Omni magazine was a science/futurism publication founded by Bob Guccione Jr. that ran from the late seventies to the mid-nineties. It ushered in a new era of popular science journalism, being something like the Wired magazine of its time, but with more of a speculative bent. Omni regularly featured pieces from science-fiction luminaries including Arthur C. Clarke and William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace in Omni's pages. The speculative side also meant a predilection for new age-y and UFO-related pseudo-science. In the mid-nineties Omni was the first print publication to go entirely online. You can read an article in Slate magazine here about the history of Omni, and as well visit the online tribute site.
Here is a clip from Omni's short-lived TV incarnation, featuring the analog synth wizardress / nerd pin-up Suzanne Ciani as she composes music for a pinball game. Not only is it remarkably hypnotic to watch her program computers and synthesizers, I also love the smug goofball TV show host at the beginning, lounging by a space lamp and saying "isn't it amazing that electricity of this kind will one day be used to regrow human limbs?" in a ridiculously smug voice, summing up the sort of self-oblivious giddiness of 70s futurism.
Ciani, a student of synthesizer pioneer Don Buchla, has enjoyed a successful career as a musician and commercial composer for several decades, having composed the sound effects for the MECO disco Stars Wars record, releasing her classic Seven Waves album, and scoring numerous commercials. These included a coke commercial in which she used synthesizers to generate the satisfying PSSSHT sound of a soda can being opened.
WAV files of Ciani's designs for the Xenon pinball game shown in the Omni clip are posted on her website.
Here is Suzanne in another clip, this time from the children's tv show 3-2-1 Contact, explaining the properties of electronic sound.
A milestone in classic house, instantly recognizable not only for its peppy 80s synth riff but for its nonsensical vocal sample, "brutal with the millimeter!," "let's get brutal" is perhaps a fitting track to cap off a summer spent dissertating in Germany. For who else gets more brutal with the millimeter than Germans?
Why are Germans millimetrically brutal? Because they're afraid of disorder. The German consciousness, particularly in engineering, design, and politics, is palpably sensitive and fearful about chaos, about waste, negativity, about shit. Go to any residential German courtyard - the site of ten different trash bins for all the various subcategories of waste should be evidence enough that they are serious about shit, about calculating and containing it. Germans are brutal with the millimeter because they have a slippery-slope mentality: if things start to get a little out of hand, it's only a matter of time before they plunge headlong into the flames. This explains larger political gestures, like the government attacking Scientology, as for good reason the Germs are rather wary of cultish, power-hungry ideologes, as well as smaller gestures, like never ever jaywalking ever, or when passersby call to you when you're biking, to indicate that you are in fact biking on the wrong side of the street. It's not about the particular instance, but the fear of the inevitable spread of social decay that your particular transgression will no doubt contribute to.
Why are German milimetrically brutal? Because it's fun. Ruthlessness gives them sadistic pleasure. Take the bouncer at Berghain, last time I was there. I rolled up with a female friend from the States and two Argentinians named Nico. My friend attempted to make a casual, flirtatious joke, the kind one imagines American bouncers would warm to courteously. The Berghain guard in contrast remained glacially serious, before replying with all the threatening weight of a military officer during interrogation: "You've made a joke, but it's not funny. Look, no one is laughing."
this saturday night at the MoMA, Gavin Russom, DFA's analog-synth wizard, performs as Black Meteoric Star with visuals by assume vivid astro focus. looks...ravey. Russom's last outing, Days of Mars together with Delia Gonzalez, is one of DFA's greatest and weirdest releases, so hope rides on the BMS, which has a debut release on june 9th.
in the title track to his first solo album, peter makes it clear that if there is a distinct line between the unbridled violence of child play and the terrors of real war, he doesn't know where it is. Great edgy white-boy stiff electronic funk and sonic trickery make this a fantastic futuristic pop single, and an edit-ready jewel, key insight into peter's work prior to his outsized 80s mtv ubiquity.
the literary equivalent to this song is obviously ender's game by orson scott card.
the cinematic equivalent to this song is obviously wargames starring matthew broderick.
10. new order - blue monday (jam & spoon andrea mix)
11. andy summer & robert fripp - bewitched
12. seefeel - gatha
13. edward artemyev - station
14. richard pinhas - iceland (part two)
15. wind harp - beginnings
16. this mortal coil - waves become wings
17. arp - the rising sun
18. deuter - life is love
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text by william rauscher
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Bretly and t'aja were young newlyweds, and in those days they often went to puerto rico where t'aja's parents had built their vacation home, several hours' drive from san juan, on the southwestern corner, where there was only sand and crystal water and puerto ricans. they loved each other very much and were lucky to have found each other so early in life, as you could count on one hand the number of people who could put up with the sort of foul-mouthed, slang-drenched absurdities that served them as love's own secret language.
In those days they often went to puerto rico, to escape the grey pit of pressurized despair that the city had become. Some neighborhoods in the south bronx had ceased using money altogether, relying instead on an ad-hoc barter system, its currency regulated by the demand for ketamine and bootleg reggaeton. With funding for social services and scientific research gone dry, the bedbug infestation had worsened, in part as the species itself had mutated. Left untreated, the venom in bites from this evolved bedbug could reach the brain, causing paralysis, hallucinations, aggressive dementia. by mayoral decree, staten island had become a borough-sized quarantine-zone for those citizens plagued by the bug.
Sitting half-upright, bretly could comfortably rest his iphone in his lap to see live webcam footage from the staten riots, where those forceably relocated had begun to stagger out in the streets, accompanied by members of the ACLU, who, protesting "Gitmo-era tactics," had been illegally airlifted onto the island. They could be spotted by their full-body orange ACLU jumpsuits designed to protect from infection. Bretly swallowed a muscle relaxant and a swig of rum and watched his wife swim in the saltwater pool.
Restless after several days of blissful inactivity, bretly and t'aja decided to take a scenic jaunt to the radar telescope in Arecibo. To their surprise, they learned that the observatory had, deliberately with very little fanfare, been sold by NASA to a private buyer in the past six months. With government funds running scarce, the observatory had gotten the axe. The telescope itself was a ruined marvel, the edge of its basin now overgrown with foliage, its suspended antenna now rickety, with a snapped cable or two, its once-white surface gone piss yellow from the tropical climate. When t'aja stepped to the viewing ledge, she believed she could still hear, somehow, those since-ceased signals, interstellar echoes, white noise-rumblings of cosmic dust. Shards of electric sound, whirlwinds of voices running backwards, lonely pulses of green light that blink across unfathomable blackness.
The telescope had been sold to a professor doctor wolfgang spiegelman, a shady, spittle-mouthed east German with a glass eye, who told them he had renamed the observatory the Transworld Communications Institute, and that in the next few weeks his small team of devoted followers would begin arriving, in time for the onset of the institute's spring semester. Spiegelman came across as half-guru, half-huckster, as if perpetually on the verge of believing his own bullshit once and for all. Bretly couldn't decide which was worse, the possibility that spiegelman was a remorseless cynic, or a deluded evangelist with an overactive imagination. Bretly had a sinking feeling about the whole set-up, and wanted to get in the car and go back home right away, but he knew better than to leave a lunatic German alone in charge of some piece of gargantuan, semi-abandoned technology in the middle of the Puerto Rican jungle.
white noise: late sixties rogue psychedelic-electronic mind-melter, holy grail for avant-weirdo obsessives. the first side keeps to a restrained pop framework, I guess if you consider sound-effect orgy recordings to be pop, while the second grows a beard and gets highly nasty, depicting the inner world of the spectral undead ("Visitations") and then go into a no-holds-barred abyssal freakout called "The Black Mass: An Electric Storm in Hell." There's later white noise records but they're basically solo Vorhaus albums. "An Electric Storm" is an unparalleled cannonball of whiplash studio effects and lysergic lasers.
delia derbyshire: hicks sent this link, to a post about a batch of unreleased tapes recorded by derbyshire. Today if you are a male guitar player you can impossibly fantasize about nico, if you are a laptop dork you prefer delia. She worked at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and was a groundbreaker in electronic sound experimentation, her claim to fame being the recording of the Dr. Who theme. The tapes at this BBC link are nuts. Orbital's Hartnoll rightly observes that one of them could be coming out on Warp records next week. Delia did a bunch of sound manipulation on "an electric storm" as well, which explains alot. It makes playing with ableton live seem like monkeyshines by comparison.
Three songs to inaugurate the days of a hazy, palid, low-temp submergence.
1. I'm mildly obsessed with this release by Thomas Melchior on Cadenza. It's a gorgeous, light-rhythmed minimal bliss-out, with drifty girl vocals. It feels like if you're scuba-diving and you look up and see the filtered sunlight flickering down through the water, a shimmering, diaphanous curtain. It's great for walking around on a pale afternoon, watching gusts of wind scatter leaves across the earth.
2. Track from Fennesz's latest, "Black Sea." Why do electronic musicians associate winter/cold weather worlds with metallic, hi-frequency reverb? like the kind you imagine on a Hannett-produced snare drum. It works for me, I'm just curious about the psycho-aesthetic link-up. Here thrown pebbles of white noise plunk past spare, sonorous clusters of sampled guitar, all ebbing and flowing like ripples on a gentle pond.
3. From his album, the well-titled "Surface of a Broken Marching Band." Feels very much of the Fennesz school, but with some lovely low-tuned fractured hip-hop beats lurking in the murk.
The topic of each month's player at AC is a carefully guarded secret. It is so carefully guarded, that I myself don't know what it is until about two weeks into the month itself. Those who are truly in tune with the monthly theme's unconscious vibrations, however, are able to jack in to its conceits and respond to them ahead of time. Such is the case with Bret P.'s uncannily prescient post of a video in which fax machines perform a cover of a Radiohead song.
What's effective about this video is not that it's inhuman, but that it's still somehow human. If it was just inhuman, who would care? It's about the persistent trace of the human, how it be displaced, occupy weird territories, be transformed.
On that note, the theme this month, as foreshadowed by Neil Young's Trans, is electronic affairs. We're talking about electronic/non-electronic cross-breeding jungle fever in general - could be, as in the case of Neil Young, Paul McCartney, Carly Simon, and so on, a random dip into electronic waters by a pop artist, could be a weird mash-up, or dub or remix, or a song that serves to indicate how a whole genre took a momentary weird techno detour.
In honor of father's day, it should be noted that the father of techno music is Thomas Edison. And that, as every schoolchild knows, the original matchmaker of music and technology is Pythagoras. Edison invented the phonograph, the most important and modern intersection of music and technology. All recorded music is techno. Sorry. You may think you don't like techno, but you do. Nick Drake's albums are techno, and so are Dolly Parton's and John Fahey's.
A bazillion years ago Pythagoras invented the practice of measuring things scientifically. How so? By measuring the length needed to divide a string into fifths - Pythagora's famous ratio for doing so is 3:2.
Post-Moroder Italian synth-disco genius' third record title track. A concept album about Frankensteinian abuse of experimental science: the lyrics could also allegorically be about the pairing of technology and music:
Once upon a time / Science opened up the door / We would feed the hungry fields / Tilll they could'nt eat no more / But the potion that we made / Touched the creatures down below / And they grow up in a way / That we'd never seen before / Supernature, supernature, supernature, supernature
Here's the awesome/weird video for the song, featuring man-pigs and a rainbow drum kit in the desert, very midnight-movie
3. Ricardo Villalobos - Minimoonstar New track out on Perlon now. Villalobos continues to slay with further post-Fabric mix forays into live drums. really great little accents and riffs, sounds like minimal Bitches Brew.
4. Nico - The Sphinx Not really electronic, but Nico's only venture into anything vaguely danceable, a malevolent, ice-y funk number very much in line with Yoko's Walking on Thin Ice, Sister Midnight by Iggy Pop, etc. Never, ever heard of this until AB showed me Howie B's Fabric podcast and Howie referred to it as "absolute stonkers." BTW Howie B is Scottish.
5. Girls on Top - I Wanna Dance With Numbers If we're talking about cross-breedings and genre flings, mash-ups are kind of cheating, but come on. Whitney mashed on top of Kraftwerk is literally mind-blowing. And Richard X edited it in such a way that the little Kraftian bling bells perfectly match the vocal flow. I can no longer listen to the original versions of either of these tracks. SO EPIC. Really, you need this. Bitte please.
This also might be the greatest look ever.
6. Hercules & Love Affair - Roar From a non-album 12". Way-deep Chicago-housey track featuring highly sexualized moans from Antony, you know, from the Johnsons. Really effective to hear his voice in a techno context.
7. Neil Young - We R In Control - more paranoid synth rockin from Trans. 8. Killing Joke - A Floating Leaf Always Reaches the Sea. An epic dub mix of "Requiem" from their debut album by Alex Paterson from the Orb, who was originally KJ's drum tech. Available on this compilation, which I will post as some point because it is fire.
9. Hi-Fidelity Three - Never Satisfied Twisted, trippy rap-tech interpolation of the Stones classic, taken from the now-lost Beat Classic comp that I so awesomely posted a while ago. Both BC and the ambient comp do stellar jobs of capturing a nascent genre at the period of its wild & woolly inception, before it became a packaged and streamlined framework. In the case of Beat Classic, it was all about the noisy tech-ed up backroom experiments in early hip-hop like Rammellzee's "Beat Bop," evidence of a far-out genre swerve into near-throbbing gristle territory before everything settled down.
10. Boris - Message Japanese noise rockers have a one-night stand with Konono NO. 1 Afro-tronics on this import-only track from their new album.
11. Soft Machine - Soft Space The inspiration for this playlist. Soft Machine is a 70s UK group known for its prog-jazz-rock nerd fusion excursions, so I was pleasantly unsettled to find out that there's this track that had been tacked onto some random live album ("Alive and Well: Recorded in Paris) no jazz or prog trimmings at all, just an anthemic arp-synth voyage, very Moroder.
12. Spacemen 3 - Big City A random synth-pop jam from Spacemen 3, my heroes of drone-psych. Super Krafty work. I was gonna post the video but it's mostly just them jumping around in front of multi-layered projections.
13. Black Mountain - No Hits I like this song. It's from their first record and has nothing to do with the woolly mammoth Sabbath rock sound they're famous for, instead it's a dark almost goth synth jam. Is it coldwave? Does anyone know what coldwave is?
