In our Midst…

Some traditions also hold that a vampire cannot enter a house unless invited by the owner, although after the first invitation they can come and go as they please.
~ An Encyclopaedia of Occultism - Lewis Spence

Hanging out on or around the fringes of any music scene (music venues, record and/or instrument stores, radio stations, etc…) one can meet some really strange flakes. You meet people who recorded with so-and-so on an album you can never find info on, people who claim some past fame or connection to fame and so on and so on…

But this one takes the cake.

We had an incident down at the station that has sent ripples through our little community. Someone gained access through the front door, misrepresented their role there by namedropping the right names to some unsuspecting volunteers - myself being one of them - and apparently stole some expensive equipment.
I say apparently because no one can be 100% sure, even though it’s pretty clear what went down that night and the following day. Out of the 1 or 2 percent chance of us being wrong, I’m not going to divulge the who and where of this particular individual.
I actually witnessed what I am now convinced was a first attempt by this individual.

Let me rewind for a moment.

An Idea…

…that I have percolating in my head:

I am thinking about discontinuing my other blog. That means you might see more self-indulgent meandering or ranting and raving that has little or nothing at all about music, radio or other audio-related weirdness.

That blog only gets a small percentage of the visits I get here and a small circle of regular, like-minded comrades who would undoubtedly follow me here (pretty please?).

It’s just too much to manage for me right now, and having another blog that I don’t attend to is like letting a hamster starve, or something.

On the upshot, they’ll be more posts.

On the downside, the extra ones will be self-indulgent, meandering ranting and raving that has little or nothing at all about music.

Alright

To my new friend.

It sucks going through a divorce. There’s nothing pleasant about it and it’s a tough row to hoe no matter how you slice it.
Bucking up and keeping a smile on your face when dealing with your ex-partner and keeping it together for the kids is the real tightrope act and doesn’t make any of it easier. In fact, it makes it so much bloody harder.

A little story.
I remember the first few weeks on my own. My little house was nearly empty. I let my ex take nearly everything. Not out of martyrdom but because she had the kids, I wanted them to have as normal a life as possible and I had the house (way too complicated to go into here).
I think I just had a couch, a little tv from boxes of stuff that had been in storage during our marriage. In those first bleak days, I remember turning my little tv up really loud to drown out the echoes of my kid’s voices that I heard when they weren’t around.
I turned their room into a little stuffed animal shrine in anticipation for their semi-weekly weekend stays. I assessed my material needs and slowly started to buy necessary items while licking my financial wounds. But it seemed like the emptiness was vast. I spent a lot of time out with friends before coming home late at night and turning the tv up loud to chase away the silence.

One day, I was rummaging through the storage items and ran across my ancient reel-to-reel recorder and a stack of tapes. I hadn’t thought about it in nearly a decade. I used to make audio tape collages and would experiment with sounds and tape manipulation. I had thought I had gotten rid of that stuff and also the desire to make audio art. Dads don’t do that kind of stuff, do they?
Out of boredom and curiosity, I spooled up one of the reels - the oldest looking one. After years of storage and neglect at my ex-inlaw’s storage room, the old tape machine didn’t seem to want to come to life again. It slowly came around as its vacuum tubes started glowing.

Suddenly, from the tape came a glorious noise that I thought had been lost nearly 10 years earlier. It was a bizarre, one-shot improvisational recording I had made with a guitar and digital delay device, played over the top of some audio from the tv. It was perfect and could never be duplicated in a million years, but over the ensuing years I thought it had been lost or accidentally recorded over. I used to lament the loss of that particular recording and subsequently quit doing audio art altogether. But here it was! It was music to my ears and filled the seemingly-cavernous empty room with gorgeous noise! I remember jumping around my living room with idiot-glee.
I found my lost self on a piece of oxidized 1/4″ tape.
I had reconnected with my past and remembered who I was.

From then on out, I knew everything was going to be alright.

You’re going to be alright, too.

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.

Iraq/Afghanistan Winter Soldier Hearings

All regular programming on KBOO is pre-empted from 6AM to 4PM today (Friday the 14th) in order to carry the Iraq/Afghanistan Winter Soldier hearings, currently underway.

Winter Soldier: Iraq and Afghanistan will feature testimony from U.S. veterans who served in those occupations, giving an accurate account of what is really happening day in and day out, on the ground.

The four-day event will bring together veterans from across the country to testify about their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan - and present video and photographic evidence. In addition, there will be panels of scholars, veterans, journalists, and other specialists to give context to the testimony. These panels will cover everything from the history of the GI resistance movement to the fight for veterans’ health benefits and support.

Tune in at 90.7 FM or listen on line here.

Speaking of Chickens…

Here’s a big chunk of last Friday’s Outside World program, featuring an interview with chicken entrepreneur Aaron (sic?). All kinds of secrets and wonders of the domestic fowl are revealed herein. There’s nearly 90 minutes of music and mayhem related to chickens and eggs, including music by Slim Gaillard, the Maddox’s, Colonel Sanders, The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Hasil Adkins, The Meters and much, much more.
If you want to forgo the chicken talking, the chicken music kicks in at around 17:30 minutes.
I didn’t edit it too much, as I thought it would give you a good glimpse of what this long-running program offers on a typical night.
As host Daniel Flessas says: “I come in and make the coffee…” - and a show just happens.

Download (1 hour, 42 mins, 116 megs)

BONUS:
The coolest video ever, found by Daniel. We watched awestruck, while the audio was potted up on the board.

Rufus Thomas does The Funky Chicken

UBU Hour Radio Programs

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 Hour

The 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

The Sound of Sound (with Sub-Woofer Rant)

I ran across this fascinating article on sound mixing. It talks about how producers and mixers are mixing albums to meet the limitations of MP3s:

Producers also now alter the way they mix albums to compensate for the limitations of MP3 sound. “You have to be aware of how people will hear music, and pretty much everyone is listening to MP3,” says producer Butch Vig, a member of Garbage and the producer of Nirvana’s Never- mind. “Some of the effects get lost. So you sometimes have to over-exaggerate things.” Other producers believe that intensely compressed CDs make for better MP3s, since the loudness of the music will compensate for the flatness of the digital format.

As technological shifts have changed the way sounds are recorded, they have encouraged an artificial perfection in music itself. Analog tape has been replaced in most studios by Pro Tools, making edits that once required splicing tape together easily done with the click of a mouse. Programs like Auto-Tune can make weak singers sound pitch-perfect, and Beat Detective does the same thing for wobbly drummer

That’s not so new. Producers have always taken into account what media or player the music will be listened to on. Phil Spector made the most of his mixes, knowing they would be listened to on mono equipment and mono, AM radio. In the eighties, producers optimized their mixes to play best on 1/8″ cassette tape and the best players, as tapes were briskly outselling vinyl, just before the marketing slam-dunk of CDs came on the scene. When CD’s limitations showed through the hype, many producers tried to overcompensate by accentuating the bass and treble to an obnoxious degree. I have never owned top-of-the-line audio equipment, per se, but can play my vinyl edition of Byrne and Eno’s My Life In the Bush of Ghosts side-by-side with both CD editions I own and - despite the scratchiness - the vinyl offers a more satisfying listening experience. It has a depth and warmth that even the 2005 remaster can’t approach. To me, a lot of vinyl sounds very 3-D, and has a rich bass and midrange and something in between that digital formats can’t touch.

10 - 120 Hz

In my opinion, this was probably one of the factors that led to the emergence of the sub-woofer as a primary speaker.

I think the subwoofer is an instrument of the nincompoop. Listening to anything with that much bass is like eating a cake that’s all frosting - and the yucky, industrial bakery type at that.
It’s like listening to an all-tuba orchestra.
Young people love the subwoofer. I believe part of it is the youngsters need to mark territory by making their music penetrate walls and buildings and carry longer than a humpback whale’s singing in their quest to irritate others with their inane musical choices.
Part of my irritation may be due to the fact that I have very poor upper frequency hearing, due to years of concert going and working in industrial sweatshops. But it’s abuse and over-reliance is abundant. I once helped some coworker comrades prepare a humorous hip-hop song parody for a work party, and when it came time to set it up for an office birthday celebration, the young man whose boombox we used insisted on pushing the hell-button market ‘MEGA-BASS’, ‘ULTRA-MEGA BASS’ or whatever. The results were that everyone sitting right next to the speakers were visibly annoyed and no one could decipher the words being rapped, which was what the whole thing was about. The words were buried in this muckish mud of thwacking bass drums and muddle.

I’m relieved that either noise ordinances or personal fashion trends have made the booming car in traffic a relative rarity, these days. I remember living in a poor neighborhood when those devices were first coming on the market. You couldn’t sleep for more than an hour without being woken up by them roaming through the area. It was like some kind of Third-World nuclear proliferation issue: people who didn’t have two nickels to rub together would sign their lives away for a sub-bass annihilator, because the other guy had it.
Our hillbilly neighbors now love cranking their car stereo to some godawfull music while he tinkers outside, does yard work or administers to his still. They must yell loudly to one another to be heard over the muck, so they do it often.

Your low frequencies are there for a reason. It’s like painting a whole room bright purple. Use it sparingly and appropriately, folks.

every king of cheese needs his queen

One of the things I love most about having a blog (and blog readers) is some of the self-made art and music that people have forwarded me.
One such thing recently was Every King of Cheese Needs His Queen, a song by The Stanley Zappa Quartet .
It’s delightfully jazz-damaged.

Personnel: Mark Leonard, bass; Nick Skrowaczewski, drums and percussion; Stanley Zappa, saxophones; Wyatt Doyle, voice.

MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/newtexture

Be sure to check them out.

Laibach on Hungarian TV

Brief interview with Ivan Novak from Laibach, which - fortunately for us - is in English.
Go to it here.

Preceded by a cellphone commercial that - fortunately for us - is NOT in English.