The Final Show

Today's episode marks the final airing of Worship the Glitch on KCPR. The past two years doing this show and my past three years as KCPR DJ have been amazing and I feel privileged for being able to share all of this music with my listeners. As a going away present of sorts I am putting together a compilation of some of the shows favorite artists and songs to give away. Copies will be limited to 30, but the good news is that they will be free, first come first serve. If you would like a copy you can send your mailing information to pcambon@gmail.com and I will send you a copy as soon as I complete them. The compilation has not been completed yet, but please be patient, they'll be done in the next couple weeks. Thank you all for listening.

A Crystal Skull in Peru

The track by Cloaks, which dominated this show, is simply put, superb. Piano, tapes, and bells ooze together in a long playing expanse of around 30 minutes. The track could be likened to a synthesis of Oval's "Do While" and Reich's piano works, but those comparisons should only be taken as starting points for describing something that easily stands on its own. Along with the caring and beautiful packaging this CD-R is a must have, hopefully there are still some left at Aquarius Records, where I found it. You can also listen to the podcast of the show here.

Cosmic Superimposition

Love Songs

These are love songs.

Brend

Recently there seems to be a growing trend in electronic music towards the "tribal" aesthetic. Polyrhythms, non-standard tunings, and vernacular sounds are becoming more familiar in the electronic vocabulary, but what is more striking is the general attitude towards the music making process itself. Technology is becoming a fact of life that all musicians will have to deal with, and the types of people you'd expect never to stray away from their drum circles and stoner metal bands are using the computer, drum machines, and sequencers. This provides for some interesting results, but the acceptance of many ethnic and vernacular ideas into the electronic vocabulary is not without problems.

Henry Flynt warns us that, more often than not, ethnic music has been incorporated into western music by simply inserting it as reference. In this case it is merely a surface treatment to existing structure and rules. Flynt argues that to embrace the vernacular or folk, one has to create new methods of notating and organizing sounds in ways that compliment their attributes. Lucky Dragons, the recording name of Luke Fischbeck, I think best demonstrates this attitude. Handclaps, bird sounds, tambourines, fiddles are not organized according to standardized western rhythms, time signatures, and scales (systems which were not made for these sources). Instead using applications such as MAX/MSP he creates his own processes to build songs with those pieces. Songs vary greatly in length, from less than a minute, to several minutes, never falling into the three to four minute pop standard.

Seeing Fischbeck preform live it is clear that his form of art is for his own self amusement, it is spontaneous, not governed by established laws, it is what Henry Flynt would call "brend." Flynt explains that "brend" is an experience at which you are unaware of value or your own personal valuing system, all of this vanishes leaving you with your own self enjoyment. While this may seem like a completely personal experience, "brend" can happen within a group of people. After about ten or fifteen minutes of playing on his laptop and flute, Fischbeck stood up, brought out a number of colorful ropes connected to one another, and passed them around the crowd. As they made contact with skin, sound emitted from the speakers, oscillating and harmonizing as different people touched the ropes, and made new connections through each other. It was quite a magical experience, the artist, the object being watched for our entertainment was no longer present, instead we were all part of the process, joined by system only measurable by our own connections to one another.

Listen to, and sign up for the podcast of Worship the Glitch at KCPR!

Materialization

Before the invention of the tape recorder in 1929 music's vocabulary was extremely limited. Confined to traditional instruments played by musicians it was an event one experienced in a static environment. The introduction of recorded media would completely change music's role, capabilities, and meaning. Recorded onto tape (or any media for that matter) music makes the transformation from event to object, gaining the ability to be taken out of context and planted into new ones. The implications for this are immense. Sound, when recorded onto media becomes a material object, and its plasticity, just like any other material, can be altered, manipulated, and broken.

It wasn't long after the tape recorder for musicians to begin to discover the full potential of a materialized sound. Pierre Schaeffer's pioneering work with tape loops in 1940s in Paris and Halim El-Dabh's work in Cairo around the same time expanded music's vocabulary to include any recorded sound. The definition of the instrument changed. The media technology itself, in this case the tape recorder, becomes an instrument. Along with this a whole new set of methodologies and compositional strategies that emerge from the technology and mechanical workings of the tape recorder make their way into musical practice, widening music's boundaries even more. Here a synthesis between music and technology occurs, with the development of music and technology coincides forming some kind of symbiotic relationship. Musique Concrete, the making of music from concrete objects, would serve as the basis of sampling and sample culture which today has become a large part of popular music. You can listen and subscribe to the podcast at KCPR.

Library Music

Last week I played a track recorded a song by Delia Derbyshire under the name Episonic. In the late 50s and early 60s BBC opened an advanced sound effects studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, to record jingles, theme songs, and commercials for programming. While the studio was intended for commercial purposes, it was frequently used for tape loop and music concrete experiments. Delia Derbyshire’s pioneering work in the studio would become very influential for contemporary artists such as Stereolab and Broadcast. The artists on the UK record label Ghostbox look to Derbyshire’s work as precedent for their b-movie science fiction electronic aesthetic. Sampling lost pieces of popular culture allows memories to be transplanted into new contexts through different media, creating new connections between space and time. Drawing inspiration from library music: old movie and television soundtrack recordings, the songs of Belbury Poly, Advisory Circle, and Broadcast are drenched in grain and haze of electronic music’s memories. Listen to the show here.