Mark Mothersbaugh of DEVO's Mutated Christmas Album

This 1999 collection of eccentric electronic instrumental Christmas music by Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh doesn't sound much like Devo, or, for that matter, Christmas music. It does sound really nice, tho. As the song titles indicate, the tunes suggest famous Xmas carols, and sometimes just barely at that, e.g.: the cartoonish "Midnight Windup Toy". And isn't "Soylent Night" the greatest title?

Mark Mothersbaugh - Joyeux Mutato

01 Jingle$, Jingle$, Jingle$
02 Blue Joy

03 Midnight Wind-Up Toy
04 Bell Boy
05 Happy Woodchopper
06 Only 12 Shopping Days Left
07 Peace And Goodwill
08 Enough Xmas For All
09 You Better Watch Out...
10 Let There Be Snow
11 I Don't Have A Christmas Tree (Soylent Night)
BONUS: Devo - Merry Something To You [a barely minute long jingle from a 2010 Warner Bros xmas comp]

I was reminded of this album after li'l bro Paul Fab told me about the big ol' Mark Mothersbaugh exhibit he saw recently at the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. (That's Paul at the exhibit, above.) It's a career retrospective of Devo memorabilia and Mothersbaugh's prodigious visual art output. Check the short (exclusive! not on YouTube!) video below Paul shot of some crazy contraptions: "I believe he calls them Orchestrions. It's a gallery (his kooky rugs on one wall) with four Orchestrions which all play together. They're mostly old organ pipes, but also many bird calls, whistles, metal bells and other noisy things. They're cobbled together with visible electric (and barely electronic) controls all left out and taped into whatever position they're supposed to be in. Every 5 minutes they start playing. What a cool sound."

Damn! Can't wait to see it. Once it finishes its Denver run, the exhibit will be on tour for a couple years. (I did quite like Mark's "Beautiful Mutants" gallery show in 2009.) Thanks to Paul for the pic and vid.

"Christmas Memories Played on Antique Musical Boxes"

Victorian-era robots! Plinkety-plonkety music not played by human hands!

If the phrase "music box" conjures up images of that tchotchke in your grandma's living room with a ballerina twirling around on top as "Moon River" plays, you may be surprised to hear how lush and orchestrated these beauties sound. We don't know exactly what singers and musicians of the pre-recording era sounded like, but as these big boxes, sporting such impressive names as the 'Symphonium,' were actually found in household parlors of the late 1800s, listening to them is a bit of a time machine into them long gone days before radio, records, or the internet provided in-home musical entertainment, and song titles all started with "O."

The tunes featured on this 1977 release are short, sometimes under a minute, so for the big hits like "Silent Night," they wind 'em up and play the song two or three times in a row. And if you hate Christmas music, there's plenty of unfamiliar songs here that don't feel especially seasonal and could feed your mechanical-music jones all year 'round.

Christmas Memories Played on Antique Musical Boxes

1. O Tannenbaum
2. O Sanctissima
3. Silent Night
4. Among Shepherds-The Holy City-Every Year Anew
5. O Come Little Children
6. O Tannenbaum
7. O Come Little Children
8. See the Conquering Hero
9. Cloister Bells-Ave Maria
10. O Come All Ye Faithful
11. Monastery Bells 

Another vinyl gem unearthed by this blog's ol' pal Brer Windbag. And if you're looking for some appropriate Victorian-era literature to read whilst listening to this, how 'bout this 1882 book of children's short stories that usually feature the children dying. Features the feel-bad classic, "The New Mother":

"Anyhow Stories"

O come little children, indeed. "The Imitation Fish" is another cherished tale to make your kids miserable. And who wants to set "The Paper Ship" to music?
Thanks to Count Otto, and Windy!

T.V.O.D.

Turn on the t.v., watch a movie, what do you get? Inane sitcoms, "Transformers," cops chasing serial killers for the umpteenth time...but what's this?!  Video being put to good use for a change, producing such feasts for the eyes and ears as

Nintendo audio played by player piano and robotic percussion:

"This system allows for Nintendo gameplay audio to be played through an acoustic player piano and robotically controlled percussive instruments. The piano and percussion play live during actual gameplay."  It's true, watch the game in the upper left to see how it triggers the robot instruments.

I wrote about Gnarboot's nutty album in 2011, but this video from earlier this year isn't so much kooky as it is pretty sick 'n' twisted.  Imagine David Lynch making children's programming. Over an eerie electronic score, the title phrase "Cats In Pajamas" is chanted mantra-like by a childlike vocalist, as people in cat masks mysteriously appear and disappear.  My three-year-old came over to my computer when I was playing this, intrigued. After all, it's kitties, right?  But when the scary knife-wielding clown showed up, she ran from the room.  Thanks a lot for scaring my kid, Gnarboots!

Speaking of sick and twisted...the gold standard of such, The Everyday Film, who released an album we reviewed earlier this year, have now added video to their arsenal of weapons of mass hysteria.  It's for the short version of their song "Goool" and, like a slideshow of early Jandek album covers, features a series of blurred, discombobulated photos in as compelling a video realization of alienation and disconnection as you're ever going to see.

Need a laugh now? Another M4M fave, the absurdist mad scientist and his "singing" robot duo the Satanic Puppeteer Orchestra, have also released their debut video, "Frankenstein's Laundromat," another welcome bit of their trademark electro-poppin' surreal humor. This is a preview of the forthcoming album, "Experiments With Auto-Croon."

Swedish female duo The Haggish Moue have a bunch of videos up on the youtubes, and I watched 'em all.  Not sure if I really need to listen to their wistful brand of electro-psych on it's own, but the largely-instrumental (+ somewhat ethereal vox) music works great as a soundtrack to spacey video art acid trips that you can get lost in. Let's fall into space...

"Bangs Glitter"

AJNA: A Giant, Strange Mechanical-Music Contraption

From Sweden comes some fantastic new videos of AJNA, a large musical robot that looks like Dr. Who's police box tricked out with drums, sound-making thingies, and visual artworks. The first video is a minute-and-a-half intro to the beasts' wonders, but the second video sports a full band - a contemporary chamber group, really - getting down to business with AJNA to produce some truly striking, lovely sounds and sights that are rich in dark, esoteric atmosphere.

The song "Karlak" was written by Jens Peterson-Berger of the great band Originalljudet, and features the harmonium, one of my favorite obscure musical instruments. Known mainly for its use in Sufi music (e.g. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan) and Nico's post-Velvets solo albums, it sounds somewhat like a goth, droney cousin to the accordion.

I Will NOT Be Appearing On Radio Misterioso...

...this Sunday nite. Two hours of radio hijinks will be postponed to a later date. But the good news is, thanks to super-swell maniac Phil C., "The Lavender Jungle" comp is back up. 

And there's some great stuff up on the youtubes. Another valued tipster, Niels, hepped me to this clip of "Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas," a spectacular example of the ever-evolving genre of mechanical music.

HERE is a 16-minute explanation for you techies.

And I didn't have a March Fourth post this past March 4th re: alternative marching bands, because I didn't have any material.  Well, I got one now: this swell vid about a band I wrote about HERE, a 5 minute documentary on the mysterious, highly experimental Itchy-O Marching Band, revealing their home/custom-made instruments.

ROBOTS PLAY EXOTICA

- You got robots in my gamelan!

- You got gamelan in my robots!

Two great tastes that go great together: Gamelan Galak Tika (pronounced 'Galactica'?) & Ensemble Robot, from Boston's MIT and UMass, respectively, combine forces for 19 minutes of free awesomeness that you can download here:

Gamelan Galak Tika & Ensemble Robot: Heavy Metal

A few other instruments like violin and electric guitars join the machines and the Indonesian bells 'n' gongs for a thoroughly mysterious and wonderful sandwich spread of rock 'n' roll, island exotica, and avant-garde. Now, with added chunks of sci-fi futurism! A combo this bizarre shouldn't exist. And yet it does:

And speaking of robots playing heavy metal...

Compressorhead

are a metal band - literally - whose videos show them jammin' on Motorhead, The Ramones, and AC/DC. They do live shows, and apparently an album is in the works.

Behold! The Kaleidocosmicorgrig - The Strangest Instrument EVER?!

I don't usually pay $10 for obscure old records - that's like real money - but how could I resist this description from the back cover: "This is a recording of The Kaleidocosmicorgrig... it is 35' in length, 12' tall, weighs approximately 2 tons... a contrivance of pedals, keyboards, pulleys, mousetraps, electrical wires, wind machines, magnets, bellows, fishing weights, stovepipes and bicycle wheels, arranged so as to control a parlor piano, 30 tuned bottles, 13 10-foot tuba pipes, a fine bass drum, 2 tambourines, a mariachi marimba, a wooden xylophone, Swiss glockenspiel, castanets, maracas, wood block, cymbals, bonkers, zonkers, and taxihorn."

Sounds too good to be true? Many eye/ear-witnesses have testified to its one-time existence, in a Shakey's Pizza Parlor near Disneyland, California. This 1970 album, recorded live, consists largely of frantically energetic instrumentals (with a lot of Greek influences for some reason); great versions of two Latin classics, "Tico Tico" and "Malagueña;" a few originals; some silly lyrics (from what I could make out - the vocals are not well recorded, but it hardly matters); and a final group sing-along that does not feature the giant whatsit. The album is on red vinyl, and originally came with a strawberry-scented incense stick (did I mention this was 1970?)

Orchestrions - mechanical music orchestras - were popular a century ago, before recordings became hi-fi. I have other albums of this sort, but this beast is clearly the granddaddy of 'em all. Featured here are the old-fashioned tunes you'd expect, but also recent soundtracks hits like "Zorba The Greek" and "Never On Sunday" (see what I mean about the Greek influence?) that suggests that Nick O'Lodeon (aka Nick Cornwell) was actively programming his machine by punching new piano rolls, creating new music boxes, and building the robots necessary to play contemporary music. Unless it was all theatrics, and Nick was playing live, but I don't think so - sure, he was playing and singing some live, but the rapid-fire piano and xylophone sound like they're playing too fast for human hands.

So what's it sound like? Pretty much like what you'd think it would sound like - berserk circus music filtered thru a '70s California hippie sensibility. It's a lot of fun, upbeat, and to say the least, unique. Who knew such things existed in our universe? Far out, man!

Nick O'Lodeon Plays Actual Music On His Kaleidocosmicorgrig

A DRUM MACHINE...BUT NOT THAT KIND OF DRUM MACHINE

Jens Peterson Berger of the great Swedish band Originalljudet has built a crazy contraption that puts a new spin on the term "drum machine" - this ain't no TR-808, folks, but a large robotic acoustic drum playing thingie (I want!), as demonstrated here:

Which is then joined by an orchestra for some lovely robo-classical musics:

Another fine example of human musicians jamming with homemade gizmos, a la Frank Pahl, and Pierre Bastien.

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.

Pierre Bastien's Musiques Machinales

It's a "Two-For-Tuesday"! On Wednesday! Here are two absolutely spellbinding albums by French composer Pierre Bastien, who, since childhood, has been fascinated with the idea of incorporating machines into music. His first experiment was with a spoon attached to a metronome striking a pan. Since then he has come far indeed, constructing Erector Set-like rockin' robots, and on his "Mecanoid" album, brilliantly incorporating (non-hip hop) turntablism. Over the repetitious rhythms of his machines he often blows cool Miles-like jazz horn. The results, on his "Musiques Machinales" album, range from the Steve Reich-like minimalism of "Chez Les Crânes" to "Marchin' Band," reminiscent of "Rain Dogs"-era Tom Waits. Scratchy fiddle and, on at least one song, what sounds like a musical saw also feature in his cabinet of curiosities. Like Frank Pahl and the Scavenger Quartet's "We Who Live On Land", gorgeous melodies such as the one on "Vipers" from "Musiques Machinales" sell these obtuse ideas. Magical. 

PIERRE BASTIEN "Musiques Machinales"

PIERRE BASTIEN "Mecanoid"

TOYS VS ROBOTS: THE MAD GENIUS OF FRANK PAHL

UPDATE 7/25/11: album back on line

Frank Pahl is one of the most criminally underrated composers/mad scientists at work today.
And while I still maintain that "We Who Live On Land," the album he recorded with The Scavenger Quartet that I wrote about a couple years ago, is one of the best albums of the '00s, I do thoroughly enjoy a more recent album of his, "Elementary," with the trio Little Bang Theory.

"Elementary" is performed entirely on toy instruments. It's all instrumental, and wanders over a fairly wide emotional range - no cute kiddie stuff here (not that I mind cuteness). The song writing is pretty ambitious, with some fairly lengthy "suites", tho with toy instruments you inevitably have a built-in nostalgic sweetness that keeps pretensions at bay. Utterly wonderful stuff, but it's in print, available from his site and elsewhere, so not gonna post it, but I did included a couple songs off it as BONUS! tracks, included with this other excellent Frank Pahl album that doesn't seem to be for sale anywhere.

Frank Pahl and Klimperei "Music For Desserts"

Pahl sez about this 2001 release: "What can I say? This is my favorite. All tracks began with home made automatic instruments. [French group] Klimperei laid down their sympathetic magic and I mixed."

And that's something I didn't realize when I first reviewed The Scavenger Quartet album: how many hand-built robot instruments are featured in Pahl's music, mixed in with all the strange, often antiquated human-played instruments. Da man plays: "Piano, Piano [Prepared, Prepared Barrel], Organ [Binary Air Quartet, Microcontrolled Air Quartet, Hohner Organette], Clarinet, Tipple, Marimba [Toy], Cello, Guitar [Tenor], Harmonium, Euphonium, Harp [Peacock, African], Flute [Bulgarian], Trombone [Toy], Trumpet [Toy], Bass Drum, Whistle, Ukulele, Ukulele [Automatic, Buzzsaw, Binary Quartet, Family], Zither, Zither [Automatic], Percussion, Percussion [Automatic], Performer [Autoglock, Binary Doorbell Quartet, Washing Machine, Jason Ortega's Auto Chime, Double String Trio, Virtual Pet: Gerbil, Humming Choir Loop, Shrutti Box]." No, I'm not entirely sure what all that means either, but it does give you an idea of how unique this music is, without losing a melodic approachability.

SCIENCE GONE TOO FAR?!?

Some recent musical mad scientists:

"The Chipophone is a homemade 8-bit synthesizer, especially suited for live chiptune playing. It has been built inside an old electronic organ." Yep, Linus Akesson of Sweden can play those bloopy-bleepy video game sounds on a proper keyboard, the kind of two-level organ your grandma might have in her living room. A helluva lot of work went into building his contraption. Dig the 7 minute demo video:



And check his original song:

Linus Akesson "Spellbound" (not the Hitchcock theme)

It's pretty obvious by the number of robot musicians we've covered here that mechanical music is a growing phenomenon, and now that veteran jazz star Pat Metheny has embraced it, maybe other music journalists will finally start to take it seriously. We're here, we're gears, get used to it! (sorry.)

Metheny's The Orchestrion is truly a marvel - it isn't just one robot playing pre-programmed music, it's a whole orchestra. And the level of performance is remarkable. Much robot music is understandably a bit stiff - machines can't really "swing" - but this stuff comes as close to passing a musical Turing Test as any, where you can't tell if you're dealing with artificial or human intelligence.

Musically, he's favoring percussion instruments like xylophones. Easier for robots to play, I guess. And that's fine by me, I like percussion music.

Pat Metheny - "Orchestrion" (excerpt) - Metheny's guitar is the only live instrument here.

It still sounds like typical Metheny fusion jazz. But the Los Angeles-area KarmetiK crew have built a Machine Orchestra with more of an eclectic bent. They are from CalArts, after all, so they have to get all ethnicky 'n' stuff. No albums or mp3s, but there's a video on their site, and another one HERE of their fascinating mixture of robo-rockers and humans.





Thanks to Richard E. and Joshua U.!

MORE MECHANICAL MUSICS

The collection of "mechanical music" I put together last month was a surprise hit, and it just so happens that some more music played not by human hands has come my way: an awesome German slide-guitar robot, a complex contraption that accompanies silent films, and a real curiosity: a late '50s album of rock 'n' roll player-piano arrangements.
The Three Sirens are the aforementioned German guitar-bots; their site's free-download page has some tasty tunes from their album "Robot Rock" - I especially like the balls-out (gears-out?) "Aglaopheme's Solo."

The P.A.M. (Partially Artificial Musicians) Band (pictured above) was created by Kurt Coble of the (get this) "Robotic Music Laboratory" of the University of Bridgeport, CT. No album, but as evidenced by the videos on his site, the live show must be amazing. His 'bots have recently been performing an original score to the classic Fritz Lang silent sci-fi film "Metropolis."

J. Lawrence Cook was a veteran piano-roll puncher and pianist who made a bizarre album in the late '50s of his piano-roll versions of current rock and r'n'b hits. A live band accompanies the player-piano mechanically grinding out unlikely (sometimes near-unrecognizable) ragtime-ish versions of songs made famous by Elvis, Bill Haley & The Comets, The Everly Brothers, etc, as well as some Cook originals. Why?! I mean, why go to the bother of laboriously punching out a player piano roll if live musicians are performing - why not just sit down and play the piano live? Definitely one of the weirdest artifacts of the original rock 'n 'roll era.

J. Lawrence Cook "Piano Roll Rock 'n' Roll"
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Thanks to J-Unit 1 and windbag!

No Humans Allowed - A Mechanical Music Sampler

UPDATE 4/21/10: New link to zip file.

My attempts to post an album a day were foiled by yet another computer virus. A $250 repair bill, and we're back in business. In the last couple of days I've had requests to re-up a number of tracks under the "Mechanical Music" category - music played by robots and machines - such as the "Creepy Circus Tesla Coil" song, "Printer Jam," and the fairground organ version of "Puppet On A String." So, to save valuable time, I just decided to put together an album's worth of mechanical music that's been featured here on M4M into one zip file.

Music untouched by human hands! Office equipment, player pianos, music boxes, Tesla coils, and robot instrumentalists. ATTENTION HUMANS: YOU. ARE. OBSOLETE.

No Humans Allowed - A Mechanical Music Sampler

ArcAttack - Creepy Circus Song
bd594 - Bohemian Rhapsody
Ceiri Torjussen - Raiders March
Conlon Nancarrow - Studios For Player Piano 21
Cybraphon - A March For The Sea
Cybraphon - The Balkan Bazaar
dying carousel - Moon River
Ferranti Mark_1_computer - God Save The Queen-Baa Baa Black Sheep-In TheMood
Guy Hoffman and Shimon the robot
James Houston - Big Ideas (Dont Get Any)
James Tenney - Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow
John Morton - A Delicate Road III (excerpt)
Joshua Fried - EmergencyBot
Mistabishi - Printer Jam
Steve Ward - Tesla Coil music
The Geek Group - Mario Bros Theme
The Trons - Sister Robot
The User - Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers
Tristan Perich- Just Let Go
wurlitzer fairground organ - Puppet On A String


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DON'T MAKE THE CYBRAPHON SAD

Behold! The above contraption is The Cybraphon, a marvel of mechanical music. Edinburg, Scotland's FOUND group have built a self-playing musical robot housed in a cabinet, but unlike other robo-musicians that we've featured here who play rock, jazz, or electronica, The Cybraphon takes an antique-garde approach in terms of both look and sound: "Inspired by early 19th century mechanical bands such as the nickelodeon ['player piano']...Cybraphon consists of a number of instruments, antique machinery, and found objects from junk shops operated by over 60 robotic components..."

Instruments include a Farfisa organ, chimes, an Indian classical instrument, percussion, and "...a purpose made vinyl record...cued robotically to play through antique brass gramophone horns." Cool, eh? But how does it sound? Great, actually. Listening to their two EPs (available on their site) is a kind of musical Turing Test - I sometimes forgot that I was listening to a robot and just enjoyed the music. Accordions aren't listed but something sure sounds like them in these tunes. Perhaps it's that "Indian classical instrument."

The Cybraphon: The Balkan Bazaar

The Cybraphon: A March For The Sea

"Image conscious and emotional, the band’s performance is affected by online community opinion as it searches the web for reviews and comments about itself 24 hours a day." So don't make The Cybraphon sad. Cybraphon cry.

Thanks to J-Unit 1!

ABSOLUTELY THE GREATEST THING...

...I've heard on the internet lately: the latest (Week 119) of

Tape Findings

A private recording made in the "...late 1970's of our local zoo's carousel, whose calliope had fallen into dreadful disrepair, making for some wonderfully warbled versions of Moon River, 76 Trombones, The Sound of Music and many others." If there is a circus in Hell, this is the soundtrack. (Of course, coming from me, that's a compliment.) For example, Henry Mancini, like you've never heard him before:

dying carousel: "Moon River"

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THE NEW OLD

I didn't invent the term "antique-garde," but I sure use it a lot lately to describe some of the best new experimental sounds out there. And by "new" I mean "old": inspired by obsolete, forgotten styles and instruments. Case in point: a combo led by veteran Detroit oddball Frank Pahl called the Scavenger Quartet. Pahl plays on such junkshop refugees as the Farfisa organ, banjo, ukulele, euphonium, zither, toys (piano, popcorn maker), and occasionally resorts to digital technology so that he can sample that old circus music maker, the calliope. And doorbells. Yes, doorbells. They're honestly quite mellifluous in Pahl's hands. His fellow band members add horns, reeds, guitar, and all manner of percussion. A high school marching band appears on one song. Not only that, but some of Pahl's mechanical musical automatons are featured here as well.

Which is all well and good, but this would be mere gimmickry without quality songwriting. Fortunately, the Quartet's got such grand tunesmithery that their addictive second album, "We Who Live On Land," has not left my CD player in weeks. The unusual sounds suggest Harry Partch or Tom Waits, but with an identity all their own, sometimes sweetly nostalgic, sometimes cartoonishly crazy.

Scavenger Quartet: "We Who Live On Land"

The album's artwork and song titles were inspired by another antiquity: a century-old book about sea life.

1. Marvelous Argonaut

2. Crimson Jellyfish

3. Wonderful Nautilus

4. Elegant Mermaiden

5. Fine-Haired Medusae

6. Excitable Sea Porcupine

7. Shy Polyps

8. Savage Sawfish

9. Sea Mirage

10. Gummy Stickleback

11. 6,000 Mureys of Julius Caesar

12. Dreaded Cuttlefish

13. Curious Barnacles

14. Brittle Starfish

ROBOT ROCK

Well, since we seem to be the only blog reporting on the Robot Invasion:

bd594: Bohemian Rhapsody (video)
bd594: Bohemian Rhapsody (mp3)

'Tis Queen covered with the help of singing office equipment (an Atari 800XL - "piano," Texas Instruments TI-99/4a - "electric guitar," 8 Inch Floppy Disk - "bass," 3.5 inch Harddrive - "gong," HP ScanJet 3C - all "vocals").

Absolutely spectacular.

From the Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, a soon-to-be-obsolete human plays jazz piano, as a robot marimba player responds with astonishing quickness:

Guy Hoffman & Shimon The Robot (video)
Guy Hoffman & Shimon The Robot (mp3)

Thanks to Emily Pseudonym, and solcofn!
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INNOVA 1: THE "PREPARED" MUSIC BOX

I've reviewed many releases on Mullatta Records, "Purveyors of the Unique and the Bizarre," but for the next week or so I'll be aiming the spotlight on Innova, a label that should be of intense interest to anyone with an interest in unusual non-mainstream musics. Having spent a lot of time with Innova releases recently, I can tell you that the high quality level is matched only by the fearless originality of it's music.

I love it when someones breathes new life into an antique "obsolete" instrument or musical form, and that's exactly what John Morton does on his 2001 debut "Outlier." It's subtitle tells all: "New Music For Music Boxes." Yep, music boxes - those wind-up tinkly-sounding things your grandmother has in her living room. Maybe with a twirling ballerina doll atop.

Morton breaks into music boxes and messes with the machinery, creating a surprising variety of sounds and moods. Sometimes they plink and plunk like an African "thumb piano," sometimes they're electronically treated to create abstract ambient, sometimes they're put thru distortion, suggesting grandma is a headbanger. One piece "White Tara," for sax, upright bass, and music box, is a gorgeous melancholy jazz ballad. In all these pieces, the wiff of haunted memories and childhood nostalgia is never far away.

This excerpt suggests a music box that has been dropped, and stepped on by the grandkids, it's lopsided rhythms creating compelling, somewhat spooky melodies that dramatically build.

John Morton: "A Delicate Road III (excerpt)"

Morton's follow-up "Solo Traveler" features an instrument described as "a set of 17 recomposed and altered music boxes." Needless to say, I have got to hear that one as well.

CREEPY CIRCUS TESLA COIL MUSIC

Today's song has a lot going for it:

1. It's a "Creepy Circus Song"
2. The melody is played on Tesla coils*
3. Robot drums
4. Robot organ made of PVC pipes

Strangely enough, this is the second Austin, Texas-based Tesla coil music group we've featured here. The Geek Group was covered awhile back. Same group with a name change? Or does Austin have some kind of crazy Tesla-core scene going on that I don't know about?

ArcAttack: "Creepy Circus Song" (mp3)
ArcAttack: "Creepy Circus Song" (video)


*"These high tech machines produce an electrical arc similar to a continuous lightning bolt which put out a crisply distorted square wave sound reminiscent of the early days of synthesizers."