Like a cross between cartoon soundtracks and free jazz, side 1 of this 1987 cassette-only release is a sprawling smorgasbord of countless samples and snippets of prior Rift releases mixed into a 44 minute sound-collage. Hear the album Trouser Press called: "patience-defying"! Casios, Chipmunk voices, backwards voices, video-game-like bloops 'n' bleeps, some things resembling actual rock music, and what sounds like 5 records playing at the same time...Fun stuff!
Side 2 is a found tape Zoogz claims was rescued from a garbage bin. It's a side of a polite jazzy group apparently called the Transients covering Beatles and (some fairly obscure) solo Beatle songs. That story might be more believable if the voices weren't so obviously sped-up. And then there's their, er, "cover" of "Revolution No. 9" which gives it all away. Still, judging by this set, Zoogz & Co. could have worked as a Holiday Inn lounge band. And who knows, maybe they did.
Zoogz Rift: "Son of Puke" - in 2 files, Side 1 and 2, just like a real tape.
Much thanks to maniac Michael B. for sending this rarity our way.
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"
A year we ago we wrote about artists such as The Fruiting Body who make music out of everyday sounds. I am happy to say that this trend is continuing. People of Earth! Your musical instruments are...OBSOLETE!
We salute you, France, for you are the country that gave us, among other things,musique concrète. And Furniker (aka Franz Schultz), who might literally be making concrete music - I would not be surprised if an actual concrete mixer was featured in the track "Construction Site." That's a song featured onFurniker's brand new, all-too-brief, 4-track'net release that takes everyday stuff (song titles include "In The Kitchen" and "Work") and samples and loops them into a rhythmic, compelling din. You won't find too many hummable melodies here, but if you like industrial music, well..this really is industrial. Furniker/"Furniker" (Bandcamp streaming) Furniker/"Furniker" (archive.org free downloading/streaming)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I found this chap on Bandcamp: Spannerman Dan ("instruments are made from found and recycled objects") His short, low-key songs (sketches, more like) aren't too spectacular, but "Pailito" is nice, and "Calder Waltz" is very nice, with what sounds like alien animals vocalizing over pleasantly chiming bell-like sounds. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sneak previews of two forthcoming albums that I am very much looking forward to (bookmark this page!):
The great Matmos have released a track from their forthcoming (Feb 2016) album named after the only "instrument" they used to make it: a Whirlpool "Ultimate Care II" washing machine. Dig this swell percussion jam that will also make whites whiter, colors brighter:
And Miles Copeland (the IRS Records founder/manager of The Police, I assume?) will be releasing this Dec. 10th a collection of his field recordings of the "Sea Organ" built into the coastline of Croatia. Waves roll into tubes of various sizes, creating a theoretically endless, random piece of music. Quite lovely. Two tracks for, if you'll pardon the expression, streaming, are now up: "Sea Organ"
Like the band featured in this blog's previous post, The Hoosier Hot Shots, this group also performs on homemade instruments. However, one group is considered "novelty" and the other "avant-garde." It's all rather arbitrary, and class-ist. This band isn't quite as funny as the Hoosiers of course, but they are plenty tuneful, with nice toe-tapping compositions sometimes derived from Indonesian gamelan music, something ex-members of this group would explore further with the (I believe) still-running band of fellow New York arty-smarties, Gamelan Son of Lion.
I just wish I could see these instruments. I could only find one photo (right), and no videos. Despite their academic background, this is fun stuff, not just self-indulgent banging around - hence, not a completely unlikely companion to the Hot Shots. The track "Inside the Compound" is even a kind of mutant blues. An excellent album that should have had greater distribution. This was a cassette-only release. So, yeah, this file is taken from a tape, but still sounds pretty good.
"Cosmic" Dennis Greenidge is a 60-something Londoner who sings off-key nonsense lyrics over other people's instrumental music playing out of a boombox in the background. Ha! In fidelity as low as early Daniel Johnson, Greenidge enthusiastically warbles lyrics like "Psychtronic, psycho-sonic boom! Don't leave the room!" or "the amazing colossal cucumber man" over a wide variety of musics. Sometimes he likes just a snippet of music (the intro perhaps) and audibly keeps hitting 'rewind' to play the good bit over and over, "singing" all the way. The songs are often under a minute, hence we've got a whopping 66 tracks here. They're not all songs, e.g. "Horror Interlude," a brief radio drama that's far more funny than scary. Other highlights include the kiddie march "Lavender Castle," the bizarre beach party of "Satellite Beach" ("Space Dracula, Space Frankenstein, Space Mothra, party down!"), the literal laugh riot of "The Laughing Cavalier," and the quite wonderfully bonkers "Spaghetti Yeti": "Spaghetti, you eat it! Yeti can eat you!" There's even the inspirational sincerity of "The Windows Are Open." Such delightful torture! Musos will of course consider Cosmic Dennis to be utterly without any musical talent, but, like The Note-Ables, he's obviously having such a grand time with this lunacy that many Maniacs will find themselves getting swept up into Greenidge's mad world. Or is it madness? Perhaps it's just good ol' English eccentricity.
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? ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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."
For newcomers looking for a crash course, or vets who want to relive old favorites, check out the now-archived 3 hour Music For Maniacs special on WFMU's Bodego Pop, a look back at ten years of blogging. On to the next decade! My fave new discovery was recently sent to us by Australia's sound collage superstar Buttress O'Kneel, who co-recorded this in 2000/2001 with Panthera Leo (who is now the mother of the kid in Stinky Picnic)and is finally letting it out of the can. The Fruiting Body used no guitars, no keyboards, no drums...heck, no instruments of any kind. Check the ingredients for one song: 2 rubber bands, plucked 1 retractable ball point pen, clicking 2 Bessemer saucepan lids, ringing 1 elephant, thumping 1 elephant, spraying 1 elephant, rumbling 1 extremely low sine wave Sample, loop, and serve. Could have been a gimmicky novelty, or a dry piece of conceptual art, but it's really just good music. I started listening out of curiosity (what does a radar, owl, and air raid siren sound like mixed?) but ended up being quite struck by both the technical ingenuity and the musical qualities. The song "Eel Race Road" is freakin' epic. Free/name-your-price download here: The Fruiting Body: "Nudibranch and the Moondew" (click on 'lyrics' to get each track's ingredients) This album reminded me of the early days of sampling, when the idea of finally being able to make music out of everyday sounds was an exciting new one, e.g.: Bernie Krause' 1988 all-animal-fx classic "Gorillas In the Mix." But sampling existing musics (and tv, radio, etc) as a way to deal with our 'media environment' quickly took precedent, Ms. O'Kneel being one of it's foremost proponents (she claims that the events of 9/11 also pushed her into that direction.) And there's also the fact that it is simply easier to make music with music then with hairdryers and trains. Still, there's a lot of potential for this approach. Back in 2005 we wrote about Matthew Herbert's yummy album that used only food sounds. It is now available to listen/purchase: Matthew Herbert "Plat du Jour" (song notes HERE.)
The notes point put that the first song uses, among other sounds "chickens being killed for a local farmers' market and its feathers washed and plucked." Oh man, now I'm hungry. Who's up for some KFC?!
Artist Rutherford Chang says: "I collect first-pressings of The White Album and currently own 1,034 copies." As part of his 'White Album' project (which also includes a record store only stocked with copies of you-know-what arranged according to serial number) he somehow got 100 of them to play at once. I wonder how? Sounds quite good tho, like 100 needles were dropped onto 100 turntables at pretty much the same time. Then they slowly go out of phase, like an old Steve Reich tape-loop piece. Surprisingly wonderful, e.g.: "Julia" (end of side 2) whips up a really nice drone. And I hadn't actually sat down to listen to the White Album since I was a kid, so it's also an interesting way to revisit the album. Four 20+ minute tracks, one for each side of the White Album, plus lots of pics of White Albums in various states of decay: Rutherford Chang - We Buy White Albums (file removed by corporate Blue Meanies) Reminds me of another Beatles-related oddity, a very skillfully executed mashup album based on the absurd (or is it?!) premise that someone visiting another dimension where the Beatles never broke up brought back a cassette of one of their later albums. It's actually made up of tracks from various Beatles solo releases. The whole crazy story, and the album download, is available here: The Beatles Never Broke Up Thanks to Amadeus, And Count Otto!
At the time this excellent board tape was made, multi-media collage/ performance art/ prankster legends Negativland had been around since the early '80s, releasing several albums that served as warm-ups for their glory years of the late '80s/early '90s, when they ruled college radio, signed to the indie label everyone wanted to be on (SST Records), and generally moved from being mere (if brilliant) performers/recording artists to becoming a genuine cultural force, merry pranksters manipulating the gullible mass media, and daring to pull down the pants (so to speak) of some of the biggest figures in the music industry. They paid for their hijinks big-time, but ultimately came out the other end bloodied but unbowed. Lo these many years later, as seen in today's post-internet media-overload environment of mashups, youtube, etc., they seem positively visionary. And this performance finds them at the top of their game. Even if you're very
familiar with Negativland's "Escape From Noise"/"Helter Stupid"/"U2" era (as I would
imagine many, if not most, Maniacs are) this is still a fresh experience, as they take elements from their album tracks and rework them into lovely new mutations.
1 - Christianity Is Stupid 2 - Helter Stupid 3 - Escape From Noise 4 - Time 5 - Another Perfect Cut 6 - Free TV Or Pay TV 7 - The Playboy Channel
Side 2:
1 - Playboy Channel 2 2 - Why Don't They Blow Us Up? 3 - I'd Like A Piece Of Meat / Michael Jackson 4 - U2 5 - Car Bomb
This comes to us from maniac Bob Berger. Can't thank him enough. He writes: "Recorded off the sound board onto Maxell XLIIS cassette with whatever tape deck was present, this tape has been legendary among all of my friends for many years. The sound quality is amazing... I've never heard Negativland recorded quite so well... Given our state(s) of mind at that show, I have no idea how we managed to capture this as well as we did... but here it is. At home, I've chopped these bits up into each track as best I could, but I figured that it would be best to preserve the whole show's continuity as two sides of the, now infamous, cassette.
Enjoy.
colunco23"
And - hey! - let's not forget to salute "guest vocalists" like the recently departed Casey Kasem, and L.A newscaster Hal Eisner. When on those rare occasions I stumble across Eisner's TV appearances, I chuckle, almost expecting him to say, "This is Hal Eisner. This is stupid." RIP Snuggles.
I'll be guest dj-ing once again this Sunday, 8pm PST on Spacebrother Greg's "Radio Misterioso," bringing up another batch of wild sounds that have mostly not been featured here. Listen live at http://killradio.org/ so you can call in and/or go on Greg's facebook page and leave comments 'n' stuff.
And now...on with the show:
My recent posts about musicians who build their instruments out of junk reminded me of similiar artists I'd written about, whose songs posted ages had long since gone off-line. I was also reminded of a recent single re-release, and miscellaneous records I'd had for years. Junkyard Bands
The Junkman - 'Beat The Can' [both from his album 'The Junkman 2," available from his site - the liner notes break down exactly what objects are used for each song] The Junkman - 'Drug Puppet' [bit of a Residents kinda thing going on here] Electric Junkyard Gamelan - 'Bigbarp' [pictured above] Car Music Project - 'Noodles' Gamelan Son of Lion - 'Bang on a Tin Can' Electric Junkyard Gamelan - 'Nutbutter Challenge' The LA Drivers Union Por Por Group - 'Por Por Horn-To-Horn Fireworks' Electric Junkyard Gamelan - 'Space Kitty' (excerpt) Staff Benda Bilili - 'Sala Mosala' Wendy Chambers - 'Star Spangled Banner' [on the legendary car-horn organ, pictured right] Wendy Chambers - 'The Kitchen' [not only are kitchen implements used as instruments, but an actual meal is supposed to be prepared during the performance of this piece!] The Junk Yard Band - 'The Word' [killer Def Jam single from the '80s - a group of children playing gogo funk from DC; that lead singer rivals the young Michael Jackson] The Watts Little Angel Band - 'Nik Nak Paddy Wack' [same concept as The Junkyard Band, but from a decade prior; this must-have single, whose b-side is an oldies medley 'New Orleans/Land Of A 1000 Dances,' has recently been re-issued]
All of this had me thinking about Test Dept (none of whose music I can recall off the top of my head) and Einstürzende Neubauten (think I did like some of their stuff), two '80s bands whose use of found percussion was popular with the industrial crowd, as it was seen not only as a way to be real noisy, but to seem shocking and rebellious and what-not. Also from the '80s: the L.A. band Savage Republic used things like an oil drum and a railroad tie - anyone else use junk percussion mixed with conventional instruments, in the service of actual songs? Think I read David Byrne saying that he and Eno played junk on "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts." And did the Bang On A Can group ever actually bang on cans?
(Now back up: Capt. Beefheart "Clear Spot" instrumental tracks, and the Caribbeana Esoterica of Elmore Stout, and The Lashing Dogs.)
"The flipflopaphon – the tromballoony – the springy tuby thingy – the gardenhoseatoot": such are the tools of Saul Eisenberg aka Mr. Junk Man, who not only travels around his native England performing on his home-made junk instruments, but also works with kids to help them build and perform on (and dance with) their own recycled sounds. He seems to be the kind of "cool teacher" that I wish I had when I was a wee lad.
He has a resource page for other teachers that features and instrument-building demo video. Teachers, heck, I want to make these! And he will build for your park/recreation area a "soundgarden," which has nothing to do with any old Seattle grunge bands, but are rather children's play areas with instruments built into them. Just fantastic.
There are free streaming/download songs on his site:
Wonderful stuff, but I have one complaint - some of the tracks are too short, some lasting barely a minute. C'mon, Mr. Junk Man, why so chintzy? We want a proper album!
I haven't been posting anything new lately, cuz I've been trying to re-up albums that were victims of the Great Mediafire/Rapidshare Takedown of 2013 by request. Which I'm happy to do, but I wasn't able to find: The Full Life All-Stars, The Lavender Jungle, "Ya No Hay Beatles," The Musical Betts, March Fourth
2012. 'Til then, dig these crazy sounds made not by guitars, not by keyboards, not by trap-drum kits - man, that old-fashioned stuff is for squares - but by stuff. Junk. 'Found objects,' and what-have-you.
The Gas Tank Orchestra does what it says on the tin, making their instruments out of discarded auto parts. The now-defunct New Orleans combo has an excellent posthumous free download album now available that does wander around somewhat aimlessly at times, as improv groups are wont to do, but really hits the gas (sorry) on nifty toe-tappers like "Making Way," "Bunnys Bolero" and "Desire Project." The GTO don't make the kind of racket that groups like Einstürzende Neubauten used to make - their sound is subtle, atmospheric even, with a keener sense of rhythm. They are from one of the world's funkiest cities, after all.
You probably know StSanders' 'Shred' videos - they received millions of views before YouTube yanked most of 'em off. Well, they're all in one place now on the mad Norseman's (or is he Finnish?) own site, and I can't think of a better way to do April Fools' Day then to spend the afternoon watching "classic" rock acts videos get re-dubbed. As Buttress O'Kneel (whose own shenanigans we'll be covering soon here) said to me:
the band ones are so so so good. not only is it GENIUS to compose music and lyrics BASED ON THE ACTIONS AND MOUTH-SHAPES OF OTHER MUSICIANS (like, this is something even john cage never imagined!), but then to layer the pieces in heaps of cultural references as well (notice the 'simpsons' section in the eagles one, and the 'luke's theme' in the springsteen one - there are SO MANY!)... good golly, this is high fucking art. and all that stuff comes AFTER the fact that i'm sitting here with tears in my eyes, unable to breathe with laughter.
st sanders may actually be making the highest - and most powerful (and most original) - art of the 21st century. i bow down to his greatness.
Yes, a genius of the avant-'tard. He has his imitators now of course (someone even did a Captain Beefheart one), but it doesn't get any better then this Eagles one. The music's so good I'm gonna buy the mp3 (you can do that now, too.)
I've passed the 1000 posts mark. And boy are my fingers tired.
On to 1001! Milvia Son Records from up in the Bay Area sent me a batch of their vinyl-only goodies, and the first thing you should know about 'em is that they've released an album by Can's first singer Malcolm Mooney. If that doesn't automatically score cool points, what will? They didn't send me that one (it sells itself, presumably), but there's other fun to be had in their catalogue of "head music" that bears little resemblance to most psychedelia or stoner rock currently being made.
1. Bad Drumlin Grass "All Night Long" - Bad grass? Actually, this New Wave-y tune from a 7" is made from good stuff, like synth farts and nonsense vocals. And nekkid ladies on the cover! 2. Bad Drumlin Grass "Can Do" (excerpt) - Speaking of Mooney-era Can, I was digging this lengthy jam, the opening track to their album "The Invigorating Scent of …" and it reminded me of Can's "Yoo Doo Right." Then I checked the song title. So probably no coincidence. The song "Out on the Tracks" is an ill synth jam; the album gets increasingly jazzy/trippy, less groove-y as it goes on and the chemicals kick in.
3. Bob Frankford "O Carl" - Totally ridiculous ode to Carl Sagan sung (?) over a mangled recording of the theme to Sagan's tv show "Cosmos." I shouldn't love this, but I really do. From the four-track 7" sampler "Just a Little Bit of Milvia Sun," which includes a pic of Dr. Carl, and a lengthy quote allegedly from the famous astronomer himself describing how great smoking pot is, e.g.: "Experiencing orgasms while high and listening to music, particulary electronic or 'psychedelic' music, is one of the greatest pleasures of my life.' Wow, did he really say that? 4. Jaki Jakizawa " Period Fart" - All of side one of Jaki's album is super cool disco electro improv - like Giorgio Moroder goes free jazz. I spent part of the '90s looking for anyone who was doing to synths what Coltrane did for the sax, what Jimi did for the guitar, and not coming up with much besides Sun Ra. A much-welcome approach to the synth. The flip is drum-less cosmic electronica recommended to Tangerine Dream fans. And there might still be a few of them left. 5. Old Yeller & The Pigbites - "The Wreck of the Jerome Garcia"/"Handsome Stranger" - This no-fi mess of acoustic guitars and vocals piled on top of each other makes Daniel Johnston sound as polished as Celine Dion, but some gems do rise thru the muck. ("Handsome Stranger" = Not Safe For Work.) By the way: If you are a Can fan, the new "Lost Tapes" box set really is a treasure-trove, not just a hodge-podge of leftovers, crappy-sounding live tracks, demos, etc, as these types of collections usually are.
As I wrote last year: "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." Locher's back with another epic of prog-prank, 15 minutes longer then the last "conversations," and we're not in a shopping mall anymore. Just random folks are the unwitting stars rockin' the mic here. The first couple minutes are just people saying "Hello?," but the random collisions eventually become fascinating, thought-provoking, hilarious, and, when the really ancient-sounding old ladies are talking, kinda poignant. I could listen to this all day - but bursting into laughter doesn't look so cool at the office. Brandon Locher "Conversations (Revisited)"
Here's an idea who's time has truly come: a project called "Imagine" in which Mexican artist Pedro Reyes leads a team that takes guns donated from citizens of a county particularly wracked by violence and transforms them into musical instruments. Pistols form a guitar's body, gun barrels have holes drilled into them and made into flutes, or are arranged according to size into a xylophone, etc. The remarkable lyre pictured above is as much a triumph of visual design as musical. Go
to read/see the pics/watch the making-of vids. The video below is a 6-minute "Imagine Concierto" featuring the instruments. Yes, the music is based on the Lennon song, but even if you're sick of that tune, you must admit to how good these instruments sound, how well they're played, and just the general awesomness of the project. The percussion in particular gets increasingly sorta funky as the song progresses.
And I'm outta here til sometime in January. Much thanks to the many of you who have contributed to this-here web-log this year. Peace on Earth, goodwill towards men, and all that jazz.
Buttress O'Kneel is the Australian madwomen who won our "M4M Idol" contest last year, and "Avant Retro: Post-Tardcore," her latest mashup/sound collage on-line album, continues her winning streak. She rarely just drops an acapella from one song over someone else's instrumental, and when she does, as in the 48 second Guns 'n' Roses vs Jane's Addiction "Been Caught", it's all-too-short. Many tracks seems to have at least 4 sources fighting to be heard. Other strategies include: creating amusing dialogues between the songs (dig Grandmaster Flash's back-and-forth with the B52s on "Jungle Rat"), pounding the likes of The Buggles and Rick James into breakcore submission, and glitching up a song into abstraction a la John Oswald's Plunderphonics ("Mother Nature's Mulch"). And what's not to love about a song with a title like "She Blinded Me With Shatner"? Pick hit: "Running For Party Leader." (And bonus points for elsewhere sampling nutty Rhino Records parodists Big Daddy.)
All of which makes her other new recordings so surprising: they are as chilled and meditative ("spiritualy-themed," she sez) as her usual stuff is violent and confrontational. She has recently uploaded a series of extremely-slowed down remixes (for lack of a better word) to archive.org. Stevie Wonder's "Superstition," the theme song to 'The Neverending Story' (at a never-ending 102 minutes long), and Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody', among others, have been streeeeeeetched to great lengths. The results are not the monotonous drone-fests you'd expect, but beatiful ambient music. My fave of the bunch is "Heaven," which elongates Zep's "Stairway To Heaven" to 77 minutes and 7 seconds. When Robert Plant's vocals show up at around the 9 minute mark, they are surprisingly legible - you can make out some of the lyrics. This track was even apparently actually played at a church service, but the sometimes spooky results are as ghostly as they are Gregorian. Free listen/download here:
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:
If I may just speak like a Rat-Pack era showbiz-type for a moment and say, "Marvelous stuff what the kids these days are doing." Especially when the kids are some Sarasota, Florida teenagers making their own instruments out of junk. Too bad they've only got one song up for listening/purchase right now, a delightfully messed-up version of Elvis' "Hound Dog," scored for cereal box-guitars, garbage drums, a saxophone made from a popcorn push toy, and the miracle of the Glass Bottle Idiophone:
This interview features bits of other songs (also oldies remakes), as does this video, which includes a bitchin' version of The Surfaris' "Wipeout," as well as an up-close look at those nutty instruments:
I'd take this ramshackle version of "Satisfaction" over the Stone's any day:
But what do they use for strings? Regular guitar strings? And will they ever cover The Cramps?
