Thoughts on Monotrona, Cory Arcangel, and the return of Old School Vid Games. I've never been much of a player of videogames but I love the distinctive, cheap-synth-meets-sped-up-player-piano sound of the early consoles. There's something beautiful and stupid and perfectly reductive about those adrenaline-filled melodies, as urgent in their own way as Ramones songs. In 1983 Haruomi Hosono, of the Japanese technopop outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra, released an LP of game ditties on the Alfa label; the genius of his Videogame Music was that he didn't "interpret" the tunes but presented them straight up (according to this Hosono fan page, VGM was the first of what went on to become an established genre in Japan). Of all the tracks on the album--"Xevious," "Bosconian," "Pac-Man," "Phozon," "Mappy," "Libble Rabble," "Pole Position," "New Rally-X," "Dig Dug," and "Galaga"--only the last got some YMO-style musical embellishment; everything else was treated as found sound. I bought the album in the '80s and listened to it with the proper degree of quasi-ethnographic disinterest, as if it were a Harry Smith collection of folk ballads, but also just plain enjoyed it. Not only did the anonymous composers compress the entire musical spectrum--classical, pop, show tunes--into the smallest number of bytes, they wrote some damn catchy tunes ("Dig Dug" is still stuck in my head).
Videogame bleeps and sniggles were an important component of the early '80s "electro" scene, which was primarily urban hiphop and synthfunk in the Man Parrish/Afrika Bambaataa/Roger Troutman mold (see David Toop's A-Z of Electro for a definitive rundown). Pop culture has been revisiting that scene for a few years now in connection with the '80s nostalgia boom, and videogame sights and sounds are once again in the air. In this post I discuss two careers that are somewhat tangential to the taste-cycle, but nevertheless informed and uplifted by it. Monotrona is a post-feminist, posthuman musician/performance artist who uses old-school electronic gadgets in her act: her new CD, Hawkeye and Firebird, prominently features ancient Commodore 64 game sounds. Cory Arcangel is a computer artist associated with Beige Records, the definitive electro-slacker (but not really) combine.
I first heard Monotrona on the Stork Club on WFMU-FM (a sadly missed live music show), around '97 or '98, performing "Joey, a Mechanical Boy,” which was described as the "fourth in a 14-section work called the 'Fourteen Imitations of Man.'" The story--told in music and dialogue, all performed by the artist using a variety of accents, vocoderlike filters, etc.--was extremely weird. Joey is an ectopically-spawned robot child who goes to work for NASA. His mother, in a ridiculous Chicago accent, tries to reach him on the phone and is headed off by the "Dark Technical Force," a gnostic demiurge that has a strange hold over Joey. Meanwhile, two shadowy government operatives discuss a rogue scientific scheme to create a ManWoman. The piezoelectric puppet show includes some really beautiful songs in the Chrome/Suicide/Throbbing Gristle postpunk vein, performed with buzzy, distorted keyboards. After the performance, Stork described Monotrona's equipment for listeners as "a mountain of unpatented cheap toy electronics adapted for her use--an indescribable array of electronics centered around a Casio machine, using light sabres, pistols, all sorts of mixers, and an oscillating device that looks like a little recipe box with two joysticks coming out of it..." [added 3/24/04: my cassette tape of the event: 36 min, 33.6MB]
Clearly Monotrona's act is visual as well as sound-based, but I've yet to see her live. Searching around the Internet I found a number of baffled and/or dismissive reviews of her stage show. Nevertheless, as a radio musical "Joey" was brilliant and I've been eagerly awaiting a followup. It finally arrived last month in the form of Hawkeye and Firebird, an 8-song, 21 minute CD on Menlo Park. Evidently her "14 Imitations" cosmology has morphed into a gesamtkunstwerk called "Superbeings," and the CD's title characters are two more personae in that scheme (I note that Joey is still on the list, too). Some listeners may be put off that she sings all the songs in the pidgin-English, little-girl voice of Hawkeye, a "Korean superhero" who flies around the world in her airplane accompanied by Firebird, a legless robot slave. ("People awound the world are afwaid/Don't worry people, we will fight and save the day!") The vocal conceit works well on about half the songs, and the music is consistently arresting. She integrates game tunes from the Commodore 64 ("Hotrod," "Monty on the Run," "Sanxion," "Crazy Commets") into the songs sometimes as the primary melody (I think), other times as effects and fills. All of the tracks have the breakneck speed and delicious brevity of the best game music, and there's at least one Gary Numan reference.
The Commodore 64 also appears on The 8-Bit Construction Set LP, released in 2000 by the musical ensemble of the same name: in addition to Cory Arcangel, the group consists of Paul B. Davis, Joe Beuckman and Joe Bonn. This unusual record is marketed as a "dj tool" that includes samples and lock grooves for use in live performances. "8-bit" refers to the very low memory computers first introduced in the '70s and early '80s, including the Atari line, much fetishized by geeks. Meticulously organized, The 8-Bit Construction Set has an "Atari side" and a "C64 side"; each includes samples and "scratch tones" taken from the respective computers (including sound clips from ads used to sell them back in the day), about ten locked grooves with beats and simple loops played on the machines, an original 2 or 3 minute composition ("Saucemaster" on the Atari side and "Dollars" on the C64 side), and a track of actual data that can be recorded on audiocassette tape and fed into the appropriate computer (these sound like fax machine tones until you translate them). Highlights include a promo of Alan Alda hawking the Atari to nervous first-time users, and the two aforementioned original tracks by the group, which are slammin' Detroit-style electro (wish there were more of them). With two copies of the record you can amuse your friends and pets by performing long, trippy Steve Reich compositions using the lock grooves and a fader; I'm not embarrassed to admit I tried it.
The DIY aesthetic also infuses Arcangel's visual work, particularly what he calls his "Nintendo cartridge hacks." On his website, he describes in mind-shattering detail his process of disassembling game cartridges and adding or subtracting characters and backgrounds. This compulsion to educate is part of the Beige Records schtick, as explained in this New York Times article:
The [8-Bit] stage show was a testimony to nerdiness. It wasn't enough for the group simply to play dance music on old Atari and Commodore 8-bit computers and show homemade "Star Trek"-like films. It continually stopped its show to announce the type of computer being used, how much memory it had, its assembly language and other technical minutiae. This was an attempt not just to show how difficult sophisticated electronic dance is to make on such retro technology, but also to savor the moment in the limelight that the group members' cumulative hours of computer reconstruction, programming and yard- sale searching had bought them.
 For his piece I Shot Andy Warhol, Arcangel took apart a cartridge called Hogan's Alley, a fairly elementary target-shooting program, and substituted new characters on a chip of his own making. The object of the hacked game--and it really is this simple--is to aim a plastic pistol at the screen and hit the Andy Warhol icon whenever it pops up in the alley, while avoiding hitting the Pope, Colonel Sanders, and Flavor Flav icons. The game ends when you've made 10 misses (including erroneous celebrity kills). In another part of the game you take potshots at falling Campbell's soup cans, and flouting the laws of physics, make them bounce upwards through an open window.
Elsewhere on this page I've dissed art-smart art using videogames, and still think the idea of blowing apart a Foucault text in an arcade-style shoot-em-up is pretentious. At first I was annoyed by the concept of I Shot Andy Warhol for this reason. Oh, no, not him again. But after playing the damn thing at Eyebeam Atelier (and I must proudly say, advancing the TOP SCORE on all 3 subgames) I have to say it's so focking stoopid it's OK. It is what it is: an opportunity to be vicariously transgendered (if you're a guy) and sociopathically kill an important-but-overhyped art world figure again and again. (My only two "misses" were plugging Colonel Sanders twice; that was pretty fun too).
retro games are the best! i used to play games on my dad's atari with the little black joystick with the one red button. he had like 100. the graphics were terrible and of course simple. i think my favorite was "pie man". it's self-explanitory; you made pies. it was an assembly line that got faster and as the game went on you had to avoid spills, but that was it. i think my favorite *song* was from "pinhead". it was just so happy!! in the game you were a guy on a unicycle with a pin on your hat, and as balloons fell from the sky you just had to poke them. they fell faster and faster, and if you missed one it played that *rolls eyes* i don't know the name of it but it goes dah dah dah daaaah, dah da-dah da-dah da-daaaah.
anyway, i love the way you write, it's like you're writing an article or a term paper, you've got all your references and everything. i wish i was so intelligent. :)
Pamela, perhaps you were not aware that Tom Moody is actually a vast active living intelligence system staffed by hundreds of trained lemurs. Your writing is quite interesting & intelligible as well, even lovely at times, & you did it yourself.
I second that thought! I've been polling my co-workers tonight and I think that dah dah dah daaaa dah da-dah da-dah da-daaaah theme is from a Beethoven symphony, possible the second movement of the 3rd, or Eroica. (I'll check later, when I get home.) It was very popular to use when game characters croak.
Also, I have a question about the Shelter, Pamela. You were saying it plays a lot of triphop/electronic stuff. But isn't, or wasn't, it also a hiphop club? In that new Eminem movie, which I haven't seen, supposedly that's where he gets his "big break."
There was a great hip hop party every sunday afternoon at Shelter in the early 90's. The venue also hosted raves in those years. (I guess you'd call them raves as they went from 10 pm to 2 pm or so the following day.)
Not Beethoven: it's F.Chopin's "Funeral March" from Piano Sonata No. 2, Op.35. Thanks to Robin Nahas for figuring it out. "The adaptation most performed nowadays is by Sir Edward Elgar, who knocked it off in 1932 for 75 pounds." (Norman Lebrecht)
lemurs, huh? that's pretty good. so actually tom, i've only been to the shelter twice. it's in the basement of st. andrew's hall, "three floors of fun"! from what i saw the second floor seems to be cheesy danceable techno with a big dance floor where hoochies bump-n-grind (not really my thing) but it has a nice size bar. the top floor seems to be mostly hip-hop yeah...the one time i walked in there i was the only white girl. but i think it's different when they have shows because poe played there last year, on that floor. i don't really think she's hip hop? then in the shelter, when i was there, they played some dark techno and trance... you know, raver music. i met a reformed raver when i went to see supreme beings of leisure. one of the opening bands' singers (i can't remember his name) was a lot like morrissey. i don't know if that answers your question...sorry...good night!
p.s. i KNEW it was a funeral march!
Thanks for the report. It sounds a lot like Webster Hall, here in NY. Choose your party...
St Andrew's Hall has been hosting local bands for over twenty years. I'll never forget a show by David Thomas in 1984. I abandoned a Milt Wilcox perfect game on the car radio (he blew it) to make it to the former Pere Ubu frontman's show, only to wind up as one of a few drunken fans consoling him because the audience couldn't make the jump to his post-punk crazy-kiddie meanderings. They booed; he quit early. I saw friends of mine play there in some of the earliest Detroit new wave bands, including Ralph Valdez, who's still the best alternative DJ in town. Maybe he knows something about Shelter. Or maybe not. As I recall, neither he, nor any of my other Detroit contacts knew anything about "Detroit" techno or dance music in general. Small worlds in a big world.
Oops..Err...I was talking about the Shelter in Tribecca. Duh.
|
Thoughts on Monotrona, Cory Arcangel, and the return of Old School Vid Games. I've never been much of a player of videogames but I love the distinctive, cheap-synth-meets-sped-up-player-piano sound of the early consoles. There's something beautiful and stupid and perfectly reductive about those adrenaline-filled melodies, as urgent in their own way as Ramones songs. In 1983 Haruomi Hosono, of the Japanese technopop outfit Yellow Magic Orchestra, released an LP of game ditties on the Alfa label; the genius of his Videogame Music was that he didn't "interpret" the tunes but presented them straight up (according to this Hosono fan page, VGM was the first of what went on to become an established genre in Japan). Of all the tracks on the album--"Xevious," "Bosconian," "Pac-Man," "Phozon," "Mappy," "Libble Rabble," "Pole Position," "New Rally-X," "Dig Dug," and "Galaga"--only the last got some YMO-style musical embellishment; everything else was treated as found sound. I bought the album in the '80s and listened to it with the proper degree of quasi-ethnographic disinterest, as if it were a Harry Smith collection of folk ballads, but also just plain enjoyed it. Not only did the anonymous composers compress the entire musical spectrum--classical, pop, show tunes--into the smallest number of bytes, they wrote some damn catchy tunes ("Dig Dug" is still stuck in my head).
Videogame bleeps and sniggles were an important component of the early '80s "electro" scene, which was primarily urban hiphop and synthfunk in the Man Parrish/Afrika Bambaataa/Roger Troutman mold (see David Toop's A-Z of Electro for a definitive rundown). Pop culture has been revisiting that scene for a few years now in connection with the '80s nostalgia boom, and videogame sights and sounds are once again in the air. In this post I discuss two careers that are somewhat tangential to the taste-cycle, but nevertheless informed and uplifted by it. Monotrona is a post-feminist, posthuman musician/performance artist who uses old-school electronic gadgets in her act: her new CD, Hawkeye and Firebird, prominently features ancient Commodore 64 game sounds. Cory Arcangel is a computer artist associated with Beige Records, the definitive electro-slacker (but not really) combine.
I first heard Monotrona on the Stork Club on WFMU-FM (a sadly missed live music show), around '97 or '98, performing "Joey, a Mechanical Boy,” which was described as the "fourth in a 14-section work called the 'Fourteen Imitations of Man.'" The story--told in music and dialogue, all performed by the artist using a variety of accents, vocoderlike filters, etc.--was extremely weird. Joey is an ectopically-spawned robot child who goes to work for NASA. His mother, in a ridiculous Chicago accent, tries to reach him on the phone and is headed off by the "Dark Technical Force," a gnostic demiurge that has a strange hold over Joey. Meanwhile, two shadowy government operatives discuss a rogue scientific scheme to create a ManWoman. The piezoelectric puppet show includes some really beautiful songs in the Chrome/Suicide/Throbbing Gristle postpunk vein, performed with buzzy, distorted keyboards. After the performance, Stork described Monotrona's equipment for listeners as "a mountain of unpatented cheap toy electronics adapted for her use--an indescribable array of electronics centered around a Casio machine, using light sabres, pistols, all sorts of mixers, and an oscillating device that looks like a little recipe box with two joysticks coming out of it..." [added 3/24/04: my cassette tape of the event: 36 min, 33.6MB]
Clearly Monotrona's act is visual as well as sound-based, but I've yet to see her live. Searching around the Internet I found a number of baffled and/or dismissive reviews of her stage show. Nevertheless, as a radio musical "Joey" was brilliant and I've been eagerly awaiting a followup. It finally arrived last month in the form of Hawkeye and Firebird, an 8-song, 21 minute CD on Menlo Park. Evidently her "14 Imitations" cosmology has morphed into a gesamtkunstwerk called "Superbeings," and the CD's title characters are two more personae in that scheme (I note that Joey is still on the list, too). Some listeners may be put off that she sings all the songs in the pidgin-English, little-girl voice of Hawkeye, a "Korean superhero" who flies around the world in her airplane accompanied by Firebird, a legless robot slave. ("People awound the world are afwaid/Don't worry people, we will fight and save the day!") The vocal conceit works well on about half the songs, and the music is consistently arresting. She integrates game tunes from the Commodore 64 ("Hotrod," "Monty on the Run," "Sanxion," "Crazy Commets") into the songs sometimes as the primary melody (I think), other times as effects and fills. All of the tracks have the breakneck speed and delicious brevity of the best game music, and there's at least one Gary Numan reference.
The Commodore 64 also appears on The 8-Bit Construction Set LP, released in 2000 by the musical ensemble of the same name: in addition to Cory Arcangel, the group consists of Paul B. Davis, Joe Beuckman and Joe Bonn. This unusual record is marketed as a "dj tool" that includes samples and lock grooves for use in live performances. "8-bit" refers to the very low memory computers first introduced in the '70s and early '80s, including the Atari line, much fetishized by geeks. Meticulously organized, The 8-Bit Construction Set has an "Atari side" and a "C64 side"; each includes samples and "scratch tones" taken from the respective computers (including sound clips from ads used to sell them back in the day), about ten locked grooves with beats and simple loops played on the machines, an original 2 or 3 minute composition ("Saucemaster" on the Atari side and "Dollars" on the C64 side), and a track of actual data that can be recorded on audiocassette tape and fed into the appropriate computer (these sound like fax machine tones until you translate them). Highlights include a promo of Alan Alda hawking the Atari to nervous first-time users, and the two aforementioned original tracks by the group, which are slammin' Detroit-style electro (wish there were more of them). With two copies of the record you can amuse your friends and pets by performing long, trippy Steve Reich compositions using the lock grooves and a fader; I'm not embarrassed to admit I tried it.
The DIY aesthetic also infuses Arcangel's visual work, particularly what he calls his "Nintendo cartridge hacks." On his website, he describes in mind-shattering detail his process of disassembling game cartridges and adding or subtracting characters and backgrounds. This compulsion to educate is part of the Beige Records schtick, as explained in this New York Times article:
For his piece I Shot Andy Warhol, Arcangel took apart a cartridge called Hogan's Alley, a fairly elementary target-shooting program, and substituted new characters on a chip of his own making. The object of the hacked game--and it really is this simple--is to aim a plastic pistol at the screen and hit the Andy Warhol icon whenever it pops up in the alley, while avoiding hitting the Pope, Colonel Sanders, and Flavor Flav icons. The game ends when you've made 10 misses (including erroneous celebrity kills). In another part of the game you take potshots at falling Campbell's soup cans, and flouting the laws of physics, make them bounce upwards through an open window.
Elsewhere on this page I've dissed art-smart art using videogames, and still think the idea of blowing apart a Foucault text in an arcade-style shoot-em-up is pretentious. At first I was annoyed by the concept of I Shot Andy Warhol for this reason. Oh, no, not him again. But after playing the damn thing at Eyebeam Atelier (and I must proudly say, advancing the TOP SCORE on all 3 subgames) I have to say it's so focking stoopid it's OK. It is what it is: an opportunity to be vicariously transgendered (if you're a guy) and sociopathically kill an important-but-overhyped art world figure again and again. (My only two "misses" were plugging Colonel Sanders twice; that was pretty fun too).
- tom moody 11-07-2002 10:48 am
retro games are the best! i used to play games on my dad's atari with the little black joystick with the one red button. he had like 100. the graphics were terrible and of course simple. i think my favorite was "pie man". it's self-explanitory; you made pies. it was an assembly line that got faster and as the game went on you had to avoid spills, but that was it. i think my favorite *song* was from "pinhead". it was just so happy!! in the game you were a guy on a unicycle with a pin on your hat, and as balloons fell from the sky you just had to poke them. they fell faster and faster, and if you missed one it played that *rolls eyes* i don't know the name of it but it goes dah dah dah daaaah, dah da-dah da-dah da-daaaah. anyway, i love the way you write, it's like you're writing an article or a term paper, you've got all your references and everything. i wish i was so intelligent. :)
- pamela (guest) 11-11-2002 3:41 am
Pamela, perhaps you were not aware that Tom Moody is actually a vast active living intelligence system staffed by hundreds of trained lemurs. Your writing is quite interesting & intelligible as well, even lovely at times, & you did it yourself.
- frank 11-11-2002 4:49 am
I second that thought! I've been polling my co-workers tonight and I think that dah dah dah daaaa dah da-dah da-dah da-daaaah theme is from a Beethoven symphony, possible the second movement of the 3rd, or Eroica. (I'll check later, when I get home.) It was very popular to use when game characters croak.
Also, I have a question about the Shelter, Pamela. You were saying it plays a lot of triphop/electronic stuff. But isn't, or wasn't, it also a hiphop club? In that new Eminem movie, which I haven't seen, supposedly that's where he gets his "big break."
- tom moody 11-11-2002 6:54 am
There was a great hip hop party every sunday afternoon at Shelter in the early 90's. The venue also hosted raves in those years. (I guess you'd call them raves as they went from 10 pm to 2 pm or so the following day.)
- steve 11-11-2002 8:51 am
Not Beethoven: it's F.Chopin's "Funeral March" from Piano Sonata No. 2, Op.35. Thanks to Robin Nahas for figuring it out. "The adaptation most performed nowadays is by Sir Edward Elgar, who knocked it off in 1932 for 75 pounds." (Norman Lebrecht)
- tom moody 11-12-2002 4:56 am
lemurs, huh? that's pretty good. so actually tom, i've only been to the shelter twice. it's in the basement of st. andrew's hall, "three floors of fun"! from what i saw the second floor seems to be cheesy danceable techno with a big dance floor where hoochies bump-n-grind (not really my thing) but it has a nice size bar. the top floor seems to be mostly hip-hop yeah...the one time i walked in there i was the only white girl. but i think it's different when they have shows because poe played there last year, on that floor. i don't really think she's hip hop? then in the shelter, when i was there, they played some dark techno and trance... you know, raver music. i met a reformed raver when i went to see supreme beings of leisure. one of the opening bands' singers (i can't remember his name) was a lot like morrissey. i don't know if that answers your question...sorry...good night!
- pamela (guest) 11-12-2002 8:42 am
p.s. i KNEW it was a funeral march!
- pamela (guest) 11-12-2002 11:32 pm
Thanks for the report. It sounds a lot like Webster Hall, here in NY. Choose your party...
- tom moody 11-12-2002 11:48 pm
St Andrew's Hall has been hosting local bands for over twenty years. I'll never forget a show by David Thomas in 1984. I abandoned a Milt Wilcox perfect game on the car radio (he blew it) to make it to the former Pere Ubu frontman's show, only to wind up as one of a few drunken fans consoling him because the audience couldn't make the jump to his post-punk crazy-kiddie meanderings. They booed; he quit early. I saw friends of mine play there in some of the earliest Detroit new wave bands, including Ralph Valdez, who's still the best alternative DJ in town. Maybe he knows something about Shelter. Or maybe not. As I recall, neither he, nor any of my other Detroit contacts knew anything about "Detroit" techno or dance music in general. Small worlds in a big world.
- alex 11-13-2002 12:51 am
Oops..Err...I was talking about the Shelter in Tribecca. Duh.
- steve 11-13-2002 8:24 am