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The Mire

Originality and the 808

A couple of weeks ago at Future Human’s Sonic Boom event the discussion drifted onto the subject of value, originality and use of presets in music making. Matthew Herbert decried the use of presets in music. “I find it so depressing that so much stuff is still based around drum machines,” he said. “There is definitely something very valuable in the democratisation of the tech that allows people to engage in trying their hand at music… but presets are absolutely the wrong way to go - it just feels like a supermarket.” The implication is that music made with presets has little value, and later in the discussion Herbert questioned the point of making it at all. While from the point of view of the artist as a creator and a creative, he talks sense. It’s reductive in so far as it almost eliminates the listener from the equation. How well can most...

The Portal

Andy Battaglia Portal

April 2011

Andy Battaglia's article Once Upon A Time In... Harlem in The Wire 326 revisits the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and its importance in the work of composers such as Vladimir Ussachevsky, Otto Luening and Milton Babbitt.

Essay

Xenakis Symposium Extras

March 2011

A three-day conference, sponsored by The Wire and organised by the Centre for Contemporary Music Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London on the Greek composer coinciding with the tenth anniversary of his death. Scholars, researchers and musicians will present papers and participate in panels, alongside a programme of concerts and workshops. London Southbank Centre, 1–3 April.

The Mire

Lingerin' could be your doom

Two of Dust To Digital ’s recent releases, Rev Johnny L Jones The Hurricane That Hit Atlanta and the book and CD bundle Ain’t No Grave , a bio of Appalachian preacher Brother Claude Ely are two parts of a lineage. If Brother Claude Ely is the raw material, red raw vocal chords stripped by screaming, Jones is a mark further along that lineage, watered down - but not to its detriment - where sermons are songs (in the conventional sense) with electric guitars. Asked about why they started calling him ‘The Hurricane’, Jones says: “The hurricane starts off slowly, slowly slowly, and as long as there’s the process, the faster, the faster, the faster she gets, and when she gets a certain speed, that’s when she’s dangerous.” Listening to the two in sequence, this idea of a snowballing force is better applied to Brother Claude Ely than Jones, but it’s the idea that connects them: the...

The Mire

Queered Pitch

"Sound itself is queer." I was struck by this quote from Drew Daniel of Matmos while flicking through a video of a Q&A I did with them at Mutek last year (the Mutek people have kindly just put it online , a series of four interviews from the 2010 edition that they're putting up in the run up to this year's event). Queerness is what exceeds values and structures, he explained. So if sound qua sound exists outside language and and the usual hierarchies of taste, then is sound queer? While Drew Daniel was riffing on this idea (22 minutes into the interview) I was in the presenter's chair with one half of my brain pre-occupied with thinking of the next question to throw back at him. But nearly a year on it resonated with ideas that have been rattling around my head in the meantime. Right now I happen, oddly enough, to be listening to disco...

The Mire

The Wire Salon Reading List: The Sounds Of New Atlantis: Daphne Oram, Radiophonics And The Drawn Sound Technique

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was a pioneering British composer and electronic musician. She was the creator of Oramics, a synthesis technique which used visual images to create electronic sounds. She is credited with creating the very first piece of commissioned electronic music for the BBC in 1957 (the score for Amphitryon 38 ) and was instrumental in the formation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, becoming its first director in 1958. Leaving the BBC less than a year later, Oram founded her own electronic music studio where she produced the electronic soundtrack to the 1961 horror film The Innocents , as well as various concert works and compositions. After her death in 2003, the British improvisor and instrument builder Hugh Davies inherited her archive of papers and...

The Mire

Resonance FM fundraiser

This weekend, from 12 noon on Saturday 19 March 2011 until midnight on Sunday 20 March, Resonance FM is holding a live, on air fundraiser to raise money to keep the best radio station in the world up and running. A whole slew of unique, collectable and plain beautiful objects and experiences are available for auction. Notable items include a 90 minute bass guitar lesson with Led Zep's John Paul Jones, two weeks in Annapurna Eco-Village, Nepal with all creature comforts provided, one month's entry to London venue and Wire fave hangout Cafe Oto, signed Chris Watson Records, Bob Cobbing posters, red wax from Anish Kapoor’s recent Royal Academy retrospective, a one hour sitar lesson with Baluji Shirvastav, and much more. You can find details of all the lots and how to bid at resonancefm.com/auction . As for The Wire 's offering this time around – it's a rare, art-edition release of a one-sided LP by The...

The Mire

Smiley Culture 1963-2011/Lyricmaker Mix

I'm saddened and shocked to hear of the sudden death of original UK mic-man David Emmanuel, aka Smiley Culture , after a police raid at his house. I'm not going to add much to the other tributes elsewhere , but I'll gently point you in the direction of an excellent mix exploring the fast-chat era of the UK reggae deejays, of which Smiley was a crucial part. The Lyric Maker mix by John Eden (of the Uncarved blog) and Paul Meme (Grievous Angel) is a great introduction and, most importantly, a crucial selection of Cockney and JA chatters.

The Portal

Portal 16/03/2011

March 2011

This is the first of four conversations to be uploaded in the lead up to Mutek 2011. Remaining Q&A's feature Matmos, Kevin Martin (aka The Bug/King Midas Sound) and The Caretaker.

The Portal

Portal 15/03/2011

March 2011

Online radio series by Barcelona's museum of contemporary art, with programmes covering the history of collage and sampling in music to the German home recording tape scene and much more...

The Mire

Britcore

I came a little late to Rephlex's recent compilation of late 1980s/early 90s recordings by UK crew The Criminal Minds, but over the last couple of weeks it's completely blown me away. The comp spans their early hiphop recordings through to the vital Eureka! moment of the breakbeat and a little way beyond. There's so much to take in: the density of the music, the abrasive grain, like tarmac grazing your flesh, the cheap thrills of messing around with samplers, and a gawky sense of yoof-telling-the-truth about tough times in the UK (which actually seems more resonant in these recessionary times than, say, five years ago). The friction comes as hiphop meets the brutal torque of hardcore and early rave, with just about enough lyrical flow to stop the whole machine from overheating. The energy, physically and mentally, is amazing, several notches up from much of what emerges from the UK underground these days. ...

The Portal

Portal 11/03/2011

March 2011

Free download of the second volume of Numero Group's Eccentric Breaks & Beats. Mix by Adam Calman from Parallel Thought.

The Portal

David Bedford Portal

March 2011

"The many strands of BASCA's activity include the lobbying of politicians, civil servants and industry bodies; celebrating achievement through such events as The Ivors, the Gold Badge Awards and the British Composer Awards, and fostering a community in what is frequently a solitary freelance world."

Essay

A-Z Of Electro

March 2011

In its original incarnation, Electro was black science fiction teleported to the dancefloors of New York, Miami and LA; a super-stoopid fusion of video games, techno-pop, graffiti art, silver space suits and cyborg funk. Now that Electro is back, David Toop provides a thumbnail guide to the music that posed the eternal question: "Watupski, bug byte?" This article originally appeared in The Wire 145 (March 1996).

The Mire

Back With Another One Of Those Poplocking Beats

Still in the electro zone following Dave Tompkins's The Wire salon (see The Mire passim), I find myself slipping through wormholes of sample sources, song theft and shout-out references. Today in the office we're booming Zapp & Roger's "So Ruff, So Tuff": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eksaGYygLsw Which sends me back to a personal favourite, Ronnie Hudson And The Street People's "West Coast Poplock", which borrows a chunk of Zapp, and adds the iconic lyric "California knows how to party" : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmJXjDhpA_s Documentary evidence of real-life poplocking to Ronnie H can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02HxXrVlr2U The Hudson lyric was later, of course, borrowed by 2pac's "California Love", which featured Zapp's Roger Troutman: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWOsbGP5Ox4 Which melded it with the sample from Joe Cocker's incredible track "Woman To Woman": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmRNUToamI A track which itself had been sampled by the Ultramagnetic MC's late 80s track "Funky": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq_C01YkmnM In a neat reversal of...

The Portal

Archive Trails Portal

March 2011

The Archive Trails project – a twelve week residency at the School Of Scottish Studies Archives with Aileen Campbell, Alasdair Roberts, and Drew Wright – is featured in The Wire 325

The Mire

Baroque & Bassline

Still reeling from Dave Tompkins’ fantastic presentation for his book on the vocoder How To Wreck A Nice Beach , at The Wire salon last week. Both the book and his talk are full of little coincidences and serendipitous overlaps. One that was particularly mind-boggling for me was Dave interviewing Florian Schneider and Wendy Carlos on the same day. I’d be quaking in my boots at the thought of talking to even one such towering figure in modern music, much less two in one day! Naturally, ensuing office chat after the talk turned to Carlos’s Switched On Bach . Some (no names, ahem) don’t see the appeal, but I had to admit that I own the Switched On Boxed Set (you can listen to some audio clips from it here ), which I bought a few years ago when I was listening to a lot of Bassline. That little revelation beggared another...