But theme, theme, theme, theme....
Books scattered, papers strewn, digi-bookmarks marked. I was getting ready to teach an undergraduate course called "New Media" (not my title) that would be focusing on the computer as cultural artifact -- getting inside that badass black box and theorizing the chip out of it. Had machines on my mind, algorithms on the brain, codes in my nodes.
The digging began with music that was made with computers, and led me around to early stuff that experimented with electronic sounds, and later stuff that keeps on trucking with electronics and computers with the same enthusiasm as the pioneers. I liked what I found.
I was also lured in by groups and songs that were about these things in name/theme only. One gets the impression that you can hardly consider yourself a band these days (or those days) if you don't have at least one album that celebrates electronics (or robots).
Those 0s and 1s on the album cover are my digits, by the way. I didn't realize until after I'd designed this that it could look like finger puppet penises and vaginas. Well, if you fancy that interp (my new word for today, rhymes with 'perp' as used on CSI or Law & Order SVU or any other acronymmed TV cop show), you're welcome to it. Really, though, I was trying to allude to the musician's hand betwix' the computerized mix.
So on with the data:
1. Detune / Radio Symphony Orchestra Vienna 1:07
I broke a wee rule here, since this track is actually composed by Karlheinz Essl, who will also be providing us with track 20. But this song is damn short, and is played by a whole orchestra, which track 20 is not, so really, there's a lot of different musicians involved. Essl, an Austrian "composer, performer, improviser, media artist and composition teacher," uses a lot of computing in compositions, music installations, and performances. Detune is a "fragment for oboe and large orchestra", written for the 40th anniversary of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
Every time you refresh Karlheinz's homepage, there's a new photo of him, along with a weird phrase that may or may not be machine generated. Included are such things as:
trims a modest technique
fails to achieve the proposed sentence
messes around with the problematic search
flattens the inner revelation
obeys the essence of a junction
departs from his data track
2. electric to me turn / bruce haack 1:53
This was a fun find. This guy is my alma mater, for god's sake. He's apparently from Nordegg, a town not far from Rocky Mountain House (Alberta, Canada), which Cucumbah and I happened to drive through this summer. If I'd known about Haack, I would have asked about him in the town museum (doubles as the coffee shop). Word is, Haack tried to get into University of Alberta's music program, but was shown the hand. He took psychology instead, and then went off to NYC to get groovy and experimental in ways probably frowned on by central-west Albertans at that time. Have a look at these vids and fall in love like I did.
And that's not nearly all, folks. Check out Haack's 'dermatron'... a human theremin, plays on skin, not air:
Perhaps the neatest thing about Haack is that a large part of his discography is made up of albums for kids, featuring "Miss Nelson".
3. Take It In / Hot Chip 4:08
I love how this song moves back and forth between arty dissonant pop and 80s inspirational easy listening. This track is from their latest album, one life stand.
4. Summertime Clothes / Animal Collective 4:30
Animal Collective's latest album, Merriweather Post Pavilion, made it onto a bunch of 'top' lists for best music of 2009, and rightly so. This is music for the church choirs of the future. The electroplay makes a perfectly calibrated nest for the complex vocal layering -- and these guys are really singing. Big bonus points for having an album cover image that fucks with our perceptual apparatus.
5. Step Aside / Efterklang 4:39
Efterklang is a Danish group with 3 studio albums (newest one, Magic Chairs, being released any day now). Step Aside is from their first (2004). Wikipedia reports that Efterklang means "remembrance" or "reverberation". They're coming to play a small venue in Montreal shortly -- looking forward to seeing how they fill the room with that sweet, seductive sound. They performed their entire second album, Parades, with the Danish National Chamber Orchestra. Check out 'Caravan':
Update: Checked out the show at the small venue. It was well attended and supremely enjoyable. When they introduced "Step Aside," I felt like they were playing it just for me. This is a truly happy bunch of musicians, who smile as they sing. They're also a very generous and caring band, treating both their compositions and their audience like precious jewels. I left the show with a profoundly calm optimism I hadn't felt for some time.
6. Symphony For A Spider Plant / Mort Garson 2:41
Mort Garson is another born-in-Canada (New Brunswick) electro pioneer, known mainly for his Moog synthesizer compositions during the 60s and 70s, especially his "The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds", with tracks for every astrological sign (Elektra Records (1967)). Though there are spacier songs out there (enjoy "Deja Vu" from "Ataraxia The Unexplained" (1975) below), my four years of greenhouse work compelled me to choose from a Garson album entitled "Mother Earth's Plantasia...warm earth music for plants... and the people who love them" (1976). Other track titles: Concerto for Philodendron and Pathos, Swingin' Spathiphyllums, Ode to an African Violet...:
7. skip for love / minikomi 3:19
I found this cool track on a chiptune blog out of Australia. Chiptune is a type of music generated by computer or sound chips (e.g. from Atari, Nintendo, Game Boy, etc.), or that generates the sound chip sound using other means. minkomi 'itself' is apparently from Australia, residing in Japan, and recently launched M>E>T>R>O>D>U>B, a dub-oriented chiptune label.
8. Dancing Choose / TV On The Radio 2:56
I first saw TV on the Radio on the Colbert Report, likely a billion years after 'the kids' had picked up on this group. This album is apparently the more poppy of all their efforts... I like the media frenzy whipped by the title and first lines (about the newspaper man), not to mention the album name (Dear Science).
9. One Note Samba / Jean-Jacques Perrey & Ger… 2:08
One Note Samba was originally 'Samba de Uma Nota So, composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim. It appeared on the Grammy-winning 1963 Getz/Byrd/Jobim album "Jazz Samba". This version is by Jean-Jacques Perrey and Gershon Kingsley, from their 1967 collaboration, Kaleidoscopic Vibrations: Spotlight on the Moog (1967). Perrey was experimenting with sound looping, splicing with tape and scissors when he befriended Robert Moog, to become an early Moog synth musician. Check out the Moog-less one note melody line with Jobim, lyrics, backup vocals and flute:
AND Ella's scat rendition:
10. Let X = X / Laurie Anderson 3:54
"Let it Be" for postmoderns. From Big Science (1982). Genius words. "It's a sky-blue sky. Satellites are out tonight!" An especially appropriate song by NASA's first ever artist-in-residence.
"Oh boy. Right. Again."
Let Laurie = Laurie:
11. To A Little Radio / Chumbawamba 1:08
Must divulge the embarrassing truth that I thought this was a Sting song, having heard his version first, as "The Secret Marriage" on "...Nothing Like The Sun" (1987). I now know that this was a composition by Hanns Eisler, a product of a longstanding creative collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. This was part of "Hollywood Songbook" which Eisler composed in exile, in California, where he worked writing popular film scores (two of them Oscar-nominated). Hollywood Songbook is a "cycle of art songs" -- lieder -- based on poems, many by Brecht, including this one, An den kleinen Radioapparat. Media studies is fond of citing Brecht's reflections on radio's democratic potential.
"Radio is one sided when it should be two. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him.“Chumbawamba did right to stick to Brecht, and not write new lyrics like Sting did. Here it is with the original German poem:
12. Golden Phone / Micachu 2:44
Don't know much about Micachu, but really enjoy this album, Jewellery (2009). It's complicated, tough to listen to at times/in places, sweet and dainty in others. Dissonant, experimental, spastic, captivating.
13. Plug Me In / Add N To (X) 5:32
This song's title refers to electronics. The band's name is an equation. It's the perfect combo for this mix. Add (N) to (X) is also fond of making sex-themed vids. The "Plug Me In" video adopts porn vid stylings while featuring sexy women having hot fun amid a variety of gadgets -- see it, read about it here.
Another Add (N) to (X) song called "Metal Fingers in My Body" a racy 'sex with robots' animation.
14. Abwärts / Echokrank 2:12
I don't know anything about this group, just stumbled on this song at the site of "Gagarin Records", which might be defunct. Also have no idea what the title of this song means, but am quite curious. If you find out, let me know. I would put a picture of them up, but Blogspot doesn't let me use the paste function anymore for some reason. So no more photos in this post. Here's a video that pans back on the photo I would have included:
15. 09 The Last Song-1 / Plant Life 3:37
PlantLife, out of LA, are Jack Splash, Panda One, Dina Deadly and DJ Rashida. They've described their sound as 'tomorrow music', a mix of funk, electro, hiphop, disco, bit o' this, bit o' that, eclectic-like. Shout out to DJ Jesh for suggesting it for my disk. This disk needed some groove.
16. Are Friends Electric / The Dead Weather 4:25
A remake of Tubeway Army/Gary Numan's "Are Friends Electric?" by "American alternative rock supergroup," The Dead Weather (says Wikipedia). Cucumbah thought it was a bit heretical to include this cover -- the Numan original is luscious. But doesn't The Dead Weather one grow on you, too? A Numan fanvid for comparative purposes:
17. 22 Moog Cookbook - 01 - Black Hole Sun 4:23
A tribute to Moogs and Moog Music, Moog Cookbook is a 2-person band that composes everything on analog synthesizers. The Moog Cookbookis their 1995 album. (Love how this article from the Moog archive talks about how Canadian customs officials wouldn't let the early Moog in the country... a cultured Quebecois customs officer, versed in 'musique concrete,' saves the day and gets the papers signed.)
In the spirit of homage, I chose Black Hole Sun in honour of A-Funk's version on last year's "Not ABBA" compilation. I hope this nod to Soundgarden reworkings can be a continuing theme for our group.
18. Loop duplicate my heart / Suburban Kids with Biblical Names 3:07
Cheerful Swedish boy duo, singing about love and computers. Fits the bill. Another taste:
19. Jetpack Blues, Sunset Hues / Anamanaguchi 3:28
Couldn't have a computer music themed disk without including some more 8-bit chiptune, of the Nintendo sort. Anamanaguchi's psychedelic graphics and jumpy bitmaps cook up the right dose of hyper (hold the Ritalin!):
20. Hoquetus / Essl, Karlheinz 3:43
I love that this song uses fragments of speech as its structural elements. At least, that's what they seem like to me. Nothing better than bits and blurbs of chit and chat that make no sense, but generate an arresting pattern. Apparently, Essl performed this live on "m@ze°2", his computer-based instrument (23 March and 19 November, 1999). Here's a look at the instrument, Karlheinz's performance style. This one's definitely got a bit of Hoquetus happening, oo-oo, aa-aa, ee-ee:
21. IBM 1403 (Printer) / Jóhann Jóhannsson 9:33
I love the buildup in this song. It's beautiful. At first I thought it would be too snoozy for this mix, but I'd never take it out now. It's from Icelander Johannsson's 2006 album (4AD) entitled "IBM 1401, A User's Manual," which consists of 5 tracks inspired by a recording Johannsson's father made of an IBM mainframe computer. He had been the chief maintenance engineer for the 1401 since it's arrival in Iceland in 1964. The story of the computer, the work of the engineers and technicians, their efforts to make it perform outside its business capacities -- they made music and recordings -- as well as the funeral ceremony they held to commemorate it when it was dismantled in 1971, is behind Johannsson's project and compositions. The story is touching -- read more about it here.
Here's Track 1, IBM 1401 Processing Unit
22. daisy / IBM 704, 1962 1:39
In 1961, the IBM 7094 was programmed to 'sing' -- this was the song, Daisy Bell. It was also the song HAL sang before being forever unplugged in 2001: A Space Odyssey. I thought it was an appropriate outro to the disk. A suitable ending to these liner notes, I think, is this 11:00 youtube video that's called "Hal 9000's voice played 2000 times slower"... it's cool and creepy.
