From a piece today by Simon Sellars on the manner in which dystopian bard J.G. Ballard’s worldview is suffused into contemporary sound (ballardian.com):
In recent times, Ballard’s influence on music seems to have waned although there is convergence with a cadre of sound artists who have magnified and critiqued the sonic footprint of the world’s cities [...]
Not all charts are created equal. The wisdom of crowds can be a lot more convincing on a message board than on a sales chart. The top 10 albums of a given week, according to Soundscan, can be more a reflection of conventional wisdom and reactive consumerism than of individual taste or the state of [...]
The forums at cratekings.com continue to be a great place to dig for excellent electronic music in the form of beat-heavy, sample-based solo work. Recent faves include Grimeshine’s “Hangover,” with its old-soul strings, punchy funk touches, vocals reduced to moany vowels, and a hot little minimalist piano riff (MP3, zshare.net, cratekings.com). More on the Seattle, [...]
We know what Alan Morse Davies did to construct The Last Summer. The brief liner note on the project’s home page (at archive.org) states it plainly enough: “An album of manipulated recordings from 78RPM records recorded between 1905 and 1931.” He’s taken outmoded recordings of once popular music and transformed them, courtesy of the creative [...]
Quick News, Links, Bits, Reads: Playing catch up on links I’ve accumulated. … Is the Nintendo DS video game Electroplankton out of print? Someone’s selling it for over 70 bucks, used, on amazon.com. (Thanks, Jeff.) … Speaking of which, amazon.com has updated its underacknowledged free-download service, now as part of the blue-light specials at amazon.com/mp3deals. [...]
There’s no didgeridoo on the five-track album Altered Signals by Mystified (aka Thomas Park), but there may as well be. Much of the music heard here has the slow, otherworldly onomatopoeia of that aboriginal device. The collection opens with the title cut: the crackle of data, the ping of noises echoing in a long, narrow [...]
The remix project Our Lives in the Bush of Disquiet has been downloaded over 20,000 times, as of today. I uploaded the set in early September 2006. It is an homage to the then 25-year-old (and now 27-) album My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. Bush of Disquiet [...]
From wall text at an exhibit currently on view at the Architectural Heritage Center in Portland, Oregon:
there is not much good that is not in some way based on something old that is good
The sentiment serves sample-based composers and remixers.
The full context of the quote is: “All my training has been in offices doing classical [...]
The influence of jazz on hip-hop is never as evident as on cuts of the latter that sample the former, and that legacy in transition is rarely as fully fleshed out as on Turntable Jazz, a recent podcast by DJ ZedVantz. The set packs together 11 cuts, including a Billie Holiday remix and more great [...]
The aspiring hip-hop producers who populate the forums at cratekings.com work together for mutual musical benefit — and not only by commenting on each other’s work and pushing the collective to tweak each sample, hone each beat, and better craft each instrumental track that they post. They also collaborate, as on the 14-track compilation of [...]