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Channel: Musician – Rocknerd

Brian Eno knows the score.


Apple’s shiny new headphone adapter turns out to suck. Gosh, etc.

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Apple’s gone digital with their headphone outputs, but they have an analogue adapter for the expensive cans you already own. Pity it’s not powerful enough to drive them, per c’t in Germany. There’s significant and variable signal loss through the adapter — telltales of a pissweak amplifier — and their tests left them wondering if it wasn’t in fact an analogue signal going through the Lightning connector, rather than a digital one.

Also, the Lightning connector digital output is always downsampled to 16-bit at 44.1 kHz — though Rocknerd readers know that even the advocates of higher resolutions can’t hear the difference in A/B/X tests. However, the pro-audio market, who generally live on Macs (increasingly regretting it as they are) and work in 32/96 so they have room to process stuff, are not entirely pleased. (Mind you, I’m now wondering what the digital-analogue converter for the previous headphone plug actually did, and it’s not like pro audio is free of magical thinking.)

Also, for some reason, Apple’s efforts to improve Bluetooth linking only work on their own mediocre headphones! What are the chances.

Good thing the market will save us, since the Lightning connector is a widely-accepted standard with plenty of alternate vendors. Oh wait, it’s nothing of the sort. Oh well, never mind.

Links: September, Ziggy Stardust, Alan Turing, rap as social news system, even cheaper streaming.

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Today at work I’ve been busy discussing the horror of Blockchain. So have some interesting webpages that are completely not about that in any manner.

Links: Spotify malware ads, music manuscript fonts, drugs. And Blockchain.

Links: bad lyrical subjects, worse record companies, Psychic TV and Polka Floyd.

Culture is not about aesthetics redux: scented candles in a human face, forever.

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“Culture is not about aesthetics. Punk rock is now enforced by law.” is the most popular thing I have ever written, anywhere, of any sort. On a music blog that nobody reads, this thing got 80,000 hits. A one-hit wonder I failed to cash in on in any manner.

The piece won’t tell you anything that wasn’t already obvious to any reasonably informed pixel-stained technopeasant — but this stuff was actual news to musicians I knew personally, who had been musicians since the ‘70s and ‘80s and were going “what the hell happened?”

Best bit: the comments on it were really good and apposite, with meaningful discussion. I was most pleased.

Part of the problem that I didn’t really hammer on is the Great Cultural Fragmentation. Given the choice, people want what they want, not what you want them to want. Mass movements are nothing like so massive now that listeners have options. The mass media hegemony broke absolutely the moment we could escape them.

Even pop music isn’t actually popular any more — you can have a mainstream number one “hit” in the UK with less than 10,000 sales, which thirty years ago would have had you topping the indie charts. Mainstream pop used to be a serious cultural force, and now it just … isn’t. You haven’t heard of most of these people because they aren’t actually famous.

The gigantist twentieth-century record industry is decreasingly viable simply because they no longer control the means of either production or distribution. And are jawdroppingly inept in any case. Hail Mary passes and wishing for magic aren’t going to make it rain. They’re doing a pretty good job of dying in a fire, but they need to hurry it up please.

And this is despite there being more music than anyone could ever keep up with.

Bob Stanley in Yeah Yeah Yeah offers a useful distinction: music can become “pop” when there’s intermediation between you and the performer. Forms in which you know the performer are not “pop”:

What exactly is pop? For me, it includes rock, R&B, soul, hip hop, house, techno, metal and country. If you make records, singles and albums, and if you go on TV or on tour to promote them, you’re in the pop business. If you sing a cappella folk songs in a pub in Whitby, you’re not. Pop needs an audience that the artist doesn’t know personally – it has to be transferable.

(He didn’t mention drum machine goth songs in a pub in Whitby, but that’s pretty clearly folk too.)

What we’re seeing now is all music increasingly being forced by the laws of the market to work like folk.

So how do subcultures work now? In the ’80s, a whole city’s indie rock scene could subtly change sound because one guy’s Flying Nun albums just arrived from New Zealand and he played them for his mates. Now it’s picking a genre to mine. The meaning of “subculture” changes when they’re self-organising groups on the Internet.

I didn’t manage at the time to come up with a programme of action less broad than the downfall of neoliberal late capitalism in its entirety. (Though at the least, you’d need people to feel secure enough in their lives to spend money in the first place.) Thinking further on it, there are approaches such as finding a niche and owning as best you can — a given small cultural area, in which context aesthetics can then hold — while working on your general game. Base yourself in a scene to learn your chops.

I have no idea if this would work, by the way. It would certainly be a tough row to hoe if your intent was to make a living. Music’s a rough game. Also, you have to transmute into a sort of entrepreneurial marketing obsessive — the approximate opposite of art, certainly as far as artists I know are concerned.

(e.g. the one I’m married to. Buy a bloody T-shirt, will ya. They’re really good!)

All of this is what life looks like when the means of production have been seized. Everyone with a computer has the tools to be an artist, and the distribution channels. You are an artist. I am an artist. (I literally can’t play an instrument or sing, but here’s my SoundCloud.) Anyone can sell their music easily, cheaply and in the same outlets as the hugely popular people. Or just give it away.

For professional artists, it’s a bit of a problem — but the problem is not internet piracy, but competition:

  • you’re literally in direct competition with every other artist in the world, not just the city;
  • you’re literally in direct competition with non-professionals doing adequate work as a hobby;
  • you’re literally in direct competition with everything that isn’t consuming your art. In 1986, there was going out to a band, or bad TV. In 2016, there’s going out to a band, or the whole Internet and all your friends.

Steve Albini says life is incomparably better now, and the Internet has solved the problem with music, but you gotta hit the road, Jack. This is a limited approach that not everyone has time for, but I suppose someone has to stay home and foment revolution.

Culture is not about aesthetics. The laws of microeconomics means everything collapses into a folk-based singularity. (Not punk rock, I was wrong.) Cottage industry for all! Scented candles at a county fair in a human face, forever.

Links: Indonesian and Mexican record markets, the Mekons, jazz saxophone relationship advice.

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  • In Indonesia, the music industry runs on fried chicken. You buy your records there. KFC is starting their own label.

  • In Mexico, it’s USB sticks.

  • A nice retrospective on The Mekons. Fails to mention the Three Johns (or the Sally Smmit LP), but otherwise excellent and gives you a reasonable introduction to what this thing is. Even if the prose starts a bit purple.

  • Question from a 1933 advice column:

    saxophone-jazz-orchestra

(Arkady concurs on flautists, having married one previously. “The person to trust even less is a male violinist,” says the David Garrett obsessive. Fortunately, it appears superannuated rock critics are just fine.)

 

Instrument links: acid house for web, make your own, use light, shut up’n keep playing yer guitar.

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  • Acid Machine: a TB-303, drum machine and sequencer implemented in Web Audio. Works best in Chrome, though it was also fun in Firefox. You can download your stuff too. It’s not as authentically unstable and flaky as genuine analogue Roland kit, of course.

  • If you’re a programmer and want to build something like that yourself, here’s a pile of Web Audio sound fonts, MIT-licensed.

  • Or if you want to get out the soldering iron, here’s the Illumaphone, a light-based instrument project based around an Arduino.

  • In the meantime, Fender asks that you KEEP PLAYING THAT BLOODY GUITAR WILLYA jeez kids these days with their iPad 360 controller Nintendroid DS gadgets you mark my words

     


Links: World industrial, the economics of EDM, the eyes have rhythm, fretless bass an octave up.

Links: CBGB awning for sale; Ableton Live; the cucumber organ.

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  • The CBGB awning is up for auction! Expect some pharma bro to pay $25,000 or so. It’s not the “original” as claimed, by the way — it’s a 2004 repainting, the third or fourth in its line.

  • The Story of Ableton Live: Berlin techno scenesters creating something to help them do their own stuff live.

  • An organ with cucumbers for keys. Created as advertising for Hendrick’s Gin. It’s set up so the cucumbers are touch-sensitive. Made by WonderMakr, who have a pile of this stuff.

New instruments: The Mitt, PushPull and a 3D-printed wind instrument designer.

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The Mitt is a synthesizer with a hand-shaped controller pattern. It’s not actually a glove, but it’s shaped for a hand: one finger on each of five joysticks,

PushPull is a squeezebox with LED lighting, capacitive touch sensors and motion sensing that you can 3D-print most of, program yourself and use as a controller. It was designed by Amelie Hinrichsen, Till Bovermann, and Dominik Hildebrand Marques Lopes of 3DMIN in Berlin.

Printone is a resonance simulator allowing the creators (from Autodesk and Dartmouth College) to design wind instruments in any stupid shape they can think of and predict what they’ll sound like. The software’s not available yet, but they have the paper with their maths up.

Niland’s music classifier and similarity searcher, and a demo you can play with.

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Niland are an “AI startup” working on machine learning. They sell a search and recommendation engine for music companies. And there’s a demo for you to play with: paste in a track from SoundCloud and see what it makes of it.

I fed it one of mine. Its “top predicted tags”:

  • Drum Machine 74%
  • Electronic Sounds 87%
  • Sound Textures 86%
  • Medium Fast 97%
  • Synthesizers 88%
  • Rock 60%
  • Happy-Uplifting 51%
  • Instrumental 98%
  • New Wave/80s Rock 69%
  • Downtempo/Ambient~Synth/Electronica 62%
  • Industrial&Gothic~Darkwave&Coldwave 100%
  • Downtempo/Ambient~Minimal_Wave/Synth&Minimal_Industrial_(Revival) 99%

… those last two being oddly specific. It also recommended some “similar tracks,” of which “Blind Mice” by Figure of 8 and “Kiss The Screen” by Nite Jewel fit surprisingly well. Try your own and see what it makes of you.

Musician links, George Michael on Joy Division.

Links: Selling yourself as a streaming artist, vacuum tubes, indie conspiracy theories.

Links: Slowdive return, GRIDI, Tetris on a Launchpad, BitTorrent Inc.

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Links: What.CD successors, the 1939 Voder, anaemic chart sales, the bagpipe AI.

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  • What.CD has successors! TorrentFreak and Digital Music News list a few. Having seen the “Library of Alexandria” go up in smoke with not a trace left, they have of course learnt from the mistakes of the What.CD spurious hipster exclusivity strategy. No wait, of course they haven’t, they’re using literally the same software (Gazelle) that What.CD used. I predict the same story and the same hipster snob tears a few years from now. I would hope that anything you some awful pirate gets off there, you they whack a copy of up on TPB where culture might actually be somewhat preserved. What am I saying, of course they won’t.

  • The story of the first machine to synthesize the human voice: from 1939, the Voder.

  • You can top the US Top 100 Albums with 29.893 copies. And you can make number 200 in the Top 200 with 737 records, though I’m assuming for that last there’s a lot of sales being missed.

  • Roko’s Basilisk, right, but on the bagpipes.

Links: Buy from Bandcamp on Friday, why Hollywood is(n’t) doomed, US pirate warning scheme fails.

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  • Spend all your money at Bandcamp tomorrow — they’re donating their entire 15% share from each sale to the ACLU, in honour of the spray-tan horror. Start at the bands and labels donating their 85% too.

  • Hollywood is doomed, because unions!! And not, say, blockbusterism in the pursuit of multi-hundred-million-dollar fourth sequels of superhero movies or making the cinema experience increasingly expensive and miserable. While there’s physically imaging things, movie crew isn’t about to disappear any more than roadies will disappear while live shows exist. Of course, CGI and super-simple animation might get somewhere.

  • With the exciting new system of warning letters to pirates about to go into place in the UK, the same scheme in the US has just been abandoned. Because actually, you can’t cut off someone’s internet just on the record and movie industries’ haphazard scattergun title-matching say-so.

 

Links: Marquee Moon, CD rot, how to be a better producer, rockin’ nuns.

Industry links: Spotify playlist SEO, SoundCloud financial woes, Cogent update.

Links: World’s dumbest terrorist, procedural music, bogus DMCAs, the editorial dictator.

Links: Bono and Pence, Richard Spencer and Depeche Mode. And dealing with musicians.

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reach out and punch face

No posts for a few days, I am sufficiently ill that I literally can’t listen to music. More Rocknerd maybe later. Buh.

Musician links: The bass master race, the history of guitar distortion, the Funky Drummer dies.


Links: VPN survey, a generated music startup, Metal Machine Music for Lou’s 75th.

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  • For when you need to hoist the Jolly Roger browse with privacy: TorrentFreak’s 2017 VPN survey.

  • Amper is a technology startup to sell procedurally generated music. (They use “artificial intelligence” as the buzzword to score venture capital. At least it wasn’t “blockchain”.) This should be interesting in terms of copyright and iterative exploration of the space of all possible melodies.

  • In honour of Lou Reed’s 75th birthday, Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds reminiscences on Metal Machine Music. (And the 2012 Metal Machine Trio installation.)

Links: Spotify hackers, voiceover woes, Cabaret Voltaire in 2017.

Links: Roland founder dies, workplace entrance themes, BitTorrent repivot.

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Links: A dumped Steinway, Kim Dotcom’s terrible album, early TR-808 hits, the history of disco.

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Musical user interfaces, copyright companies being themselves, the worst of Rolling Stone.

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There’s drum machines, then there’s a machine drummer.

Links: How to rig the charts, musicians’ vending machine, a malware music player, Internet Archive.

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Video: Go-Betweens, techno in six steps, a pop hit in four minutes.

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The rest of the day’s been the blockchain book. Here’s how come the Bitcoin price hit $1900: because you can’t get ActualMoney out of Bitfinex and several other exchanges, so there’s nothing to spend it on but more bitcoins. And of course seeing the 100% predictable and predicted effects of a proprietary software monoculture that people like me have only been warning about for a couple of decades. But with Bitcoin.

Lester Bangs on Brian Eno.

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Yesterday was Brian Eno’s 69th birthday. Lester Bangs interviews Brian Eno, apparently an unpublished interview. Mr Eno is a thoroughly delightful fellow.

I found this from looking at the Dangerous Minds article for Eno’s birthday and trying to track down the record sleeve at the top. A Google Image search on it and going to All Sizes turned up this blog post linking to it. The page has long since come down. A find, lurking in the Internet Archive, unindexed, waiting for a determined reader. Tracking down useful stuff lurking in the IA will be the future of humanities scholarship.

Here’s the documentary Dangerous Minds posted. It says 1994, they think it’s 1992. There’s a bit of German at the beginning and the rest is in English.

Bonus: how Brian Eno managed to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s urinal “Fountain”. Allegedly.

 

It appears to be a bootleg of a Peel Session of “Baby’s On Fire”. But surely a sleeve this obviously good must have been used elsewhere.

Links: AIR Studios Montserrat, Carl Bernstein the pop critic, net neutrality for musicians.

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Links: Declining guitar sales, I Feel Love, tinnitus.

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  • Electric guitar sales are through the floor, down from 1.5 million annually a decade ago to 1 million now. The charts need more guitar heroes.

  • Another retrospective on the writing and production of “I Feel Love”, including what synthesis was like in 1977. I didn’t know the kickdrum beat was Keith Forsey going thump-thump-thump for seven minutes, ‘cos they couldn’t synthesize a good kick sound. “It is safe to say it was the blueprint for all electronic dance music today.”

  • Oh look, that’s topical: Tinnitus!

  • Finishing off the damn blockchain book. Now doing final text revisions, trying to write the intro and conclusion, and awaiting some artwork.

Well chaps, SoundCloud may be buggered. Save what you can.

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It turns out that SoundCloud can’t just continue stumbling forth with no clear direction or business plan and losing twice as much money in a year as they take in revenue. After firing a pile of people with no warning last week, it came out yesterday that they have money “until Q4”, which is 80 days away. (SoundCloud denies the TechCrunch report, but TechCrunch calls BS and stands by their story.)

Everything about SoundCloud seems to have been a mess. The Hacker News thread after the layoffs has a pile of stories like this one:

Frankly none of this should be surprising: nobody there could figure out a product definition nor a monetization plan. What is more: the engineering organization at SoundCloud at large was completely fractured and suffered from in-fighting. Nobody trusted anyone across organizations. There was no shortage of bullying even. Taking that in mind, SoundCloud’s downfall was to be expected. Because of caustic environment even before the financial crunch, they couldn’t execute.

The Internet Archive is the obvious new home for the content, but that won’t come for free. Jason Scott from IA asked his boss Brewster Kahle about it, and tweeted:

Had a quick chat with @brewster_kahle about the Soundcloud thing. To host a Petabyte of data for forseable future would be ~ $1.5/2mil.

The Archive Team estimates SoundCloud as about 2.5 petabytes, and is working out how to selectively save what it reasonably can without accusations of copyright infringement.

Chance The Rapper, who credits his SoundCloud with starting his career, tweeted yesterday “I’m working on the SoundCloud thing” and posted on his Facebook today “Just had a very fruitful call with Alex Ljung. SoundCloud is here to stay.” Ljung has posted positively as well. We’ll see if they’ve pulled a rabbit out of the hat … but in the meantime, it’s worth remembering that the other term for “the cloud” is “other people’s computers,” and get downloading and preserving. As you should be anyway.

Oh, and play all ours while you can!

Synth links: Detroit techno, old gadgets, TR-08, Alan Vega, making your synthesizer fart.

Producers: Max Martin literally farts a top ten hit; Butch Vig; Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies.


Pop links: The missing V chord, why pop comes from Los Angeles, how earworms work.

Links: Devo “Satisfaction”, failed electronic instruments, subgenres of electronic music.

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  • Devo got their start with their cover of “Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. Warner Music required them to get approval from the writers … and Mick Jagger liked it. Their performance on Saturday Night Live pretty much started their career:

Links: TR-808 in Wikipedia, the Nick Cave graphic novel, punk podcast, Big Muff.

Links: Reviews and auteurs in the streaming age, Grant Hart’s last interview.

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  • Adam Clair at Real Life holds that written reviews are now superfluous, because music is readily streamable — so why read words when you can just click play! This misses an important point: listening is slow, but reading is quick, and anyone who was going to read to get tips on new stuff will still be doing so — nobody who uses Alexa as a radio was reading in the first place. I would be delighted if I could just link a pile of stuff and say “here, this is great!” because trying to write about music is arse. But the precious commodity these days is attention, and a well-turned sentence is the hook to get people to even click on the thing you feel the need to tell them about. And that’s quite apart from music being about everything else and not just the sounds at all.

 


Links: Sgt. Pepper, Raincoats, Severed Heads on DAWs, Tommy Keene RIP.

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  • Some 1987 interviews with George Martin and the other engineers on the recording of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
  • A career rundown on The Raincoats, the not-entirely-expected post-punk wellsprings of grunge.
  • A week between Rocknerd posts! My apologies, I’ve been horribly busy. I started a Patreon, which is mostly marketed to the blockchain news blog, but I’ll note Rocknerd posts there as well so as to help generalise it to the rest of my writing. So if you want to encourage this here thing, give me money. Or attention, I’ll take attention. Also writing reviews. Look at that tottering review pile …


Become a Patron!

 

 

Links: Chapter Music, Damned Industrial top 20, ZynAddSubFx terms, iTunes shutdown, vinyl clog.

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  • God it’s been hectic. I did BBC News at Ten, which, you’ll be pleased to hear, sold a ton of books. I just spent a week ill in bed. This thing I quickly dashed off last Sunday has somehow become the second most popular thing I have ever written anywhere (first is this, third is this). Friday’s 25% off Bitcoin sale was, I assure you, hilarious.

 

 

Links: Dick O’Dell/Y Records, DX-7 presets, Mony Mony, going algorithm-free, Hypebot.

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  • The story of writing the first Yamaha DX-7 presets. You know these sounds — they were all over every pop record in the early ’80s. The video doesn’t have the sounds, but Dave Bristow tells the story.
  • In 2018, Kaitlyn Tiffany wants to find music without algorithms. I applaud, but must confess that Spotify’s Discover Weekly has totally been delivering for me, both new and old. Also my inbox is often outdone by my favourite method of musical discovery: going through “New Arrivals” on a tag in Bandcamp — maybe a 1 in 30 hit rate, which is actually pretty awesome for literally going through the slush pile. How do you think I find so many things nobody’s ever heard of to review? I go looking. So if you’re after an algorithm-free discovery experience, you should just read Rocknerd.
  • Of course, this requires me to find time for reviews any time soon — it’s still all go here, my word. The bl*ckch**n book got reviewed in the New York Review of Books, holy shit! “A sober riposte to all the upbeat forecasts about cryptocurrency.” I have a review quote with authority! So media’s been taking off too. (I did BBC Tech Tent on Friday. The segment from 9:20–16:15.) I also wrote a series for the blog called “Why you can’t cash out”, which has been as popular as you’d expect with that name.

 

 


Links: Dragon Ball Super mass piracy, origin of the gated reverb snare, the return of illegal raves.

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  • Toei Animation and the Japanese government: “Please do not pirate Dragon Ball Super.” Local governments across Latin America: “lol GFY.”
  • Thirty years later, illegal raves are all the go again in Sheffield and London. For some reason that first article was deleted from the actual nme.com site.

 

 

 

 

Links: Spotify metadata, VU meters, songwriting camps, Disney defends fair use, the history of Smash Hits.

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  • I was pretty sure someone at Spotify would read my whinge. They’re now promising to fix the data themselves, not just trust the record companies to do it for them.

 

“Twenty Deadly Diseases,” Lausanne, 7 November 1986

Links: BitTorrent “web” client, the women of Rolling Stone, Deerful how-to, “Despacito” on kazoo.

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  • BitTorrent Inc. releases a “web” version of uTorrent! … it involves downloading a Windows-only binary with bundled adware, but it’s “web.” Bram Cohen has long since left BitTorrent Inc., the company’s been bought by cryptocurrency bozosmultiple cryptocurrency bozos were apparently chasing it — and the BitTorrent protocol remains open source and completely unaffected.
  • I’m moving house, and won’t have reliable internet at home until Monday 1 October or thereabouts. Don’t expect much on the blogs.

 

 

 

Records: Nero Bellum, Am I Dead Yet?, O.R.k. (2019).

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NERO BELLUM: NFRN° (Metropolis) — This album exists for Nero Bellum to show off his actually-analogue modular synth collection, and build all the sounds from the ground up — “each piece in this collection is an exploration of synthesis in the modular domain. Each piece was improvised, with no overdubs, & without the use of computers in the creative process.” So it’s full of crunchy and obnoxious noises you haven’t quite heard before. Non-minimal synth. Some tracks get a bit much like equipment demos, and if you’ve heard a minute of the sound, you don’t really need the other five. But it’s an interesting listen. Musicians especially should check this one out. Needs to come with a technical manual.

 

 

AM I DEAD YET?: Am I Dead Yet? (Wire-sound) — Mary Byker and Noko from Apollo 440 doing aspiring movie themes. Every song is presented — produced within an inch of its life, both in sound and songwriting. None of the parts are new — there’s cliches by the truckload — but they know how to get precisely as overwrought as is reasonable with the materials to hand. “Joe Meek Shall Inherit the Earth” (above) is where it all comes together. This is precisely the right amount of too clever for its own good.

 

 

O.R.k.: Ramagehead (Kscope) — Prog supergroup. Heavy on the noodling, twiddliness and hard rock histrionics, but saved by lots of grungy and metal bits. First track (above) “Kneel To Nothing”‘s grungy guitar intro starts the album off great, even as it goes twiddly after that. Third track “Beyond Sight” is not twiddly and holds things up well. “Strangled Words” has good bits in between the twiddling — though it comes across like the supergroup all wanted to chuck something in. It’s prog, but I do like those first and third tracks. Full points for keeping nine tracks of prog down to 39 minutes.

Protodome: 4000AD (2020). A chiptune jazz-funk EP played entirely on a 1-bit square wave.

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Blake Troise is the chiptuner known as Protodome. He’s spent the past four years doing a Ph.D., in the course of which he’s recorded 4000AD — “a tiny, 4-track, 1-bit, progressive jazz album. Each track is synthesised using a C script (which converts a custom MML dialect to WAV by running microcontroller code and recording the output) and is a fun exercise in both low-memory programming and 1-bit music.”

The 1-bit is somewhat faster than 44.1kHz — “I’m using a technique called the pulse interleaving method, which basically rapidly arpeggiates at speeds faster than than human hearing. When this is downsampled (to sensible sample rates), it becomes a true change in voltage.”

(Really, that’s just pulse-width modulation, which you can encode any arbitrary waveform with. But synthesising music with PWM is a bit more work.)

The music is pleasant — didn’t grab me, but didn’t offend — but the album is worth at least one listen, just to see how much you can achieve with one bit.

Blake also has an article in the Journal of Sound and Music in Games on how he did it — “The 1-Bit Instrument: The Fundamentals of 1-Bit Synthesis, Their Implementational Implications, and Instrumental Possibilities”.

An image carefully constructed to make musicians cry.

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Musicians who have a casual attitude to the continued use of their eyes may want to look over this advertising image and see if they can spot a single thing right about it:

 

  • holding it like that
  • lipstick with a reed instrument
  • mouth is slack, can’t play a reed instrument with embouchure like that
  • is that two left hands?
  • is the right left arm twice as long as the left left arm?
  • just to mess with you, the one correct aspect of the photo is that the oboe and its reed have been assembled correctly

The photo is of Taiwanese jeweller and musician Bella Chen, who wanted to advertise her new ring collection a couple of years ago. Chen can apparently play an oboe perfectly well, but this was a pose to advertise the rings.

That is her right hand, and the perspective makes more sense — the hands, at least — when it’s not a photograph of a photograph at that angle.

Chen paid for the image to go up as an advertisement at Tianmu Baseball Stadium for three days. Here’s the original:

 

 

When Classic FM went “what on earth,” Chen put the Classic FM article on the home page for her shop, Bella Couture. There’s no such thing as bad publicity!

Valedictions, Vangelis

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It seems to be all a little bit disturbing to write shortly after the death of Klaus Schulze, that one must also put finger to keyboard to comment on the loss of Evángelos Odysséas Papathanassíou, better known as “Vangelis” on May 17th. Like his colleague of electronic music of the same vintage, Vangelis had a prodigious and notable output dating back at least as far as Aphrodite’s Child in 1967, which Vangelis formed with Demis Roussos, famous for the single “Rain and Tears” derived from Pachelbel’s Canon in D major, and one of the most impressive progressive-psychedelic rock albums, “666” (1972). Even in this period, Vangelis began engaging in solo work writing experimental and film scores for film, for which he would become famous. His first solo album was “Fais que ton rêve soit plus long que la Nuit” (1972), a sound collage of the May 1968 events in France (Aphrodite’s Child was stuck in Paris at the time), and the first film score “L’Apocalypse des animaux” (1973), the two being quite suggestive of where his political loyalties lay.

The two albums “Earth” (1973) and “Heaven & Hell” (1975) firmly established Vangelis on his solo path, especially the latter where he departed from a progressive sound to one of synthesized classics which, in this author’s considered opinion, reached a superb highpoint with “Opéra Sauvage” (1979). Mention must also be of “China” (1979) which included significant Chinese instrumentation which was somewhat unknown to the occidental ear at the time. Also of special note is symphonic and classical “Mask” (1985) (not to be confused with the Bauhaus album of the same name of course, although a Bauhaus-Vangelis fusion would have been interesting), and the experimental and acclaimed album “Invisible Connections” (1985), which had a curious pressing error where the two sides were reversed.

In addition, there was the collaboration with high-octave vocalist Jon Anderson, previously of Yes. Vangelis had been previously considered as a replacement for Rick Wakeman in the mid-70s, but Anderson did some vocal work with Vangelis on some of the pieces in the years that followed, notably the harp on Opéra Sauvage. Four albums came out from their collaboration with some very successful singles, “I Hear You Now” from Short Stories (1980) and “I’ll Find My Way Home” from The Friends of Mr. Cairo (1981), with a characteristic dreamy synth-pop. The album, The Friends of Mr. Cairo, is notable for its exceptional 12-minute tribute to detective, gangster, and romance film noir.

However, Vangelis was most famous for his film and television compositions, especially for Chariots of Fire (1981), the SF-noir Blade Runner (1982), the haunting sounds of Missing (1982), the orchestral brooding and ominous in 1492: Conquest of Paradise (1992), and the otherworldly music for Carl Sagan’s Cosmos (1980). From the score to 1492 Vangelis received an Echo Award as “International Artist Of The Year”, and RTL Golden Lion Award for the “Best Title Theme for a TV Film or a Series”. Nevertheless, Vangelis’ most famous piece is certainly the opening theme for Chariots of Fire, “Titles”, which has been subject to a number of amusing parodies and is still mistakingly referred to as “Chariots of Fire”, something that will certainly trigger exasperated Vangelis aficionados. “Chariots of Fire” is actually a twenty-minute epic ranging from gentle waves to crashing crescendos. As an entirely subjective representation and an indication of my reading habits of the time, as a teenager I would often fall asleep to this, dreaming of Tolkien’s Noldor Elves crossing from the Undying Lands to Middle Earth. I was that sort of teenager (well.. before I discovered punk rock).

In the 21st century, Vangelis found himself following on from his space exploration interests from Cosmos to work with both NASA and the ESA on a number of music projects. With NASA, this included the live performance and subsequent studio release of “Mythodea” (2001) for NASA’s Odyssey mission to Mars, which was launched that year. Mythodea combined several facets of Vangelis’ style, including the deep and militaristic sounds, along with the orchestral and choral presentations. For the ESA he composed some short pieces for the ESA’s Philae lander on Comet 67P in 2014, which would be elaborated and incorporated into the studio album “Rosetta” (2016), and in 2018 he composed the limited release “The Stephen Hawking Tribute” which was from the score for Stephen Hawking’s memorial; as Hawking’s ashes were interred at Westminster Abbey, the music with Hawking’s speaking was beamed by the ESA to the black hole, 1A 0620-00, which is the nearest to Earth. His final studio album was “Juno to Jupiter” (2021) inspired by NASA’s Juno space probe and orbital mission to Jupiter.

With an enormous range over more than five decades, it is difficult enough to give a summary of the career of Vangelis. His contributions have ranged from the highly notable, to the downright famous, and often provided a connection for those who felt that their life was either in the wilds or journeying into the vast expanse of space. Capturing all those in a range of musical styles and influences was certainly his art, and the mark he has left on musical history will certainly be lasting. For those who have been touched by the magnificent sounds of the electronic musician trio of the 1970s and 1980s, following Schulze and Vangelis – one can only ask – dear Jean-Michel Jarre, do not die this year – even if it makes aesthetic sense.





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