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A new piece of music I made: "Eine Zwei Drei" [1 min - 1.37MB - .mp3]. I find it kind of sinister. Coming this soon after talking about Monotrona, it might be compared to that, but I'd say it's closer to Laibach. That's it--a kind of abject, basement Laibach (Slovenian dirge-y synth stuff, but this is goofier.)
An earlier post described a "radio musical" I heard several years back by Electro musician and performance artist Monotrona (it might be called the first Electro opera.) I taped it on cassette and am now posting it here in all its hissy, lo-fi glory. [36 min, 33.6MB] Here's what I wrote before:
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..."Combining music and stand-up with the sheer Cage-ean randomness of these toy store electronics, "Joey" is brilliant even in a crappy, taped-off-the-radio recording. The bleeping, buzzing acoustics wed the arcade with the abyss, as Joey struggles to master simple digestive and muscular functions under the tutelage of a scary voice recalling Tron's Master Control Program. Monotrona is considerably more than just an entertainer or proto-Electroclash musician or what have you (although her recent songs are tight, smart pop): she is a poet of the "dark technology" embracing us whether we hug back or not. (video still from punkcast 237)
Beige Programming Ensemble at the Whitney; The Slowes
I missed Cory Arcangel and the Beige crew at the Whitney Museum last night because I had to w_rk, but fortunately Thickeye is on it with an excellent report. I like his description of the line of kids wrapped around the block for free admission night, soon to be groping in the darkened video rooms, contrasted with the image of middle age people sitting at tables in the downstairs dining room, politely listening to the Beige-rs explaining their new 8-bit iPod concept.
Beige has a music download page that I highly recommend, consisting of their vinyl releases in mp3 format. Cory also recorded several songs as The Slowes, which I am pleased to offer here. The melodies are faux-dumb and very catchy. I say faux-dumb because they're actually fairly ambitious in terms of musical reach--a lot of pop music history is integrated in them (lounge, 60s-electronica, progrock, Pink Floyd...). Being so lo-fi keeps the homages from being overt or too reverent. Here's how Cory explains them in an email (edited slightly):
yeah,...the slowes is just me. most of the melodies were written by a melody writing program i wrote called "Rudy Tardy Generator Pro"..it was a cgi script. every time you went to its web page, it generated a new song and melodies (in the slowes style, which is lotsa open roller rink kinda chords) so....... i would have the program spit out 10 melodies...i would then pick the best few, turn them into a song, and go into my bedroom and record them. i used an organ, atari, drums, + guitar////The Slowes downloads:the whole myth of the slowes that I made up was that it was this guy who sat in his basement all day and worked on his atari. his name was Rudy Tardy. This was his band. For a few years, i used Rudy Tardy to sign all my art projects...[Beige-r] Paul [B. Davis] to this day still Dj's under the name DJ Rudy.
"Fat Bits" [.mp3 - 1.33MB]
"Starship Izod" [.mp3 - 4.12MB]
"The Anthem" [.mp3 - 2.29MB]
"Hooked on a New Thing" (cover of 3Nuff Z'Nuff) [.mp3 - 5.2MB]
Suite: All Four Songs Above [.mp3 - 13.14MB]
dan at erase reports on a Squarepusher/Steve Reich/Aphex Twin-related live gig in the UK that sounds like a lot of fun. He's also been posting links to good online mixes, such as this tech-house assortment ("Eucalyptus" and "Night Herbs" are recommended--haven't heard the other one yet) and this 80s/00s electro jam.
UPDATE: The mixtapes mentioned above are by Sami Koivikko, from Finland, who makes tracks when he's not dj'ing. The "Night Herbs" mix is flawlessly beat-matched and contains a number of those angelic arrangements of 3 or 4 confectionary notes that probably have a more precise musical term but are what I like most about house tracks, especially of the minimal/tech variety. Producers such as Losoul, John Tejada, Paul Kalkbrenner and other favorites are included in the mix.
As promised, here's the 2-Step Garage Mini-Mix: [.mp3 removed]. By way of background, this music combines the trickier rhythms, vocal science, and hiphop atmospherics (e.g., sped-up scratching) of drum & bass with the party vibe and divas of UK garage (a house variant). You may recall Ishkur (now in V.2!) called 2-Step "so fucking boring," complaining about its "idiotic" basslines and all the guest popstars. He's right about the guests: usually an electronic dance producer jumps the shark when vocals are added (see Swayzak, Chemical Bros.). But the basslines kind of crack me up. They make me think of the original intent of the Roland TB303, which was to be a kind of automated "bass genie" for pubrockers. The three tracks in this mix are light on vocals, guest or otherwise, and heavier on the atmospherics. All are "classic" 2-Step, meaning about 4 years old: "Scrappy" by Wookie, "True VIP" by Youngstar, and "Romantic Call" by DJ Deller. Any help with what the singer's saying in the last (after the lines "I'm on a romantic call/Talking to my baby down at the yard") would be greatly appreciated.