Daedelus - Fair Weather Friends

(enchantedfern)

Directed by Jordan Kim

Daedelus - Fair Weather Friends

via Comfort Music (one of my favorite music blogs)

Daft Punk - Fresh

daftpunkalive

Bus Driver - Imaginary Places

(video link)

Bus Driver

seen on A short vision of art

stray bullets

Mafiaboy grows up; a hacker seeks redemption The Internet attack took Yahoo Inc. engineers by surprise. It came so fast and with such intensity that Yahoo, then the Web's second most-popular destination, was knocked offline for about three hours. That was on the morning of Feb. 7, 2000. A few months later, 15-year-old Michael Calce was watching Goodfellas at a friend's house in the suburbs of Montreal when he got a 3 a.m. call on his cell phone. His father was on the line. "They're here," he said. A hacker seeks a career. This seems to be the standard arc: make news, get busted, do time, write a book, become a security consultant.

Follow up: Almost human: Interview with a chatbot No machine has yet passed. But the winner of the Loebner Prize at the weekend – Elbot, brainchild of Fred Roberts at Artificial Solutions in Germany – came close, according to the contest's rather generous rules.

Ocean Containers To Bury According to most survivalist sites, ocean containers can be buried, hidden away under the ground outfitted with electricals, rudementary plumbing, and all the food and water you can store for several months of keeping a low profile. While we at American Steel have seen it done, I'd like to give a word of caution.... Anyone planning to use a container for anything should take note. (via)

Downloads soar despite crackdown Music downloads among US adults have risen sharply during the past several months, despite a crackdown by the music industry to curb such behaviour. Few I know could afford their music collection. (via)

also:
Recurring science misconceptions in K-6 textbooks (via)
First look at Downey Jr and Jude Law as Holmes and Watson
$56,000 Turntable Only An Audiophile Could Love
Surrealist techniques (via)

viddy:
Buffalo Dance featuring Hair Coat, Last Horse, and Parts His Hair
Trio: Da Da Da
Alien Contact: What will happen on October 14 (thx, dave)

Otomo Yoshihide ＋ Yasutomo Aoyama - without records

YCAMArchives:

In this installation, there are about over a hundred portable record players without records. In the space, turntables scattered everywhere, high and low, right and left, produce noises by the rotating friction, resonating in multilayer. Quiet, low-fi sounds form groups and change the entire image of sounds. This works provide people with an opportunity to reconsider the meaning, possibilities, and historical significance of sound art composed of records and turntables, which are being consigned to oblivion in the digital age.

Otomo Yoshihide

hat tip to Drive-By Blogging

stray bullets

At Home With Wayne Coyne
When trees grew in Antarctica (via)
Emily Dickinson's Secret Lover! (via)
Historical Fiction for Teenage Girls
Historical Fiction for Teens
Create your own search engine
FM 100-30 Nuclear Operations (via)
Make Your Own Hard Cider (via)

viddy:
Daedelus Talks Vinyl And Culture (crate-digging)
Jack Kerouac - American Haikus
Laptop Orchestra
Che - Steven Soderbergh @ NYFF Q&A
How cocaine is made
Motoman: Robot Bartender

stray bullets

'Intelligent' computers put to the test No machine has yet passed the test devised by Turing, who helped to crack German military codes during the Second World War. But at 9am next Sunday, six computer programs - "artificial conversational entities" - will answer questions posed by human volunteers at the University of Reading in a bid to become the first recognised "thinking" machine.

Blake Pontchartrain on Zulu coconuts Everybody wanted a Zulu coconut, but when you shouted 'Hey, Mister, throw me something," and what you got was a coconut thrown at you, you ducked or suffered the consequences. Believe it or not, lawsuits resulted; lots of them. When Mardi Gras of 1987 rolled around, the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club was unable to get insurance, so it was a parade without coconuts. One year, back in the day, I had the honor of painting a dozen or so Zulu coconuts.

costume detail: Stripes "The Medieval eye found any surface in which a background could not be distinguished from the foreground disturbing. Thus striped clothing was relegated to those on the margins or outside the social order - jugglers and prostitutes for example - and in medieval paintings the devil himself is often seen wearing stripes." The Devil's Cloth by Michel Pastoreau (via)

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical-experimental-electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. (via)

also:
How to Photograph the Stars (via)
Original Locations of 15 Mega-Chains (via)
Death becomes him: Kevorkian’s artwork on display at Armenian Library (via)
Another rare Serra interview (via)
Best of History Web Sites (via)
Dickens' London Map (via)
Fight Spam With A Direct Message To Twitter (via)

viddy:
Buckminster Fuller profiled on PBS's SundayArts
Ladislaw Starewicz - Cameraman's Revenge (proto-stop-animation)
Scratching With Tape Decks (cassette and reel-to-reel)
Vinyl Record Manufacturing Explained
Smashing Glass To The Anvil Chorus (via)

stray bullets

Antiquities smuggling: Growing problem at US ports Three years ago, an elderly Italian man pulled his van into a South Florida park to sell some rare, 2,500-year-old emeralds plundered from a South American tomb. But Ugo Bagnato, an archaeologist, didn't know his potential customer was a federal agent. (via)

Tourist who found Stone Age axes rewarded £20,000 A British tourist who unearthed four Stone Age axes on a beach in Brittany has been put forward for a prize worth more than £20,000 by the Ministry of Culture for not keeping the treasure. (via)

CEO murdered by mob of sacked Indian workers Corporate India is in shock after a mob of workers bludgeoned to death the chief executive who sacked them from a factory in a suburb of Delhi. (via)

also:
Cheap Chinese lederhosen anger Germans
a couple of good lists this week: Top 10 Things That Are Surprisingly Good For You & 10 Odd Discontinued Olympic Sports (and don't forget drawing and watercolors)
Flashback: The One Elevator Trick Every Traveler Should Know
Neil Armstrong makes rare speech as NASA turns 50
Erase Cell Phone Data: Free Data Eraser (via)

viddy:
The Mike Wallace Interview: Frank Lloyd Wright (via)
The arty farty show
Sati Audiovisual (excellent VJ performance)

Visual Music - Amon Tobin music video

A perfect video for your Monday morning!

12FRAMES (Jan Schönwiesner):

My graduation film. It´s a music video about a man trapped in a dream. His world, consisting of "plattenbauten" (buildings made with precast concrete slabs) begins to fall apart...

Outstanding work, Jan (ausgezeichnet!).

Making Of

Amon Tobin

Outsider Hip-Hop

Although I have grown weary of the tired and trampled memes of hip-hop, now and again a track or an act comes along that catches my attention. Frequently, almost exclusively, these come from sources outside of the corporate machine. Crossover and the wide, global appropriation of the form is nothing new-- one of the first successful efforts, to my memory, is Blondie's Rapture, and we're all painfully aware of many unsuccessful and downright awful ones. However, there are some remarkable gems in the remainder.

I go through loads of videos in my work here, I have a bookmark folder full of them. Here are a few of them that I would consider "outsider" hip-hop. This is by no means meant to be a comprehensive or representative sampling, it's just a few nuggets that I've found, stashed and now present to you. Connoisseurs of obscure hip-hop might find these a bit pedestrian, but many of you might find something new and interesting here.

As I've watched these videos and listened to all the music I have over the years, I am struck by how mutable and universal hip-hop music and culture has become. Love it or hate it, it is undeniably a new medium that has touched the entire planet. These people, for the most part, aren't taking the piss-- they're enthusiastically embracing this form of expression and many are producing some great work.

As with most internet videos, volumes vary, so mind your speakers.

It's no surprise or secret that the Japanese have embraced hip-hop. One of my favorites is m-flo's Expo Expo. I understand they're quite popular in Japan and a lot of their stuff I find a bit eh, but this track is a classic. It features Towa Tei, Bahamadia and Chops. The production on this is top-drawer stuff.


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Up from the kitchens of New York's Chinatown, come strong the Notorius MSG. Their comic approach plays on old-school vibes and new-school Asian stereotypes. You can find out more on their YouTube channel. There a couple of clips that will give you an idea of what they're about, one NSFW and the other, more mainstream. It was hard for me to pick one, so we'll start with their first music video, Straight Out of Canton (somewhat NSFW) and if you want, you can explore the rest.


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The white-boy rapper trope is just about as tired as hip-hop itself, but I like Buck 65. I believe he found a bit of acclaim in alternative circles in the past few years. Originally from Nova Scotia, his music has a dirty roots sort of feel to it and his lyrics are witty and waver, coexist and fuse somewhere between the sardonic and the uplifting. Wicked and Weird was always my favorite. He now hosts Radio 2 Drive on CBC Radio 2.


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Usually, I avoid this kind of thing, but Russian opera and pop star, Nikolay Baskov and the comedy/parody group Мурзилки International perform Albinoni's Adagio much to my satisfaction. At first, I was seriously cringing, but by the end they had won me over. The Russian language and the poetic sensibility both seem to work well with hip-hop. This is probably pretty high on the popularity scale in Russia, but it's still outsider. There does seem to be a thriving scene there. (video link) (ht)


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From out in leftfield comes experimental/alternative/abstract hip-hop dons cCLOUDDEAD. I love their music. They disbanded in 2004 and left behind a strange and impressive body of work. Although they are well known in college radio circles, they are certainly qualify as outsider. This is one I like, from their album Ten, Pop Song. You can find out more about this branch of the hip-hop tree at anticon. records, although I would say that they have branched out all over the place these days.


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Plastilina Mosh are from Mexico, where I understand they have a strong following. They inhabit the boundaries between pop, rock, hip hop and trip hop. Their 1999 album Aquamosh is the shit. The rest, I don't know, I'm hit and miss with it. I liked this video, though. From 2006, this is Millionaire.


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And finally, back in 2002, the Melbourne, Australia based outfit, The Avalanches achieved a degree of fame in the U.S. with their singles Frontier Psychiatrist and Since I Left You (great video, btw). And then they disappeared. I understand they are due for a new album, which I look forward to, as I thought that their 2000 album Since I Left You is a masterpiece from beginning to end. Although their roots are planted largely in punk and hip-hop, their later work is a synergetic blend of all sorts of styles. They're sort of a DJ-Culture jam-band. Here's an older, more Beastie Boys-esque version of The Avalanches from the Australian TV show, Recovery, from sometime in the late 1990's. The tune is Run DNA.


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FOOG - Circular 7

FOOG aka 福富幸宏 (Yukihiro Fukutomi)

Freeworm - Steeps (live)

(video link)

Freeworm

Cassette tape DJ

jf1234:

DJ Artyom is a Russian DJ who's built a cassette tape mixing desk.

via not enough memory

Rare 1920's Or Early 30's Disc Jockeys Dual Turntable

Buy It Now!
via DTYBYWL

DJ Spock and Ill-Logic-L

from Situationist
via watcher of the skies

Fairlight Robbery Revisited

EMU modular synthesizer, 1977

I found the above image during my usual abrowsal, and as a fan of vintage electronic instruments, I took interest and sourced it back to DJHistory.com. There, I found a remarkable article on sampling from 1987, by one Louise Gray, titled Fairlight Robbery. It appears to be one of the earliest mainstream introductions to sampling and I found it to be dead-on and even a bit prophetic. (I have since sourced the above image to the Old Tech Vintage Sythesizer Site, which is where I think it originated.)

The article brings up a lot of issues still discussed in the music world, though the context has changed:

A synthesiser uses sounds that are located within its circuits, an electric guitar makes noise via vibrations, but a sampler ‘takes’ When the Musicians Union and BPI between them came up with those slogans on a thousand guitar cases – “Home taping is killing music” and “Keep music live” they hadn’t considered the sampler. But the true significance of this development is not so much in what it does, but what it implies. When it’s cheaper to sample than buy a guitar (the SK-1, bought by buskers, parents and the curious as the ultimate coffee-table toy, starts at £69; the Fairlight 3 at £60,000, but there’s a myriad of points between the two) why sweat? Why try to play like Hendrix when you can rip him off?

Samplers didn't kill music and MP3s won't either, but brain wave music technology made available to the consumer might likely be the next industry-destroying bugaboo falling from the sky... why buy music when you can play it from your head anytime you want? (Note that the ones complaining the most are the ones that have the most to lose when they won't be able to fleece the public and the musicians as much as they did in the glory days.) Technology and business models will change, music will remain. More amateurs may be making better music, but the truly gifted will always sway our attention.

What I really found astonishing is how this article foreshadowed the explosion of sampled Hip-Hop and even House by bringing the KLF and Mixmaster Morris into the picture. That's quite early for all that. She was just ahead of the curve. The Second Summer of Love came the next year and shortly thereafter, sampling was no longer strictly the domain of the superstar and the early adopter.

To be fair, however, Fairlight Robbery comes more from the direction of the fan and the industry as opposed to the street. There is a somewhat different version of the story, though it does not invalidate Ms. Gray's observations. This version is oral tradition, largely anecdotal* and sometimes borders on folklore, but is essentially the way it is. Since there are many threads to the tapestry, we'll keep to the main.

To get to the origin of sampling in DJ culture and what ultimately drove it into its place in music today goes back to the early 1970s. Back in those days, block parties were a big part of inner city life. I've been to a number of them growing up and they're a community tradition-- one that can be traced back to the Ragtime days and even beyond. For our purposes we'll stick to the '70s.

Back then, times were harder than ever in the ghetto and finding bands with all the gear to play parties became more and more difficult as time wore on. They also asked for money and probably couldn't play for more than a few hours. Eventually, the music for these parties became the domain of the guy in the neighborhood who had the most records. One of these guys, the most famous and iconic and the one credited with starting hip-hop and DJ culture is the much storied Kool Herc.

Kool Herc
image Wikipedia









Kool Herc was a Jamaican born DJ that played block parties in the Bronx and throughout the New York area. He had a big sound system and all the records. His aspiration was to play reggae like the sound systems back home, but the people in the neighborhood weren't having it, so he played funk and soul. At some point, Herc began to notice that the dancing crowds went nuts during the breakdowns, longer drum and percussion driven sections of songs that you use to release a little tension, build it up again and bang out of it to good effect. Any of us that have listened to popular music in the last 40 years should be aware of this, at least subconsciously. He started extending the breakdowns by moving or knocking the needle back to the beginning of the breakdown or even in the same groove, on and on, back and forth to the delight of the crowd. Use two turntables and you can extend it or even mix two different beats. Others adopted this style, Grandmaster Flash took it to the next level. The breakbeat, scratching and subsequently, Hip-Hop emerged.

Soon, DJs became so good at cutting up records that they found that the crowds would often gather around to watch, transfixed, as opposed to dancing to the music. Since the object of these parties was to get loaded, dance and get laid, they had to find a way to get the booties back on the floor. They brought in "MCs" to steal focus and rile the audience into moving their asses. Thus the rapper was born.

Initially the DJs were the stars of the show and the MCs were along for the ride. Later, when these groups gained the notice of record companies, notably in NYC and Philly, the focus was shifted to the MC. American popular music is vocalist and image driven, so the rapper became the obvious sell.

In the 1980s and even into the early '90s many up-and-coming crews didn't even have turntables and mixers, they made their beats on tape using what became known, retrospectively, as "pause button sampling." This technique requires a dual cassette-tape deck and a lot of patience. You use the playback side of the deck to play the break, rewind, play again, while recording only the desired spots on the other side, controlling it with the pause-button. It takes some skill and some practice, but if you have any rhythm, you can get the hang of it. I did this for many years before I knew there was a name for it. Public Enemy's Rebel Without a Pause is an obvious reference to this.

After all that, when DJs and pause-button samplers realized that there was such a thing as a digital sampler that could do the same thing much easier, cleaner and more high fidelity, the movement began. When affordable sampling workstations and rack-mount units became available, it all blew up, and here we are, twenty years later. Musical movements like Musique Concrète prompted the initial development of the synthesizer and sampler, but it was Hip-Hop that spear-headed the widespread use sampling in popular music.

















Fairlight CMI
Fairlight

With early samplers like the Fairlight series being the domain of those that could afford the £60,000+ price-tags, artists like Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder and Art of Noise were some of the few using them until right about the time Fairlight Robbery was written.

Since then we've seen sampling dwindle in prominence due to a move back to the drum machine for beats and also because of persistent litigation and stringent court-rulings. MP3s and piracy have stolen the spotlight, but you can still get your ass sued off for using that Zeppelin riff. Samplers are useful, but short of licensing loops, paying artists for the spirit of their work or bootleg mash-ups using phrases, rhythms or entire sections of songs, many artists utilize them as a sonic supplement for things like sweetening vocals, a string section on the cheap or a means to create unique sounds. I'd wager you'd find some sort of sampler in most major or independent recording studios as well as post-production sound facilities in the film industry. They are here to stay alongside banjos, cowbells, electric guitars, compressed music files and eventually mind-music machines.

*Years back, I read a story about Kool Herc that said he had a smaller mobile sound-system that could be powered by a bicycle-driven generator. Tales are told of Herc playing gigs in the parks and squares of New York while one of his dreadlock buddies pedals away furiously to keep the system running.

Kool Herc: The Origin of Hip-Hop: