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Artist Sally McKay is participating in a show in Toronto, opening April 30, called "Robot Landscapes." In her piece, a small mirror-lined box serves as home to a solar powered robot slowly caroming around inside. Reflected on the inner walls of the box is a continuously looped video of a half-factual, half demented Martian landscape; a kind of Zen foil-ball garden with a dozing, skullfaced inhabitant, who may or may not be inflicting intermittent, flaring image breakdown on the Rover's prying digital eyes. The mirror-diorama is viewed through a window, with nearby headphones chiming musical accompaniment--a kind of lo fi, ambio-melodic soundscape created by yours truly. Sally explains more of the particulars here, and she's also offering a scaled-down version of the 9 inch wide video as a streaming or downloadable online video. A borrowed copy of the interface is below.
click for streaming video
(or option click / right click here for download)
graphics by Sally McKay, music by Tom Moody
Saturday night, April 24, a group of laptop performers convened at vertexList, a newish space in the old Four Walls location in Brooklyn. Video artists picked audio artists as collaborators (and vice versa) and the work seemed as random as the pairings: synergy was only intermittently achieved. The video part of the Jeremy Bernstein/Glomag collaboration (coruscating patterns of finely minced abstraction) showed more subtlety than the clunky audio, and the audio part of the jenghizkhan*/Daniel Vatsky union (mysterious, sexily-filtered ambient industrial keyboards) eclipsed the video's rather generic typography-cum-50s-science-textbook imagery. One moment where everything clicked came during the token "analog segment," when Mike Ballou's super-8 film of a crowd pulling a giant helium-inflated pig through the sky found suitable porcine accompaniment in Brian Dewan's morose vacuum tubular oinks.
A cranky comment: some artbloggers outside NY have said "there's nothing going on here" or words to that effect. That's clearly wrong. The scene is so rich, so multi-layered, so overflowing with good work that gallerygoers have become blase--talking, schmoozing, laughing, flirting, and exchanging business cards during performances. The music and video serve only as a cool clublike backdrop for their networking. This is Williamsburg, after all, where those art school "how to survive as an artist" courses are field-tested en masse. To put it bluntly, the pigs weren't just up there on the screen Saturday.
*aka John Parker
CLASSIC RAVE HITS! (except I don't know what any of them are)
All of the following house and breakbeat rave techno tracks were taped off the radio in '93 and '94, specifically during DJ Jeff K's live mix show, "Edge Club," on KDGE-FM in Dallas (besides killing Kennedy, that city has been a haven for club music since the late '80s, as Simon Reynolds noted in his book Generation E). I made them as "studio tapes" (i.e. to play while making stuff), but found them indispensable when I moved to NY shortly thereafter and had all my other music in storage. Some tracks were played by Jeff K himself, others by the guest DJs he had on each week (DJ Icy, the Hardkiss collective, Utah Saints (!)). What they all have in common is (1) I still play them on my battered cassettes and (2) I don't know any of the artists or titles, except as noted below. Now that they've been extracted from the longer mixes where they originally appeared--digitally clipped, sutured, & faded in or out as .mp3s--a little attribution help would be greatly appreciated: any information you might have about this weird, E'd-up, often gemlike music.
Techno-Rave
Track 1 [4.5 MB]. "Like this," "come down," and an uncanny "blablablablablablablablablah" are the samples punctuating this frenetic Two Bad Mice-like track.
Track 2 [3.4 MB]. The insipid "different strokes for different folks" vocal commencing this number is soon belied by Mentasm stabs and other craziness. The ending sample of a lad saying "only originate and never pirate" (as in "pyrate") cropped up a lot around this time.
Track 3 [3.7 MB]. Very minimal breakbeat rave recorded on Jeff K's birthday. A sequence of 12 notes is repeated (with the filtering constantly changing) until the middle, when it is replaced by another sequence of 12 notes.
Track 4 [4 MB]. From a live mix at the Bomb Factory in Deep Ellum, this peppy number (possibly by a Texas producer) merges flawlessly into Joey Beltram's famous "Energy Flash," right before the fade.
House
Track 5 [4.1 MB]. A bouncy little march opens and closes this Dixieland-inflected track.
Track 6 [5 MB]. Disco-era drum pads, a Chinese prepared piano hook, and a vaguely Middle Eastern diva wail: it's catchier than that sounds.
Track 7 [5.5 MB]. Digs and Woosh of the UK's legendary DIY Crew guest-mixed this deep house track. James at Satellite (who met the DIY-ers in Dallas) thought it was from Chicago, maybe Balance Recordings. The string riff magically smeared dozens of ways sounds like turntablism but I assume it's the sampler.
Track 8 [5 MB]. Spare (as in lean) organ riffs from guest DJ Germ-E's mix.
BONUS: Downtempo Rave (?)
Track 9 (5.5 MB). Not sure what else to call this; it's too giddy to be considered triphop. It's from a mix by guest DJ Kid E.