Category: Music

Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” from back in the day (1989!) still has the power to get a rise out of me, and has one of the most complex sample layers of any song in that period. (Or any period, as most contemporary hip-hop is the weakest of weak sauce.) Mix Magazine has a tech geek-out article from 2006 on the creation of this track:

A key to the lo-fi sounds found on “Fight the Power” and other Public Enemy records of the period were the technical limitations of their samplers, which the group enjoyed and embraced as part of their noise-based aesthetic. The S-900 and SP-1200 used 12-bit samples — more advanced than the Mirage, but lower than today’s standard of 16 bits. Hank Shocklee explains that he likes the low-res sound because “you can’t pick out the exact instrument and things that are going on, and it kind of meshes it all together, so the frequencies of where the guitar and the bass come in are not clearly defined.”

This was enhanced by the fact that the group often used longer sample loops than the equipment was intended for. “I think the SP-1200 had eight or 12 seconds tops for all 16 pads,” explains Hank Shocklee. “It wasn’t designed to do what we were doing. It was just designed to put in kicks, snares, hi-hats, rides. To get more time, we would speed up the record, play it at 45 and we got almost double the time.” Once the sped-up sample was loaded in, it had to be pitched down, resulting in a further degradation of the sounds. Add to that the fact that the SP-1200 cut off the ends of its samples sharply. “The cut-off gave it a rough sound, a real edgy sound,” says Keith Shocklee appreciatively.

Illustration by OBEY.

Gotsdamn, I love the Internet sometimes! Case in point: music blog Mutant Sounds. For a month or so now, the owner of this blog has been posting rips of extremely rare electronic music from the early ’80s that only saw release on obscure, home-made cassette labels like Adventures In Reality, Roding Recordings, Integrated Circuit Recordings, and plenty others. Some I have downloaded have been a bit too gnarly and amateurish for my ears, but others are just gems.

Two I recommend are Rick Crane’s A Long Week in Houston from 1982 (maybe) and Robert Lawrence & Mark Phillips’s The Dadacomputer (1981). “Houston” is two side-long analog synth space noodlings, one with taped voices, the other without, but both transport me back to the times when you could pick up weird music on the radio, late night. Or maybe that’s just my memory. “Dadacomputer” is more rough and ready cut-up style, but bits remind me of Tuxedomoon. There’s more to choose from, but I don’t have the time to grab ’em all.

Los Lobos, above, not being ripped off.
Did Paul Simon completely rip off Los Lobos for the last song on Graceland? Steve Berlin says yes and said so back in April 2006 in this interview for Jambase. The song in question is “All Around the World.” According to Berlin, they were called in by a WB exec to jam with Simon and they shared a song that was going to turn up on “By the Light of the Moon.”

I remember he played me the one he did by John Hart, and I know John Hart, the last song on the record. He goes, “Yeah, I did this in Louisiana with this zy decko guy.” And he kept saying it over and over. And I remember having to tell him, “Paul, it’s pronounced zydeco. It’s not zy decko, it’s zydeco.” I mean that’s how incredibly dilettante he was about this stuff. The guy was clueless.
It was ridiculous. I think David starts playing “The Myth of the Fingerprints,” or whatever he ended up calling it. That was one of our songs. That year, that was a song we started working on By Light of The Moon. So that was like an existing Lobos sketch of an idea that we had already started doing. I don’t think there were any recordings of it, but we had messed around with it. We knew we were gonna do it. It was gonna turn into a song. Paul goes, “Hey, what’s that?” We start playing what we have of it, and it is exactly what you hear on the record. So we’re like, “Oh, ok. We’ll share this song.”

They thought Simon was going to cover one of their songs…nope. Anyway, it’s a fascinating read and, damn, I hate when I read something shitty about an artist I like!
By way of WMFU’s Beware of the Blog.

It was the hottest ticket in town, no joke, and I couldn’t go. And now people like the NPR’s Bob Bollen are calling the two-hour concert one of the best concerts they’ve ever seen.

Radiohead’s show at the Santa Barbara Bowl came as close for musicianship and creativity as any show I’ve seen in 37 years. I’ve seen a lot of shows.
These guys write great songs, and sometimes you can even sing along to them, but what they do better than any band is create a sonic adventure — a soundscape which, at its best, stretches time and allows the mind to wander and rejuvenate. I think of it as resetting the synapses. Creativity breeds creativity. When the music was over, I felt unboxed and changed and pretty darn happy. Drugs are overrated; music is underrated.

And, bless their cotton socks, NPR has posted the ENTIRE SHOW AS A DOWNLOAD! Awesome. The show runs at 133kpbs, which is pretty good.

A lost white-funky new-wave classic from 1982. Split Enz were not very big in the States, but Neil Finn’s next project–Crowded House–was.
This bassline has been in my head all day.

From the music blog Different Waters:

In the 70’s, Rainer Wehinger created a visual listening score to accompany Gyorgy Ligeti’s Artikulation. I (not me, someone) scanned the pages and synchronized them with the music.

Typically, scores like this are created by the composer as instructions to the players to improv. This is more a graphic after-the-fact deal. Still it’s cool and makes explicit the various sections of the electronic tape score. If you don’t know already, I groove on this kind of music from the 1950s and 1960s.
Why not buy some Ligeti?

I was trolling the intertubes yesterday and came across the five-volume set of “Symphonies of the Planets,” a 1992 release on the truck-stop and Ross Dress-for-Less label , LaserLight. Five tracks of “space music” 30 minutes long. But here’s the deal: this “space music” is purportedly real space music.

In 1990, we made the Symphonies of the Planets series from raw, uncatalogued space sounds data as a promotional series… We did not go through the lengthy process to document specific planets, moons or rings. Rather we selected random information from the raw data and processed it to produce Symphonies of the Planets. However all sounds are Space Sounds. There are no engine sounds from the space probes.

The finished result, which I fell asleep to last night, sounds close to Eno’s “On Land” album. No sweetness, just grumbling drones and weird sweeps of sine-wavery. Five tracks in all, and all, I suppose, are linked to a certain fly-by. But it doesn’t say which. And the NASA site has nothing on it. Horribly out of print, check it out here.

Since I posted this cover of my 1999 m:lls CD compilation on Flickr, I’ve had some requests, so I’ve posted the 2-CD set to Megaupload. Feel free to download the mix and check out some still pretty good tunes from nine years ago. (148 mins in total, 31 tracks, 160kbps.)
Track list is here:

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[Spit take of my morning coffee]Whaaaaaaaaa????
Yes, David Byrne and Brian Eno are making music together, and an album is set for the end of the year. Ooooooh!

Speaking at an event in New York, Byrne revealed that the duo had rekindled the relationship they formed in the late 70s/early 80s which resulted in three Talking Heads records and 1981’s classic My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
“I’m finishing up a record with Brian Eno, a musician that I worked with 30 years ago,” Byrne said following an appearance with Paul Simon at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the 9th of April. “We did a record together of songs, and that’ll come out.”

I have to say I was very disappointed with the last batch of songs from Eno, Another Day on Earth, so even though I must now clean the coffee off my keyboard, I will be cautiously approaching this release.