THE WORLD'S TALLEST MUSIC: Joseph Bertolozzi's "Tower Music"

An entire album made solely from the sounds of someone banging on the Eiffel Tower?! Now that is the kind of thing to warm the cockles of a Maniac's heart, and to thoroughly confuse, if not annoy, mainstream music consumers: "Wha..? Why doesn't he use real musical instruments?" Because, my poor, brainwashed Normals, there is a universe of unused sounds out there that cannot be conjured up with pianos, guitars, even synthesizers. Music is all around us, as John Cage would say, and sampling those sounds and using them as the raw stuff of compositions is an excellent way to make us aware of that. 

The album actually sounds like you think it would, dominated by metallic plinky pongy tones. But even tho these songs are indeed produced only by Bertolozzi's molesting of a great Parisian structure, they are not just random banging. They are structured, highly rhythmic, even weirdly melodic, with each track having it's own peculiar flavor. In other words: musical. Here's one particularly toe-tappin' sample:

Joseph Bertolozzi "Continuum" from "Tower Music"

Ross Bolleter's Music For Ruined Pianos

A reader left a comment today: "How does one download from Google on a Mac? I cannot figure it out..." I'm not a Mac-intologist. Anyone?
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Rather than take old, decrepit pianos and attempt to repair and tune them, Australian composer/improviser Ross Bolleter makes new music out of "ruined" pianos. Bolleter approaches each piano as a singular entity, utilizing each instrument's lack of standard tuning, missing keys, broken strings, etc. to create strange, haunting, stirring sounds that would not be possible to make on a new piano. Which seems like a much more logical approach than taking every sound-making thing on the planet and forcing the limited range of the Western scale on it.

The music on this album hardly sounds like "piano music." The lengthy opening track is meditative loveliness, ranging from Asian gong sounds to birds calls in the background (this really is a 'field recording') to horror movie atmospherics. The remaining short tracks sound similar to John Cage's prepared piano works, but while Cage's pieces were gamelan-inspired and strictly written, these are free and jazzy. So ingenious one wonders why no-one thought of doing something like this before?

Ross Bolleter - Secret Sandhills and Satellites (Pieces For Ruined Pianos) (2006)
(UPDATE 7/15: Missing track now in file.)

Count Otto hepped me to this cat via this article about "Touring Australia's Piano Graveyards."

Pardon my Amazon cut-and pasting:

ROSS BOLLETER ruined pianos (+ accordion on 7)

1 - SECRET SANDHILLS - 28:00
2 - AXIS - 6:47
3 - DEAD MARINE - 6:10
4 - AND THEN I SAW THE WIND - 3:22
5 - CHORUS LINE - 1:39
6 - SAVE WHAT YOU CAN - 2:40
7 - GOING TO WAR WITHOUT THE FRENCH IS LIKE GOING TO WAR WITHOUT AN ACCORDION - 4:23
8 - TIME WAITS - 5:59
9 - COME NIGHT - 2:02
10 - JAUNTY NOTES OF PADDOCKS BRIGHT - 4:22
11 - OLD MAN PIANO - 1:46

"All digital recordings made in Australia around Perth and Alice Springs 2001-2005. Pieces for ruined pianos and pianos on the edge of ruin... The main work, inspired by an Aborigine painting, is the 28-minute Secret Sandhills, a generally slow-moving work spliced together from performances on six ruins. There are also 10 shorter and generally faster Satellites, some of which were performed on two ruined pianos simultaneously. Fresh new sounds from decaying old instruments."

Sounds Of The American Fast Food Restaurants

As a follow-up to last months' posting of Gregg Turkington's Sounds of San Francisco Adult Bookstores is the equally silly:

The Golding Institute-Sounds Of The American Fast Food Restaurants (1996)

17 minutes of barely discernible audio recorded "in the field" in a KFC, McDonalds, Jack in the Box, etc., tho Turkington's droll, incisive, funny narration is again the star of the show.

A1	Introduction Narrator [Introduction By] – Golding Institute, The, Ryan Kerr
A2	KFC (6th Avenue & Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, CA)
A3	Jack In The Box (11th Avenue & Geary Boulevard, San Francisco, CA)
A4	Taco Bell (Highway One, Pacifica, CA)
A5	Nation's Giant Hamburger (Westlake Mall, Daly City, CA)
A6	Subway (Skyline Plaza, Daly City, CA)
B1	Hot Dog On A Stick (Stonestown Mall, San Fancisco, CA)
B2	McDonald's (Stonestown Mall, San Francisco, CA)
B3	Burger King (John Daly Boulevard, Daly City, CA)
B4	Straw Hat Pizza (Westlake Mall, Daly City, CA)
B5	Round Table Pizza (Oceana Boulevard, Pacifica, CA)

Sounds Of The San Francisco Adult Bookstores

Thirteen minutes of supreme silliness apparently recorded on location by Gregg Turkington, the nut behind the hilarious anti-comic Neil Hamburger, and the fiendishly clever Warm Voices Rearranged anagram record reviews site. The narrator, presumably Turkington, speaks in a mock David Attenborough voice. Copies of this record came with a free tissue. 

Clicking on the title will wisk you off to DivShare-land, where a wondrous world awaits!

The Golding Institute "Sounds Of The San Francisco Adult Bookstores" (1997)

SIX ACCORDIONISTS GO RIDING ON A CAROUSEL...

...No, that's not a joke set-up. It really happened on the Santa Monica Pier in 2010. Daniel Corral and his group the Free Reed Conspiracy actually sat on carousel horses that went up 'n' down, up 'n' down, playing a near-30 minute powerful drone piece - like Glenn Branca for squeezeboxes. "...the audience listened as the music spun past them." Watch it here (can't see the musicians much, unfortunately):

NEOTROPE

or download the mp3 from Corral's website if you scroll down a bit

HERE

tho it's not as densely loud. The acoustics of the 80-year-old carousel building no doubt caused much reverberation, which I prefer to the pristine studio version.

There was apparently an entire evening of music and performance on the carousel and, as I live in Los Angeles, am bummed that I wasn't there. Encore, encore!

The Conceptual Crank-Calls of "Conversations"

Brandon Locher's "Conversations 2012" is a near-20 minute tour de force that does for prank phone calls what "The Velvet Underground & Nico" did for rock 'n' roll, uncovering unexpected depth and scope in what had been dismissed as childish nonsense.

What he basically did was call a store in a Johnstown, PA shopping mall and then did not speak. The "Hello? Hello" etc. response was recorded and then played to another shopkeeper in the same mall. Then their bewildered response was recorded and played for whoever answered the phone at yet another store in the same mall, and so on, until this game of tag went throughout the mall.

It does what a crank call is supposed to do - makes ya laff! - but there's much more going on here. It's ingeniously constructed, a well-edited piece of sound-collage, if nothing else. It's also a snapshot of corporate retail culture - jeez, the long greetings they make these poor kids say when they answer the phone! 

Then there's the fact that no-one answering the phone knows that they're speaking to a recording.  Everyone thinks that they're having a real conversation.  Between guffaws, Mrs Fab said to me that this is somewhat of an illustration of the cold-reading method that con-artists use to convince suckers that they have psychic powers, based on the fact that people generally say and act in very limited, predictable ways, even tho we like to think that we are very free-thinking, unique individuals.

Best of all - it's really funny. Listen/download here:

Brandon Locher "Conversations 2012"

The Earliest Known Recorded Music in Existence

Yep, only three known copies of this Edison wax cylinder from 1888 exist, which would certainly make this one of the most historically prized recordings ever.  But it's also a good listen. 

The "song" heard here is an excerpt from classical composer Handel's "Israel In Egypt" sung by, to quote a note on the cylinder: "A chorus of 4000 voices recorded with phonograph over 100 yards away." Conducted by August Manns; recorded by Col. George Gouraud, foreign sales agent for Thomas Edison at the Crystal Palace, London, England, June 29, 1888.

A hundred yards away?!  At first I thought: 'a hundred feet away', the length of a football field, but no, it says 'yards.' Dang, that's far. So what does it sound like?  Pretty avant-garde, actually - the white-noise of the cylinder whirring around melded with the huge distant choir is a strange and haunting sound, indeed. Not too far removed from something you might hear on a Zoviet France or Nurse With Wound album. Knowing that these are actual voices from the 1800s adds a ghostly mystery to the experience.

Handel festival: "Israel In Egypt" - excerpt

(Courtesy of archive.org.)

Music Recorded In A Cave on "The Great Stalacpipe Organ"

Here's some real "underground music," har har!  Put on your lantern helmet and repel with me down into Luray Caverns, Virginia, where an engineer named Leland Sprinkle noticed that striking the cave's rock formations produced musical tones. So, in 1954, he conceived of an organ with little hammers that strike a hollow rock when the organ's keys are depressed. It's quite musical, though with a limited sonic palette. Rather then the usual pipe organ bombast, the Stalacpipe Organ ("The World's Largest Musical Instrument!") is quiet, ghostly. The reverberating splashes of dripping water in the background sounds like sporadic electronic percussion, adding to the ambient feel.


In 2001, United States Naval Academy chapel organist Monte Maxwell recorded a cd full of popular, classical, gospel, and American patriotic standards played on the Organ. Four-and-a-half years ago, when the album was still in print, I posted one song from it, but as it has apparently fallen into a deep cave, here's the whole dang deal:

Midnight In The Caverns: Music From The Great Stalacpipe Organ

Older recordings can be heard here (the original 365 Project), and Week 15 of Tape Findings.

FUN WITH SUN BOXES

Fayetteville's Craig Colorusso doesn't "compose" music so much as build gizmos that allow Mother Nature to write her own jams: "Sun Boxes are...twenty speakers operating independently, each powered by the sun via solar panels. There is a different loop set to play a guitar note in each box continuously. These guitar notes collectively make a Bb chord. Because the loops are different in length, once the piece begins they continually overlap and the piece slowly evolves over time."

The loops-of-different-lengths approach reminds me of Eno's "Music For Airports," and there is a similar meditative effect with this music. The ambient sounds of nature (the beach, insects, etc.) are a crucial component - these are, quite literally, field
recordings. I first listened to this stuff Monday morning after a crazy Thanksgiving weekend (complete with a live "Yo Gabba Gabba" concert and thousands of screaming toddlers!) and it was as nice as dipping into a warm bath. Aaaah...

Listen or buy:

Sun Boxes Seven Inch

or listen to a continuous stream.

TUNES-FOR-FREE JAMBOREE #3: YOU ARE NOT STEALING RECORDS

Some of my favorite albums of late have been internet give-aways, the perfect music-distribution route for weirdos who don't make the kind of trendy cookie-cutter sounds the labels are looking for. Such as:

YOU ARE NOT STEALING RECORDS

Were it not for the 'net, how else would I know about the strange/outsider music underground of Portugal? There is abundance of goodies here, and from what I've heard so far, none of it sucks, and everything's been at least worthwhile, and at best wonderful.

Stealing Orchestra is the band that started this 'net label. "We are using: sampling, guitars, accordeon, drums, flute, oboé, marimba vibraphone xylophone, cello percussion, piano, theremin and a lot of keyboards like church organ or hammond." Start with:

- "For Me 'Formidable," from their "É Português? Não Gosto!" album, in which traditional Portuguese polkas and waltzes are transformed into a spazz-tronic circus.

- From their "Bu!" album, "É Contra Mim Que Luto ," and "Catarse" especially when the exotica sample comes in @ 1:oo.

- G.G. Allin's Dick, also Portuguese, play a cartoonishly crazed polka-tempo electronica on their "King of the Road" album; might be my fave YANSR release so far; "Monocycle From Hell" is a tune that has wormed it's way into my head, popping out at odd times.

- Slipper are a British band featuring ex-Loop Guru members that draws inspiration from '50/'60s exotica, but filtered thru a modern sensibility. Check "Nuke Bug," in which a thick dub bass line is crawling with insect sounds; kinda like those tropical bird call-festooned Martin Denny records, but more creepy. "Lobsters" features a Peter Gunn-ish guitar riff, Miles-esque horns, and weird nightmarish noises.

- The Prostitutes play '60s-style garage rock and surf instros with maximum fuzz and energy; compared to the eccentric eclecticism of other YANSR acts, there's nothing too original here, but these Portuguese punks are plenty fun.

- Duo Inmortales play Residential one-minute-long songs with text-to-speech robots on vocals. Pick hit: "My First Nazi Girl."

- Vincent Bergeron's first two tracks annoyed me with it's modern-classical atonalities and Bergeron's nerdy voice singing in French. Then, either I got used to it, or the classical-chamber-group-chopped-up-in-a-sampler sounds sunk in, and I found songs like "L'Art du Déssaroi" to be pretty damn cool.

- Luis Antero's 17-minute long "Sinfonia Amphibia" consists of nothing but field recordings of some very loud uncredited Portuguese critters, presumably amphibians. I like to play this at the same time as other musics, such as the minor-key shoegazey sounds of worriedaboutsatan.

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WAX AUDIO: 9 COUNTRIES

"9 Countries was recorded on location in Indonesia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Tibet, India, Egypt and Greece between October 2005 and March 2007 by Tom Compagnoni. What you hear has been entirely assembled from these field recordings, no additional samples used."

Australia's Wax Audio made a splash with his politically-themed sound collages that even graced commercial talk-radio airwaves, as well as his party-ready mashups. But this production, literally years in the making, blows all that stuff out of the water. For one thing, the sound quality is amazing. No more hissy tape recordings in the field. And it rocks - it isn't just the New Age ambient wallpaper so often found in the well-meaning-but-dull "world music" crowd, but assembled with a pop musician's ear for looping compelling rhythms. The mixing of various sounds, voices, and beats is smoothly blended - all the laws of mashups still apply so far as getting everything on time and in a compatible key.

It's a trip - literally. You'll hear things like airport announcements, tv audio snippets, and street dialogue, which can get pretty funny. By leaving in the goofy stuff that one actually encounters while traveling, he gives it a personal touch, so that it doesn't feel like a generic National Geographic special.

He took plenty of good pictures, too.

This tune features, among other elements: a procession, and street hawkers in Myanmar; streets at dawn (with goat bell) in Tibet; temple drums and music in India; a monk chanting in Laos...

Wax Audio - Belur
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UNSILENT NIGHT

A few nights ago, I wandered the streets of downtown Los Angeles along with a host of angels and wise (wom)men who came bearing boomboxes playing a copy of composer Phil Kline's "Unsilent Night." Anyone could send him an email and he'd send you a free copy of his electronic work. Everyone met at the pre-determined spot, and off we went. It lasts roughly 45 minutes. Here's the first ten, recorded on my new digital recorder:

Unsilent Night (12-10-09)

Of course, when the order is given to hit play, not everyone's in perfect synch. And that would be boring if they were. Like Terry Riley's 1966 Minimalist landmark "In C," the whole piece seems to be in the same key, and alternates from smooth ambient passages to more upbeat rhythmic ones, so having multiple versions going at once starting at different times doesn't create cacophony - it adds richness. It's a unique performance every time, depending not only on how many copies of the piece are playing and when they started, but where the audience is - everyone involved is in a different geographic space so the sounds will hit everyone's ears differently.

Since its 1992 debut, "Unsilent Night" has become something of a holiday standard. It's happening in 25 cities this year, some still yet to come as of this writing, so check da site for a location near you. Apart from it being lovely music, I think it's a way to add to the warm fuzzy feelings the holidays can bring about in us. A communal event in the cold cold night, but not the same ol' caroling-in-Victorian-costumes routine. The end part of my recording even suggests church bells ringing, or chimes, while avoiding all Christmas music cliches.

You and your friends can buy your own copies, and host your own event, I suppose.

Did anyone else out there go and take pictures? The above photo was just one I found on the web from a different staging of "Unsilent Night."
The night we went was during LA's monthly Art Walk. Never done it before, but man, that's a happenin' scene. In fact, all the live music and djs we encountered along the way sometimes drowned out the boomboxes. Unsilent night, indeed...
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