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So have they discovered why Yoko Ono tunes trigger insanity and panic?

http://www.furious.com/perfect/weapon.html

Looks like you can purchase the vinyl here. For anyone interested in the song (this guy was ahead of his time!) check it out here. You've just made me a fan =)

Yeah--I noticed those listings while I was posting. I'm particularly fond of this article on the guy. I wish I had been able to meet him before he died--he lived only a few hours drive away from me. I'm sure he would have appreciated the fond memories of my youth--hanging out in the garage, rocking out with my dad. Heck--I even remember listening to his stuff while my dad and his buddies made and bottled wine. (Try finding info on that old-and-gone company on Google buried in the events of this week--they were called "Mars Landing".)

Phenomenal!

I can whole-heartedly recommend the "The Gurus of Electronic Music" set: http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/ohm/ to anyone intrigued with early computer-generated and electronically-composed music.

Some fantastic recordings of early computerized speech in there (He Destroyed Her Image) along with some terrific compositions by Brian Eno, Terry Riley, and Clara Rockmore (lady Theremin virtuoso), as well as the theme from "Forbidden Planet", and other gems..

Pretty much all musicians copy those who influenced them.

Suing someone for their livelyhood when you have no legal ground to do so is just plain stupid. Anyone who needed to work and was being tried to prevent that would surely challenge the plaintiff. Who wouldn't challenge that? What was The Planet thinking? Actually, don't answer that.

It happens often enough. An old obscure band I referended before called Dumptruck was with Big Time records, an indy label. After their contract expired they decided to move up in the world to another label, Big Time sued them for breach of (non existant) contract for the sum of 5 million. Not like they bothered to show up in court or anything, but also it's not like anyone would pick them up given the pending 5 million dollar law suit, something that took years to resolve.

Managers are alot like children, they do things out of spite.

you can also record your own version of any copyrighted song and put it on a CD for sale without asking anyone. This is called a cover song, and the law gives you explicit permission to do that.

Could you give a citation of the passage of copyright law that does so? I could not find one on http://www.copyright.gov/ but admittedly did only a cursory search. I remember numerous examples of lawsuits, and threats of lawsuits, against artists "covering" or sampling other people's copyrighted work, e.g. U2 vs Negativland and SST Records, for which U2 may forever burn in hell.

please, both of you learn your history.. Iannis Xenakis in 1953

In 1991, Bono's band U2 sued seminal independent label SST (home to, among others, Black Flag, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Hüsker Dü, Soundgarden, ...) over a satirical record by a band on the label, Negativland. They claimed that Negativland was infringing on U2's IP by using samples and other stuff (e.g., the letter U and the numeral 2).

This nearly ruined SST over the costs of the suit alone, but by forcing SST to fight an expensive suit, while the music they had greatly contributed to for more than 10 years exploded into the mainstream, it greatly contributed to the eventual demise of the label, robbing the artists of an important channel.

Later U2 claimed to have not been greatly involved. "It wasn't us, just the label", paraphrased.
I'm sorry, but if you let your lawyer sue, I'll hold you responsible. And if you wanna preach to people about responsible behavior, I'll expect that you know what your agents do in your name.

I have one thing to say about Bono: hypocrite. I think this is a fitting "people of the year" panel: They all give to charity in the limelight, then turn around and fuck people over.

Iannis Xenakis is of course the first who comes to mind, since he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and engineering, and wrote what is known as stochastic music. What is probably his most famous piece, Metastasis, is based upon measurements and shapes from a particular building. He also more or less initiated the field of music made with granular synthesis, which suits itself very well to stochastic and other algorithmic composition methods. There's a pretty good writeup here.

Then there's Conlon Nancarrow, who, while not having any formal mathematical training (so far as I know), spent most of his career hand-punching player piano rolls in very complex rhythmical relationships. (He later said that if he had access to computers, he of course would have done it that way -- hand-punching is a pain in the ass!). Read about him here.

Charles Dodge hung out at Bell Labs for a while, and wrote a piece called "Earth's Magnetic Field", based on measurements of the Earth's magnetic field. He also produced some of the first successful pieces using voice synthesis (which are available on an album called "Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental"; really good listening!), and is in general a smart engineering guy who writes good computer music. Official page here (not very interesting), and a bit written by him here.

You may also have heard of serialism, which was, if not algorithmic, at least systematic. There were even composers in the classical period using what can really only be called algorithms.

So, anyways, while I agree that the Wolfram music is silly, that doesn't mean you can't make excellent music using formal systems, algorithms, or even representations of some data set.

Iannis Xenakis is of course the first who comes to mind, since he had a Ph.D. in mathematics and engineering, and wrote what is known as stochastic music. What is probably his most famous piece, Metastasis, is based upon measurements and shapes from a particular building. He also more or less initiated the field of music made with granular synthesis, which suits itself very well to stochastic and other algorithmic composition methods. There's a pretty good writeup here.

Then there's Conlon Nancarrow, who, while not having any formal mathematical training (so far as I know), spent most of his career hand-punching player piano rolls in very complex rhythmical relationships. (He later said that if he had access to computers, he of course would have done it that way -- hand-punching is a pain in the ass!). Read about him here.

Charles Dodge hung out at Bell Labs for a while, and wrote a piece called "Earth's Magnetic Field", based on measurements of the Earth's magnetic field. He also produced some of the first successful pieces using voice synthesis (which are available on an album called "Any Resemblance is Purely Coincidental"; really good listening!), and is in general a smart engineering guy who writes good computer music. Official page here (not very interesting), and a bit written by him here.

You may also have heard of serialism, which was, if not algorithmic, at least systematic. There were even composers in the classical period using what can really only be called algorithms.

So, anyways, while I agree that the Wolfram music is silly, that doesn't mean you can't make excellent music using formal systems, algorithms, or even representations of some data set.

The Barron retrospective was very good.

There is a wealth of information available on the web now. The previously mentioned Obsolete site has a good history of electronic music instruments, and there are several classic synthesizer sites for gear freaks.

Ohm - The Gurus of Electronic music collects early electronic music recordings, including the Barrons in a three-cd set. This is as good an introduction to early electronic music as you'll find. It's jarring, though, if your only exposure has been to techno and trance!

Synthtopia has a directory of electronic music resources that is worth checking out. The site also has interviews with some interesting electronic musicians. Check out the Kompressor interview!

Electro-music is an active community of people interested in more experimental electronic music. Lots of discussion of computers and programming within the world of music.

American Mavericks is a collection of interesting PBS shows on modern classical music, and it has some good shows on electronic music.

Yawn, that's easy listening. Try Merzbow. He has a 50-CD box set out I believe.

They'll think the phone is broken. Or at least they will come to believe that their flesh is on fire and that the only way to find relief is to immediately commit suicide in the most anguishing way possible. At least that's how I felt when I listened to a few seconds of Merzbow. I had a stop button.. your callers will not be so lucky.

On second thought, stick with the Neubauten.

"...Eno had used "sampling" via tape loops in the early 70s..." Sounds like a Mellotron to me.

Yes, and here's a hilarious quote from the interview:

"We make enough money to stay in business," Hirsch said, declining to be more specific

Greedy capitalist sellout!

Seriously, it's gratifying to see that Communism has become so marginalized that even the manager of one of the few remaining Commie bookstores pays lip service to the power of the market.

Communists are the all-time champions of mass murder. People like this Hirsch cunt are the most evil people in the world, and I hate them with every fiber of my being. Collectivism must be smashed!

-ccm

The is attributed to Revolution Books, a chain of non-profit communist bookstores around the United States.

Here is an article posted at the Columbia University school of journalism about the store. http://www.jrn.columbia.edu/studentwork/cns/2003-0 3-30/121.asp

Here is an interview with the manager of the store, Joan Hirsch. http://www.furious.com/rev.html

I'm glad to see that there are still some people left who have the backbone to stand up for what they believe in.

The one where the Declaration of Independence can still be read because it was written on hemp, or the one which outlawed hemp in 1937 because of lobbing efforts by Dupont and others that associated it with marijuana, when really they wanted to remove competition to their synthetic fibers? It is currently illegal to grow hemp because it can't be easily distinguished from marijuana during raids. William Randolph Hearst, newspaper owner and friend of the DuPonts, slanted the news in his papers (yellow journalsim) To quote Jack Herer, "in the 1920s and 1930s, Hearst's newspaper chain led to the deliberate..yellow journalism campaign to have marijuana outlawed. From 1916 to 1937, as an example, the story of a car accident in which a marijuana cigarette was found would dominate the headlines for weeks, while alcohol related car accidents (which outnumber hemp-related accidents by 1,000 to 1) made only back pages." (Source) {The "Drug War" part. This page correlates information I've found from other sources.}

Or more modern with the bills to fight P2P networks, if you want a digital equivalent. However, that's a recent example and the hemp one shows that this isn't a new phenomenon.

I can understand spending the disk/cpu for lossless compression on, say, a 96khz classical recording, but most of what comes out of a live mix (or even a commercial rock studio recording) is just not worth the system resources. for live recordings, ogg at 256 or mp3 at 320 is more than enough, and small pipes and short CPUs are much happier.

Because we're talking about audiophiles here (who else would *complain* about the previous audio format on the Phish site). You know. These are the people who think they can hear the difference between a CD and a CD with green ink on it. The same people who insist that vinyl has higher fidelity than CD. The same people who compare the dry tonality of different digital interconnects.

Even supposedly decent sites make so many mistakes when discussing digital audio that they'd fail an undergrads signals course. "No information is lost" my arse. And what sort of nonsense is that idiot trying to pass off as a digital signal; don't these "experts" know what low-pass filtering means?

Audiophilia. It's a disease. Kill it before it spreads.

My question is: Is this a coincidence, or is their a link between your music (and spoken word) and this electronics experimentation? And did this encounter with Greg Ginn's business prepare you in any way for JYW?

The inspiration for Ziggy Stardust came at least in part from a fellow Mercury recording artist, the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, according to this article

sounds like they never heard of "Music on a long thin wire"

...which, for those others who haven't, is a wonderful piece by composer Alvin Lucier, released on the Lovely Music label, with an excerpt on the invaluable collection OHM- The Early Gurus of Electronic Music.

In it, Lucier strung a long wire across a cavernous indoor space, excited it with an oscillator at one end, and left to ring for a long time. The initial performance was broadcast for a week on the radio, and got a good listenership.

Lucier's work in general may be of interest to anyone intersted in the combination of art and science. Most of it involves simple and beautiful explorations of acoustic phenomena, such as the wire.

http://www.oddmusic.com/illogic/

http://www.anti-theory.com/

http://www.simulated.net/bending/

http://www.hollis.co.uk/john/bent/

http://www.furious.com/perfect/emi/reedghazala.htm l

http://users.ev1.net/~bantha/bending/

http://www.pansiecola.com/space/inappropriate/bend ing/

And even a news group on the topic: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/benders

This practice has been dubbed "circuit bending" by the pioneer of this art, Reed Ghazala. His site is excellent (but not /. resistant). His case decorations are fantastic, and he offers plenty of information on how to whip out a soldering iron and do it yourself.

The idea isn't to create your own "analog synth" - it's to take formerly crappy and cheap sound-producing toys and rewire them to produce bizarre/unexpected sounds. You do add knobs and switches for control. I have an old tiny Casio keyboard and poking one IC pin will make it go nuts and play backwards drums, random riffs, grinding noise, blips and bloops, and on and on. It's amazing, and I got it for $2 at Goodwill.

The ridiculous prices fetched these days for modded Speak & * toys on ebay is evidence of their popularity.

For more info go here or here.

They get money up front for a concert, insult the queen so the promoter doesn't want them anymore, and get bought out to not perform. So basically they get paid twice and the only "work" they do is insult the queen on a parade. Hmm, better than my day job.

..." In fact, these projects use strong central control, which is crucial to their success."

This sentiment seems to be frequently on Timothy's mind. A while back, he gave us this topic: Peter Wayner on the Spread of Information , along with this comment: "Complexity seems to demand individual autonomy, doesn't it?"

My reply is the same:

Complex systems require control at a more fundamental level.

Clipped the long quote below from an essay by John Zerzan, http://www.furious.com/perfect/zerzan.html , while seeking out a discussion of T. Adorno indirectly on the subject of complexity and autonomy. Adorno is a dead Western Marxist (Frankfurt School, ie lots of cultural criticism...). Discovering a Zerzan essay on the topic was a happy accident.

Some talk about the composer Schoenberg's experiments with atonality (ie musical notes freed from the dominating center - the harmonic scale) in order to better express the 'Modern' individual's alienation followed by...

"By the early 1920s he had given up the systemless radicalism of atonality: not a single "free" note survived. In the absence of a tonal center he inserted the totally rule-governed 32-tone set, which, as Adorno judged, "virtually extinguishes the subject." Dodecaphony, or serialism as it is also called, constituted a new compliance in the place of tonality, corresponding to a new phase of increasingly systematized industrialism introduced with World War I. Schoenberg forged new laws to control what was liberated by the old tonal rules of resolution, new laws that guarantee a more complete circulation among all twelve pitches and may be said to speak to capital's growing need for improved recirculation. Serial technique is a kind of total integration in which movement is strictly controlled, as in a bureaucratically enforced mode. Its conceptual drawback for the dominant order is that while greater circulation is achieved via its new standardized demands (none of the tones is to be repeated before the other eleven have been heard), the concentrated control actually allows for very little production. This is seen most clearly in the extreme understatement and brevity in much of the work of Webern, Schoenberg's most successful disciple; at times there are as many pauses as notes, while the second of Webern's early Three Pieces for Cello and Piano, for example, lasts only thirteen seconds.

The old harmonic system and its major/minor key points of reference provided easily understood places of departure and destination. Serialism accords equal use to each more, making any chord feasible: this conveys . a somewhat homeless, fragmentary sense, suitable to an age of more diffuse, traditionless domination."

Zerzan continues on, of course, but this is a good place to stop.

What looks like autonomy (equality, homelessness, fragmentation, traditionlessness) on the part of individual notes is actually the result of a heightened system of control.


EC

Not only was it not pretty, I left a part of it behind... http://www.furious.com/perfect/zerzan.ht ml
-EC