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.
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.
From 1984 (or thereabouts) comes Echoplex Kitchenette with Horns.
It features David Harlan on synth and electronics, Andrew Lindsay on voices and keys, Richard Lindsay on noises, electric guitar and kitchen utensils and possibly Paul Wilson on larynx and inspiration.
Recorded live in Mr. and Mrs. Charles R. Lindsay’s kitchen and featuring a homemade echoplex unit. With horns.
Fellow DJ Love Jonze turned me onto this strange experimental duo last night when she handed me this CD and told me “you can’t go wrong with this one – it mixes with anything…”. She was right and it did. I played it mixed in with Eugene Chadbourne’s 1986 LP He is Insane and it didn’t miss a beat.
Spin-17 is a duo experimental project which explores contrasts and connections between harmony and noise, electronics and acoustics, toddlers and tea-totallers, obscenity and poetry. No genre is safe and the boundaries between art and doleful indulgence are blurred.
Spin-17 mixes improvisation with experimental composition (with a good amount of caffeine blended in). The effect of diverse influences from Mauricio Kagel to Warner Brothers cartoon soundtracks to early Siouxie and the Banshees can be heard like a diamond in the eye.
I attempted to encode a movie from the European format PAL to our NTSC, using an elaborate work-around in Final Cut. For some reason, after 12 or so hours of chewing on the file, the audio came out cut up and loopy.
The movie was The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, with Slovene philosopher and writer Slavoj Žižek. It’s a great movie about the collective dream factory we call cinema that is sadly available in the US (Do you hear that, Netflix?)
What’s cool with the loopy audio is that it repeats the words Pervert and Desires at regular intervals. I didn’t do any editing of the audio or otherwise treat it with effects. I only removed one silent bit where Final Cut choked during playback into the recording software.
Over at Negativland’snew, 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.
Here’s a spontaneous radio stew that was brewed up at a moment’s notice on last night’s Outside World, with ingredients selected by Yaney, Mssrs Dodge and Phillip and mixed by yours truly.
We played this at about 2AM, seemingly only to some nice lady who wandered in off the streets and was tripping out to it in the back studio lounge.
Play
::::I am experiencing problems uploading this, but am posting the article anyway. The YouSendit option is a temporary workaraound, I should have the link issue resolve soon. I apologize for any inconvenience.:::
‘The Residents’ were introduced to the world on Bill Reinhardt’s Radio Lab show with the first public broadcast of “Santa Dog” in 1972. After becoming friends and promoting the Residents on the air, Bill was given many recordings and rare material. (The first copies of “Meet the Residents” were sold at Music Millennium in PDX). The Residents designed several program guide covers and became a staple of the station’s progressive sonic weirdness. The ‘Special’ was made exclusively for KBOO; produced and edited by Homer Flynn, Jay Clem and Hardy Fox. Cryptic Corp. 1977 (the date is wrong in the video backdrop) “Baby Sex” and “The Warner Bros. Album” were also rare treats on KBOO.
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.
cast: dAS, Ninah Pixie, Andy Cowitt, Michael Wertz, Cliff Neighbors, Melissa Margolis, Insect Deli, Dark Muse
cover art & design: Michael Wertz (www.wertzateria.com)
