Courtesy of musician Steve Roden’s blog, inbetweennoise.blogspot.com, a five-minute recording of Henri Chopin, the pioneering poet who passed away earlier this year. Roden has ripped to MP3 format the 7″ that accompanied the 1987 Chopin catalog published by Galerie J&J Donguy.
Roden describes the track: “made with mouth and tape, [it] resembles very much a typewriter’s […]
Red Bull Music Academy continues its ongoing series of interviews with under-celebrated music-industry characters. With a voice reminiscent of Tom Carvel’s, Don Buchla talks about various stages in the history of the synthesizer in a wide-ranging, two-hour conversation, all about theremins and Moogs, patch bays and and keyboard circuitry (MP3). Buchla’s knowledge of […]
Up at the Red Bull Music Academy, a conversation with Steve Beckett, Warp Records founder, on the rise of rave culture, the influence of hip-hop on electronic music, how British geography shapes culture, early adventures in online distribution, working with Designers Republic, and more subgenres than you can shake a glow stick at (MP3). Additional […]
Laurie Anderson’s speaking voice is a national treasure. And the single syllable that best encapsulates her wit and wisdom is that symptom of inarticulateness: “uh.”
What is in most mouths a signal of hesitation can be, in hers, everything from a considered pause to an ironic gesture to a luxurious cushion of affection.
The one thing “uh” […]
A week ago, I posted an MP3 I’d created in a matter of seconds at vozme.com, a free service that takes any text and transforms it into an audio file (disquiet.com). Shortly thereafter I received an email from Larry Johnson, who’d taken a small chunk of the Bible, fed it into vozme.com, funked it up […]
What I’ve been most focused on, listening-wise, this past week:
(1) White Noise, Yoga Heat: The CD showed up in the mail late last year, and on first appearance it seemed like a prank: a collection of four lengthy, meditative drones attributed to Lou Reed, of the Velvet Underground, and released on a small record label. […]
There’s a website called vozme.com that takes any typed text and transforms it, almost instantly, into a download-able MP3. The site currently works in English, Italian and Spanish. The following link is a recording of this post: MP3. Why it has a slight Irish accent — “reh-KORD-eng” — I don’t know.
The latest release on the netlabel called term, a subsidiary of Taylor Deupree’s 12k label, is a live performance recorded back in November of last year, featuring three eminent electronicists: Sawako (computer and voice), Richard Chartier (computer), and Shinjiro Yamaguchi (mixing board, feedback loops, sampling). The concert was part of the festival Atlantic Waves, held […]
The discussion about whether rap counts as poetry is still ongoing (count me among the affirmative), but how about human beatboxing? That’s the performance practice in which the voice emulates the instrumentals of hip-hop, instrumentals usually performed on technology, such as turntables and drum machines. Beatboxing is a nimble onomatopoeia that yields music.
The writing.upenn.edu/pennsound website, […]
To close the week out, a recently uploaded interview with softspoken minimalist composer Terry Riley, dating from 1969. The interview is by Charles Amirkhanian, founder of Other Minds, the catalog of which (at archive.org) houses the file. Also interviewed are Robert Ashley and William Maraldo, then co-directors of the Mills Center for Contemporary Music in […]