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.
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:
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 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.
Play:
Download
Although it doesn’t sound that great on its own, I have been listening to it with all kinds of music and it works. It must be some unconscious thing.
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.
Laura’s Brain
Something I made with my Kaoss Pad.
Is it done yet? I don’t know.
Guest vocals by Laura Bush.
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 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 airtimelive, improvised sound collage experiment
wherein you may participate via contributing sounds with telephone during show
or other ways you may devise
then/now/latermixing combining existing playing happening
free from plan or thoughtmay 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.
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.
Link Removed.
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.
