Coldcut spun a two-hour mix along with fellow Ninja Tune Records act Strictly Kev on the BBC’s 6 Music show this past Sunday, February 29. The pop-minded affair starts off, gently, with Hall and Oates, of all things, and moves in typically big-eared Ninja style through Missy Elliott, Telefon Tel Aviv, Robert Wyatt, Pia Zadora, the Cure, and dozens of others, including the label’s own Cinematic Orchestra and DJ Vadim. (6 Music homepage at bbc.co.uk/6music, and the mix launches here in Real Audio format.)
Quote of the Week: Berklee Turntablism
Berklee College of Music professor Stephen Webber explains to the Boston Globe about his new turntablism class at the school
It seemed like everything we were doing in the studio in terms of record production was based on what the Beatles were doing 40 years ago.Â
From “Berklee Professor Takes DJ Class Out for a Spin,” February 17, 200 (boston.com).
Karl Zeiss MP3
On the website of Red Antenna Records, a distinction is made between commercial recordings and what the label calls “online objects,” or sets of free MP3 downloads. Often enough though, MP3s are located on the site’s promotional pages for its traditional commercial recordings, those physical objects known as CDs and 12″s. Red Antenna’s Karl Zeiss has recently resurfaced with a four-song 12″ single, Currency, one track of which is available for free download (page here, file here). “Guilder” is at best a handful of sound elements removed from microhouse, so deadly flat is its hypnotic rhythm and mechanized its terse funk (and yes, in this realm those are terms of endearment). The theme is so staid that over time it seems more complicated than it is, in part because Zeiss replays it in a mix of four- and eight-bar sets, which provides an element of occasional low-impact surprise, and also because on each repetition the melody forced through yet another different digital filter. And since “Guilder” starts exactly as it ends, with an unadorned beat, it can be looped forever. (More on Red Antenna at redantenna.tv.)
Japanese Train Sounds
The culture-link repository BoingBoing.net today referenced (here) a pair of websites that host audio files of the sweet, blissfully robotic music that plays in Japanese railways (here and here). Shortly thereafter, a journalist wrote in to direct BoingBoing readers to a three-minute NPR report he had done on the sounds (site here, RealAudio stream here) in September 2003. According to the broadcast, a Japan railway spokesman explained “the idea is to alleviate the kind of commuter anxiety that drives passengers to jam themselves into already crowded trains.” Reportedly, the sound of iron bells in a Zen temple inspired some of the earliest of these synthesized melodies.
Vacuum-Derived MP3s
Among the musical highlights of 2003 were the whimsical title characters of Triplets of Belleville, the animated French film. Midway through the movie, the three women, along with a guest, performed a piece of ersatz musique-concrete, the instrumentation of which consisted of a bicycle wheel, crumpled newspaper, a refrigerator grill and, most remarkably, a vacuum cleaner (the film’s score is by Benoit Charest). Now a new trio of acts (Aunderwex, Dk9 and Olga & Fritz) has produced a set of vacuum-derived music, collected as the Mio Star Compact 3000 Electronic EP, the Mio Star being a Swiss make of cleaner. The EP is available for free download from the 20kbps netlabel.
Aunderwex’s “Attack of the Mio Stars” has the industrious pep of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, all pneumatic pump and grind. Conversely, the initial impression made by Dk9’s “I Love Miostar” is of the ocean: the track starts with an echoed whir that’s all ear-to-the-seashell; shortly thereafter, though, nature gives way to the mechanized pleasures of syncopation and chug.
Finally, Olga & Fritz’s “Track 1” is the most difficult to characterize, even though it is the only one of the three to use an untreated, unambiguously recognizable vacuum-cleaner sample; it feels less like pop music and more like the sound track of a voiceless scene from a film. In combination with Charest’s Belleville score, the Mio Star EP furthers the notion that electronica adores a vacuum cleaner. (The 20kbps netlabel’s website is at 20kbps.sofapause.ch; a zip file containing all three tracks in MP3 format is here.)