Carlos beatboxing and playing the thumb piano

(cancermine)

He's really good.

via the music of sound

北京土著 - Beijing Natives (Chinese rap video)

(cockeyecockeye)

Full translation:

Slice me a piece of watermelon, about four or five liang
Only the truly thin-skin watermelon comes with this crisp and grainy texture
When the scent of jasmine wafts in the tea room of the siheyuan
One forgets all the heat of the summer
Pour a glass of fine wine as your thoughts wander afar
The senses are drunk with the fragrance of the wine steeped within the hutong alleys
As the sun sets at the corner of the old city wall that echoes with the beat of the toy rattle-drum
This native Beijinger feels a little sad
Squatting alone at the corner of the wall, receiving not even a passing glance
With eyes unseeing and confusion in my heart
Why do I feel so weary today?
Feels like I lost my soul while writing my lyrics
A wonton stall by the roadside in the early morning
A farmer rides a three-wheeled handcart as he pulls his load of bricks to work
A bowl of jellied beancurd costs a dollar
The music of a Pekingese big drum storyteller rings in the air
Drink a bowl of sour soy juice with a fried ring of dough
Dregs of oil scented with malt heave in porcelain jars with floral design
A hawker at the entrance of a hutong alley is stringing candied haws,
There's a photo of Ma Sanli displayed at the teahouse nearby
The vats are deeper than the basins, the basins are deeper than the bowls, the bowls are deeper than the plates
Waiting for your consideration
After being left there for so many years, they're still so funny…
pay attention
Native Beijingers, pay attention
Squat when you're tired of standing, sit when you're tired from squatting
Lie down when you're tired of sitting, lie prone when you're tired from lying down
Sleep when you're tired of lying prone, nap when you're unable to sleep
Keeping a myna brings special prestige
Be kind and generous and courteous too
Greet others kindly and never, ever be late
Keeping score only means making trouble for yourself
Better to smile and the world turns, infinitely beautiful
There's an old man in the park, hand in hand with his old wife
About eighty years old and he still looks so suave
Sucking on a popsicle and wearing a vest
Bloodlines run pure at the home of Peking Man
At the side of the Right-Right-Right-Right Gate of Peace
There's a shop selling Dog-Dog-Dog-Dog Wouldn’t-Notice buns
Buy half a jin of sliced-sliced-sliced-sliced glutinous cake
Spend a day free from worries at the Heavenly Bridge, just like an immortal

Seems like a decent enough message... but now I'm kinda hungry. (Though, I think I'll skip the Dog-Dog-Dog-Dog.)

thanks, Ledge!

Bus Driver - Imaginary Places

(video link)

Bus Driver

seen on A short vision of art

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)

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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stray bullets

Science close to unveiling invisible man Invisibilty devices, long the realm of science fiction and fantasy, have moved closer after scientists engineered a material that can bend visible light around objects.

How to blow it It's the most winnable presidential election in American history - but the Democrats are old hands at losing. Michael Moore offers some helpful hints on how they might gift it all to the Republicans. (via)

Covert operation floats network-sniffing balloon Hidden in the back of a 22-foot moving truck, Hill and his team of about a dozen volunteers launched the balloon Friday morning, sending it 150 feet into the air for about 20 minutes to use special antennas and scanning software to scope out the Las Vegas skyline for unsecured wireless networks, an activity Hill calls "warballooning." Hackers have practiced wardriving for years, driving around in cars with computers and specialized software that sniffs for networks.

Controller praised for texting pilot down safely Five people on a flight from Kerry to Jersey received mobile phone text instructions from a quick-thinking air traffic controller when he guided them in to a safe landing at Cork. (via)

What's the big deal? It's the little things Again and again, American history has turned on the dime of such tiny things. The Watergate conspiracy might have unraveled no matter what, but it was a strip of tape on a Watergate building office door that alerted a security guard that burglars were about. Jimmy Carter's presidency might have crashed and burned anyway, but it was a crashing and burning helicopter in the sands of Iran during a failed rescue of American hostages that may have sealed his loss in 1980... The way small causes yield huge effects is itself only one piece of the much grander idea of simplexity, a science that is increasingly being studied at universities and institutes around the world... (via)

Is That a Real Reality, or Did You Make It Up Yourself? The idea that music can transform reality predates by many millennia the category "music" as we know it. Before art was understood as a phenomenon in itself apart from its ritual application (a relatively recent and culturally specific development), what we now call music was indistinguishable from magic. (via)

Vin Mariani A good 20 years before the original cocaine-infused Coca-Cola taught the world to grind its teeth and give ineffectual bathroom-stall handjobs in per•fect har•mo•ny, there was another drink of choice among those wishing to feel invigorated and overconfident for no good reason. It was called “coca wine” and it was loved not only by self-important blowhards wearing too much jewelry but by Kings and Popes and…

also:
Two Great Stories - BOTH TRUE - and worth reading!
I don’t care about fonts (via)
Penniless author sells shares in next novel (good idea) (via)
Athlete-bloggers at the Beijing Olympics
The Hardest Places in the World to Find a Bathroom
A Look at the Secret Service, and More from CRS

viddy:
Lecture on Marcus Auprelius (via)
Reggie Watts - F*$K,S#%T,STACK (NSFW) (via)
daedelus on the monome

stray bullets

Pirates won't rob writers of riches Of course, if ebooks catch on, most publishing firms will go out of business. But I cannot think of many writers who will be sorry to see them go. Whenever authors gather around a bottle of wine, the sole topic of conversation is how terrible their publishers are. Their editors are illiterates, the publicity departments are staffed by airheads and the people responsible for designing their dust jackets should be shot. I blaze through ebooks about four times as fast I do print. I'm blind in one eye and dyslexic, so the medium is a help for me, but most people I know can't read ebooks. (via)

Warp Drive Engine Would Travel Faster Than Light It is possible to travel faster than light. You just wouldn't travel faster than light. (via)

Glass Does Not Flow. Except in Space? In 1999, Christie’s East in Manhattan auctioned off an assortment of space memorabilia, including a flashlight that Buzz Aldrin used during a Gemini 12 spacewalk in 1966. The auction catalog mentions: The flashlight lens became deformed while in the vacuum of space. I saw the flashlight in person. The lens is definitely deformed, just as if the glass had flowed. It’s not cracked. It’s deformed.

Police: Man Stole Miami-Dade Buses, Drove Them On Routes Police: Teen Dressed As Bus Driver, Returned Buses At End Of Day I really hope they don't send this kid to prison. (via)

Hiphop LX (linguistics) In Hiphop the WORD is the message. Language is a system of sounds and symbols and communication in any language is based on how to use that system. If you know the system, you have power over ideas and imagination. You can build, change, plan, play and destroy. Many words and expressions in hiphop represent regions, neighborhoods and cities. Hiphop Lx is dedicated to representing the words and expressions that represent and serve as a symbol for a region and area. It explores the language system of hiphop and how the word came into being, meanings and the overall development of the word and expression. It challenges everyone to represent their region with true bona fide words and present them to be researched, examined, challenged and celebrated. (via)

also:
Renaissance Men Are Evolving Into Renaissance Networks (via)
Top 100 Executives by Total Compensation (via)
The Top 10 Mad Scientists (via)
10 Things You Should Know About the Internet
25 Ways To Earn Money When You’re Broke On The Road
Dalí: Painting and Film (via)
Frank Zappa's Jukebox out Aug. 4 (via) (via)

viddy:
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - Pedal Up (awesome funky)
Wanda Jackson - Mean Mean Man
Dr. Ronald Chevalier – The Art of Relaxating (wth?)
Traffic in Tehran (traffic in UT)
Francis Fukuyama: What Kind of World Power China Will Be?
Marshall McLuhan Quotes
Woz the Wiz meets Captain Crunch (via)
Bill Drummond on Robert Anton Wilson
Man with No Arms Plays Guitar well (via)
Patti Smith Sings 'You Light Up My Life' (don't miss it)
Amazing Audio Illusion (it is amazing) (via)

Rahzel - If your mother only knew

I heard this back in 2000 and it blew me away. I just bumbled upon in on YouTube and it still makes me smile and shake my head. (I did a remix of this back then and I cannot find it. I know someone in New Orleans has a copy and will send it to me... hint hint.)

If if that wasn't incredible enough, here's live version where he adds a bass-line and background vocals. It's a bit rough but you'll get the idea.

Rahzel LIVE @ Prince Bandroom Melbourne Australia 2007



Rahzel

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: