.
If you are handy with GarageBand or any other similar, multitrack music app., you can roll your own remixes of A Secret Life or Help Me Somebody.

Ken’s Last Ever Radio Extravaganza

Ken of K.L.E.R.E. has dropped me the following line:

two new live shows to be created
one: in a few hours (friday june 8, 4:30-6pm CT / 5:30-7pm ET)
the other: in a few days (monday june 11, 12-1pm CT / 1-2pm ET)

both via live webcast: http://counterfolk.com/lastever
and both on live radio in austin, tx: 91.7-FM
*thanks to gary and john for airtime

live, improvised sound collage experiment
wherein you may participate via contributing sounds with telephone during show
or other ways you may devise
then/now/later

mixing combining existing playing happening
free from plan or thought

may also be listenable later on web page if you miss it

live listening, past archives, ‘podcast’:
http://counterfolk.com/lastever
(try a blue show from the upper-right corner)

If you’re a fan of live, improvised collage radio, be sure to check it out.
It’s his last one ever, so you have to.

Bill Laswell, Otomo Yoshihide, Yoshigaki Yasuhiro (repost)

Soup

P-Vine Japan

Four lengthy, fairly dirgey jams from Laswell, Yoshihide and Yasuhiro. Otomo’s an amazing guitar player! Who knew? I always assumed he was more of a turntablist/manipulator, but as an axe-grinder he’s no slouch.
Sometimes the tunes take on a dub-like quality - a Laswell trait.
This sounds like music made while coming off of a bad acid trip in Yokohama, Tokyo or a sushi joint in New York.

Download:Right here

(5/29/07) This is a repost for someone who wandered into my old blogger incarnation - and a timely one, too. I just recently accidentally deleted everything from my iPod, which wouldn’t have been such a big deal if I didn’t have lots of stuff on it exclusively. This album is one that I thought perished forever (along with more than one un-backed up album*) until I remembered that I burned it onto a CD. Crap! - When do I EVER make CDs anymore? So, luckily for us, here it is.

*The others I’ve noticed so far (inasmuch as I miss them): Peter Hammill - Nadir’s Big Chance; The Orb - Auntie Aubrey’s Excursions Beyond the Call of Duty pt. 1, and lots and lots of single tracks.

Negativland

Over the Edge Vol. 4: Dick Vaughn’s Moribund Music of the Seventies
Seeland Records

Fabulously overblown re-issue of the formerly cassette-only Over the Edge series entry Dick Vaughn’s Moribund Music of the Seventies, presenting Richard Lyon’s titular soul-less radio personality character in his many failed attempts at radio stardom. The first disc unveils an insidious change to KPFA’s programming to a bland, middle of the road music and canned news segment format called The California Superstation. the horrified and clueless call-ins are priceless, as is Lyon’s portrayal of a huckster who is totally oblivious to his own vapidity. Done in ‘air-check’ style, all songs - horrid though they are - have been culled out of the mix, leaving Dick’s IDs and commercials alone.
Side two, titled Dick Vaughn’s Moribund Music of the Seventies, documents Dick’s failed countdown show to highlight some of the low points of Seventies music. All this is wrapped around some befuddled call-ins (not included on the original issue), an assessment of Dick Vaughn’s pathology by a radio psychiatrist (Dr. Oslo Norway) and some relatively recent updates on the death of Dick Vaughn from Negativland’s 1993 concerts.

Dick 1: The California Superstation
Dick 2: Moribund Music of the Seventies

For more Negativland mayhem, be sure to visit Carnival of Headaches. He’s got the excellent OTE Time Zones Exchange Project, as well as lots of other goodies.

Viragelic

I typed Generative Music into Google and found Viragelic, a cool little java-based Flash web page that will generate a simple little composition and play it for you. It starts out rather simple, and then gets somewhat complex. It’s lovely and weird, It’s weirdly lovely.
Check it out!

Meet the Meat Beetles

Sometimes when taking a long break from finding cool music, cool music finds you instead.

The well-named Wongo Starr dropped me a line to let us know about his cool sampledelic band the Meat Beatles. Fantastic tape manipulation, turn-tablisms and great use of sampling are contained herein.

The lengthy track Backwards Devil Music #13 had me chortling coffee out my nose this morning.

They’re so good, I wonder why I haven’t heard of them before.

Go check ‘em out!