Round 1 - Iannis Xenakis vs Scooter

..but wait!! Scooter have teamed up with ‘play guitar in a day chord’ dinosaurs Status Quo to create a new hybrid of dance and rock music! Luckily Xenakis has the power of pianist Hiroaki Ooi, who spent his entire teens rehearsing this piece while his friends hung with girls.

Let the battle commence..

Live recordings from the Pins & Needles all-dayer at cafe OTO, 27th September 2008 with a conversation between the organisers Max Bondi (Tartaruga Records) and Oliver Barrett (Bleeding Heart Narrative).

Features live recordings of
Directing Hand
Mary Hampton
Pthhhh
Bleeding Heart Narrative
Daniel Merrill
The Sans Pareil
Hurra caine Landcrash
Clap Collapse
Coldstream
Grapefruits

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Some of you may have watched Art of Arts TV: The Single Arts Film recently. ITV’s weekly arts show from 1966, New Tempo stood out for me. Amazingly the entire episode they mention featuring Raashan Roland Kirk and John Cage is on UbuWeb.

New Tempo on Ubu

The following Saturday is Pins and Needles presented by Tartaruga Records. As far as I’m aware this is the first event they’ve organised, which means it’ll be a bit like that Sex Pistols gig in Manchester attended by Ian Curtis, Mick Hucknall, Morrissey… so if you don’t attend, well… you might not ever get a mention by Paul Morley on a Channel 4 Top 100 show. It also lasts all day and they’re offering free fruit to counteract the effects of noise music on the digestive system.

(…tries to find the right keys for the embarrassed emoticon.. )

Ah!

:-$

The Big Bang Machine

Lost Horizons: The Big Bang

Surely this makes more of an issue and leads a child to question why these letters are prohibited. Censoring the right combination of hiss and clicks which vaguely resembles the word fuck is one thing but one parent has complained that it refuses to spell out her son’s name Adam because it contains dam.

Apparently this is a modified version after the company were sued. Here’s the original in action.
WARNING. CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE!!!

Well anyway, Sam found this on e-bay and forwarded it to me because he knew I’m probably one of the few people on earth that would find it funny. Auction Link

It costs £199 and the description says

• Speed & Pitch of a hymn/worship song can be adjusted as much as you like. These are totally independent. For example, if you choose to speed a song up, the pitch will stay the same.
• Individual parts can be muted. Imagine a worship song with many instrumental parts (piano, guitar, percussion, bass, flute etc). If you want to play along ‘live?, you can mute as many of these individual parts as needed so you are not ‘competing’ with the recording.
• Repeat sections of a song or hymn instantly. If you want to add an extra verse, or maybe repeat a particularly rousing chorus, the MT90s will do it instantly. It has two ?Marker? buttons, which act exactly like bookmarks in a book. You can set them at desired points in a song and then return seamlessly to either of these points whenever you like.

It seems to be taking credit for the entire MIDI protocol itself. I’m sure someone will fall for it. It’s a bit like one of those Sunday supplement cons such as a “USB Turntable”.

You can picture the person who may buy this. Ned Flanders springs to mind (aww!).

Anyway, there you go. My review of a product I will never own and never know why I decided to write about it on my blog.

4 out of 5.

The average person’s perception of the story will be partly if not pretty largely due to the overall effect of the soundtrack.

Now lets take away the picture completely. We’ve probably cut the ‘average person’ down a bit but a large remainder will gather meaning if they are aware of the sound as some kind of ‘radio drama’.

My question.. Why is it that so many people are ignorant towards/too lazy for/intimidated/disinterested/baffled by something which was conceived and developed so similarly to the aforementioned soundtrack but doesn’t include a change every eight or sixteen bars, have a vocal, bass, guitar, sound like another song they like?

My point isn’t why don’t more people like ‘adventurous’ music? It’s more why are people so accepting of certain sounds when they’re presented in particular ways and not others?

All info and track listings can be found at fuzzpedal.co.uk/fuzzpedal-podcast

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Thanks to Bill for alerting me to this masterpiece. Isn’t it just lovely?

Saturday morning, I’m laying in bed listening to what has now been my ‘comfort blanket’ radio show for the last 5 years or so, Late Junction presented by Verity Sharp on BBC Radio 3. I’m reading a book to try and cover up my incessant thoughts of whether to give up making music completely, how I’ve let people down recently and generally whether today was a good day to get out of bed. When suddenly (and I assure you I had no idea) this happened..

Late Junction Clip

Listen to the whole show

Maybe I’ll just get on with making some more music. Who knows, maybe one day I could make someone feel proud to know me.

YouTube link to the original video

Now it’s your turn.

www.faceyourmanga.com

Tracks
Folkstone Hovercraft - Space Art
Tanzen - Pole
Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors - Radiohead
Savage Skulls - Padded Cell
Falling Stars - Smith N Hack
One More Red Nightmare - King Crimson
Rest - Isolee
Woodface - Funckarma
Technopolis - Yellow Magic Orchestra
Love Without Sound - White Noise
Polkamatic (live) - Vitalic
Last Rushup 10 F - The Tuss
Cybernaut - Tonto’s Expanding Head Band

The Deer Cast