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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything -
Or, Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance

Our favorite stand-up philosopher managed to escape this penal colony plane of existence recently after a long bout with Post-Polio Syndrome, so I have dug this gem out and have been listening to it lately. RAW’s Cosmic Trigger series, as well as the Illuminatus Trilogy really warped my perceptions of reality for good.
This is a rip of my six tape set available in the late eighties, so there’s an appropriate amount of tape artifacts or the occasional wow and flutter. On the whole, it sounds pretty good though.

Tape 1: The Life and Times of Robert Anton Wilson
Traces Pope Bob’s childhood, formative years, Catholic rearing (pun intended), his lifelong love of James Joyce via an interview.
Warning: Side B has a great example of twisted tape syndrome, wherein a small chunk of it plays backwards. Don’t worry, it’s in a very appropriate place, as you’ll hear!

Download Tape 1

Tape 2: Language and Reality
Incorrigible optimist Bob explores how language shapes our perceptions of the world, or how our reality tunnels are formed. He discusses Korzybski and Neuro-Linguistic Programming and other modes of thought construct.

Download Tape 2

Tape 3: Techniques for Consciousness Change
Bob discusses various methods for obtaining various states of consciousness as well as LSD, Sensory Deprivation and Leary’s Eight Circuit model of consciousness and how to reprogram them.

Download Tape 3

Tape 4: Politics and Conspiracy Theory
How trying to unravel the big control conspiracy can both drive you mad and how the more you learn about it, the less plausible, yet undeniably ‘real’ it all becomes. Also how dogmatic religions tend to have their own, unique conspiracy theories.

Download Tape 4

Tape 5: The Acceleration of Knowledge
Live lecture on the doubling of information and how it seems to be occurring at an increasing interval and where Bob thinks we’re headed.

Download Tape 5

Tape 6:
A- Religion for the Hell of it
B- The New Inquisition
Hilarious and enlightening two-part lecture in Boulder Co., where Bob rails against all stripes of fundamentalism and the rigid, Aristotalian mind-set, as well as the hardcore skepticism of fundamental materialists (with their mantra of ‘it’s only a coincidence, it’s only a coincidence!’) . Also, the rabbit-UFO connection revealed at last.

Download Tape 6

Boyd Rice

Music, Martinis And Misanthropy
Tesco

Bad boy Boyd Rice as Rod McKuen with anti-social personality disorder. Frankly, it’s hard to take Rice’s schtick at face value. If you don’t, you can both enjoy his music and have a laugh. The seething-with-hatred People shouldn’t be listened to at work on a Monday morning. I’m warning you.
Other highlights include Disneyland Can Wait and the best-ever song by Lee Hazelwood I’d Rather Be Your Enemy, rendered all the more frightening when sung by a pleasant looking man who happens to dress like an occult SS officer. Some other touchstones on this album are Anton laVey, Heraclitus, Ragnar Redbeard and the Carpenters. This is also a meeting of the Death In June/Sol Invictus/Blood Axis glee-club (Douglas P, Tony Wakeford, Michael Moynihan), plus Rose McDowall.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Tertiary Phase: Episode 1
BBC Radio 4

Fit the thirteenth

Arthur Dent awakes to find that he has spent the last four years on prehistoric Earth, alone in all that time save for five minutes with an infuriating alien called Wowbagger who arrived, insulted him, and left. Reunited with Ford Prefect, Arthur discovers that the Hitchhikers Guide he threw in the river still works – and is being updated. Rescue appears in the form of a sofa caught in the Space-Time Continuum and Arthur and Ford disappear in a fashion which would cause stern looks from the Campaign For Real Time.

Test Dept.

Pax Britannica
Jungle / Ministry of Power

Another not-too popular album in Test Dept.‘s mighty canon that is also one of my favorites. This album is a grand live affair that pairs the band’s martial drumming and industrial clanging with an actual symphony orchestra and choir. From the Test Dept. website:

Part soundtrack to the epic ‘Second Coming’ show which celebrated Glasgow as the cultural capital of Europe 1990, performed at the St. Rollox Railway Works, once the largest producer of trains in the British Empire.

It features a score from John Eacott played by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and conducted by the celebrated scottish composer James MacMillan.

Many regard this album’s concept as flawed or perhaps the execution didn’t jell at this recorded gig. In any event, it is a telling in five movements of the rise and fall of the British Empire, told with spoken oratories by the band, samples of Winston Churchill, Margeret Thatcher and John Major, backed by an epic soundtrack utilizing patriotic British music (most notably Blake’s Jerusalem) . Undoubtably, it would help to see the performance and not having some sort of libretto makes it a little hard to follow and the pace lags somewhat after the third movement. It remains one of my favorites because I like how it utilizes patriotic motifs to serve as readymades to critique the imperialism of England, somewhat in the same way that Slovene band Laibach does. Although not perfect, this album is a chilling look a once mighty nation that ought to serve as a warning about imperial hubris (especially to us yanks).

Pax Britannica – 1990

1. Movement I:
2. Pledge, Jerusalem, Heavens Command, Characters of Light, Agincourt, Accusation
3. Movement II:
4. Territory (The Epic of the Race)
5. Movement III:
6. From the Land (As An Fhearann)
7. Movement IV:
8. God, King and Law
9. The Cracked Facade
10. Farewell the Trumpets
11. Movement V:
12. The Legacy (A Lasting Presence)

Download

Happy MLK Day

Martin Luther King Jr. : I Have a Dream Speech

Also: Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam