Marshall McCluhan's Medium is the Massage is a great record filled with all kinds of interesting reel manipulations early tape splicing experiments etc.
Christian Astronauts is a very quirky record put out by some jesus freaks in the Dc area....sampled by Psychic TV among others.
Music Machine was my favorite little brainwashing kiddie record when I was young. I have sampled it numerous times. It still holds a special place in my memories.
Also Bill Cosby Talks to Kids about drugs....great record. it never gets old to me.
One day, your textbook has convinced you that Pierre Schaeffer invented Musique Concrete in 1948, and the next day, Jerome Noetinger's Metamkine record label releases Walter Ruttmann's "Weekend", a German noise symphony from the 1930's. The ability to radically redefine history with numbers smaller than 50 is astonishing. More importantly than coming first, Ruttmann's 11-minute piece has the distinction of not being French. His work does not reflect the conscience of a French composer witnessing the growing influence of technology on rural countryside. Ruttmann's work shows a pre-Nazi fascination with single-minded progress at all costs; a celebration of mechanical achievements and Nationalism. Of course, Schaeffer himself only acquired access to the technology that defined a genre after being appointed the head of a Nazi-owned organization's audio research division. Add in 1913's Art of Noise manifesto by Mussolini-supporter Luigi Russolo and you can start to make a case for progressive electronic music being entirely routed in fascist nationalism.
It's no wonder a present-day, public avant-garde figure like Jim O'Rourke would see such a necessity in finding an American identity in Musique Concrete. His Rules of Reduction, while still being a fantastic attempt, did not entirely succeed. It was based so much in subverting his highly-personalized view of Concrete clich??s that it still remained a bit too indebted to the tradition he was trying to escape. Eureka, of course, might have been the culmination of his ideas. Defining his own perception of Americana through ???70s AM Pop, looking at America's more accessible, slightly gaudy history of technological display. Yet the Locust record label's new release has given new context to U.S.-birthed tape music.
Like Pierre Schaeffer, Henry Jacobs began his work with the intent of radio broadcast. Yet, from what Dawson Prater suggests in the liner notes, the three or four years that led up to Folkways??? 1955 release of Radio Programme no. 1 had more in common with the fictional manipulation of Radio drama, Sinclair Lewis-reminiscent social satire, ethnographic field recording and the open-minded, intellectual bohemian culture of the time. It's hard to believe that these ideas have since devolved into whatever schtick your local hard-rock Morning Guys are pulling. The release of Radio Programme, however, took a step past its already dense beginnings. As the record announces almost immediately, "Audio collage, audio collage, audio collage." Yet, it is the content of the audio collage that is so startling. Jacobs describes this in his original liner notes: "???reminiscences of a hobo, the ravings of an aged schizoid, the comments of a very contemporary 'hipster', and a musical collage of a modern jazz group." Very early in the album, the listener might be shocked to hear what might be the posthumous and paradoxical birth of American Musique Concrete.
This is not to say America hadn't had its share of tape collage by this point. ??migr??s Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening were experimenting in the Ivy League, and John Cage's "Williams Mix" premiered in 1953, for instance. Yet, none of these technology-centered first steps really had any sense of American national identity. Perhaps Cage's intellectual pursuits, his somewhat random assemblage of sounds, was American in its lack of focus and its source materials, yet it???s hard not to get the impression that "Williams Mix" was a usual experiment in Cageian formal formlessness, except with non-instrumental source material. Henry Jacobs is different. Radio Programme is for the working class, made to play with the expectations and beliefs of the American public at large. Apparently, irate listeners called the show, insisting that the false interviews that Jacob conducted were factually inaccurate.
Maybe it could be contended that there is nothing more American than several cultures in collision. Jacobs utilizes Indian music. He takes a phony, fairly hysterical anthropological look at the relation between Judaica and Calypso music. He conducts an interview with an "expert" on Chinese music. He includes an incisive cut-up of bebop on the second track that seems to bring to attention the similar threads of popular music twenty five years before John Oswald got his start. The final track has several friends imitating African drumming. There is a stand-out, staged interview with a mock beatnik.
So, there is already an overwhelming amount to be excited about on this release. Sharp parody, American tape collage, warped cultural perceptions, and what Prater pretty accurately sums up as "ethnosurreal incursions". There is, yet, another layer to this work: Where a good portion of Radio Programme plays with the fictional possibilities of radio, there are also some more musical experiments, specifically Jacobs' drum loop collages. Forty years before Mouse on Mars, Jacobs is staggering and speeding up beats. One loop sounds almost identical to the opening beat on 10cc's How Dare You from 1976. In the liner notes, there is only Jacobs humble suggestion he was trying to create a polyrhythmic style in the "musique concrete medium".
It's hard to gauge Jacobs' influence. Or the influence he might've had if he had reached more people with his work. There is a small line of heritage in surreal radio fiction, including Ken Nordine, Joe Frank, and maybe the Firesign Theater. But our current musical environment is so indebted to Jacobs' work, from avant-garde electronics to pop radio, it's hard to believe that up until now, he was doomed to obscurity. Locust Music has once again given the listener a chance to discover a distinctly American avant-garde tradition, something unaffected and fiercely relevant; a chance to uncover some of the underpinnings of why we are the way we are.
"Ken Nordine, yeah I know that guy, I heard his voice 1000 times Ken Nordine is the real angel sitting on the wire in the tangled matrix of cobwebs that holds the whole attic together he's the lite in the icebox, he's the blacksmith on the anvil in your ear." - Tom Waits, 1990
The white one with the woman on the front is cool, but a little tiring (it??s a double LP....). The woman has the greatest voice ever, and even if the matters she discusses get crazy boring, her voice just oozes GOOD out of the speakers. She sounds like someone who??s really dicovered what she means is a right path in life.
The blue one is my favourite, and CHOCK-full of excellent vocal samples + it contains some good wisdom of a more concentrated/specific sort than your regular "all eastern philosophy in a easily digestable, lo-carb, diet kiddie-package"-type deal.
The moon one is cool cause it has a bunch of trippy sound effects added to it, and the commentator tells the story of the launch like a real adventure.
Details of gatefold with the booklet. Note the step-by-step action cycle towards the bottom.
I think she was the inspiration for Strangers with Candy. There's a film reel of her talking to a high school class in the late '60s where she pretty much utters the 'boozer, loser, user' line verbatim.
maybe you're thinking of?
The Trip Back 1970 color 28 minutes
Florrie Fisher, a 50 year old ex-con junkie whore, goes back to highschool to lecture the students on the horrors of drugs in this obscure classroom scare film.
Many of you who are fans of Strangers With Candy will note the obvious resemblance to Jerri Blank, but just wait til you hear Ms. Fisher tell how she used to "cook her breakfast up in a teaspoon," and if she needed a dress she "had to have it in every color," or how one night she was "thrown from a horse and had to have a laminectomy"!
The Florrie Fisher video is some crazy shit. There are a lot of lines that SWC either lifted verbatim or only very slightly tweaked, but besides that appeal, it's also some oddly compelling viewing. Florrie basically just chain smokes and rants in an extremely tangential manner. The Q&A segment is crazy, too--she barely ever answers the actual question, preferring to go off on another tangential rant, and she usually ends up insulting the questioner somewhere along the way.
P-RO: That Shorty Petterstein record is bugged out. "Drums in the Typewriter" is dat ol' crazy shit.
He did audio documentaries about New York for decades, recording children singing playing, street musicians, interviewing people, or just capturing the city sounds. There's not much suicide or drug addiction, but a lot of mentally unstable folks!
Although i have only one record.. this one-sided one:
This is a scan from basichip.com, my copy has a different handwritten dedication, says: to Roy Kuhlman(!). I got it for some $10 on ebay, when it arrived it had an old pricetag of $99. what about that
But, yay, i have a bunch of mp3s!
Newyorkers, if you find any Tony Schwartz records out there feel free to send them to me. There's a bunch on Folkways. Especially this one:
thanks!
Also, i haven't seen much of these in foreign countries so i don't know if it's (was) a worldwide trend, but during the 70s and 80s it was often the case that theatre shows were pressed on the LP here in Yugoslavia. Maybe to present the work to wider audiences because there was not a good theatre in every city, i don't know, but there were really some good plays, and as i enjoy the radio drama i enjoyed those even more because they were recorded live from the stage so you could hear a person act with the whole body, moving.. giving out a better performance then when i hear them sitting in a studio. I always buy that stuff, theatre on vinyl. Pero Kvrgic kicks ass in Ionesco's 'Chairs'.. goddamn
I've talked with the lady who speaks on this album, very friendly, and... in fact, I'll have to write to her again, as I wanted to interview but there was always some scheduling conflict on her part.
I will reveal this. The voice you hear on the album is slowed down a notch, as they wanted to give her a, as she told me, slightly sexier "in the morning" voice.
====== I just wrote to her now, so... if she says yes and grants an interview, anyone interested in running and/or printing it? I know it's not Mingering Mike, but let me know.
Great albums. I used to pass e-mails a bit with Mal Sharpe's daughter, Jennifer, who used to run a website at sharpeworld.com
Although as I'm looking at this coyleandsharpe.com website, she is still around. Her website was great, lots of oddities. I did a track for her pirate radio broadcast, which involved a lady yelling at her son for not having and finding a job. The idea was that she gave various people a spoken recording, and we could do anything with it. I am not sure if the recording was from her father's archives or from something she had found on her own.
Self-proclaimed "Super Groupies" who've boned the biggest rock stars talking on their herpies, blowjobs, one night stands, need for love, and general rowdy groupie lifestyle. Kinda funny. Pretty kitsch. Includes "Groupie Glossary" for dudes slow on the vernacular. Making piggies. RJD2 samples ("He's the guy with the hit record") for eBay tag lines.
Self-proclaimed "Super Groupies" who've boned the biggest rock stars talking on their herpies, blowjobs, one night stands, need for love, and general rowdy groupie lifestyle. Kinda funny. Pretty kitsch. Includes "Groupie Glossary" for dudes slow on the vernacular. Making piggies. RJD2 samples ("He's the guy with the hit record") for eBay tag lines.
I have a secret crush on the voice of the groupie who says "have all these kids around me..." I don't know why, but I've always suspected that voice is coming from the face of Phoebe Cates from Fasttimes at Ridgemont High?
Phoebe Cates google image search = so scandalous at work. Jesus.
I've talked with the lady who speaks on this album, very friendly, and... in fact, I'll have to write to her again, as I wanted to interview but there was always some scheduling conflict on her part.
I will reveal this. The voice you hear on the album is slowed down a notch, as they wanted to give her a, as she told me, slightly sexier "in the morning" voice.
====== I just wrote to her now, so... if she says yes and grants an interview, anyone interested in running and/or printing it? I know it's not Mingering Mike, but let me know.
That's the record where she explains how to practice giving head on an ice cream cone? That's the best of all the spoken word sex records I have come across. The best music one is the red cover Red Holloway (or Callender?) record, you know, with the gatefold, Music For Sensous Lovers maybe?
That's the record where she explains how to practice giving head on an ice cream cone? That's the best of all the spoken word sex records I have come across.
That would be her, and the infamous "lick the crack".
Comments
'DIG!' by Eldridge Cleaver
I cant take a picture of mine so I stole the image from a soulstrut review, anyway, very good stuff on this one as you can imagine.
-k
A record that is well known to Bam and fans of the Vanguard Squad.
Dan
It comes with this poster...minus the ragdoll.
Marshall McCluhan's Medium is the Massage is a great record filled with all kinds of interesting reel manipulations early tape splicing experiments etc.
Christian Astronauts is a very quirky record put out by some jesus freaks in the Dc area....sampled by Psychic TV among others.
Music Machine was my favorite little brainwashing kiddie record when I was young. I have sampled it numerous times. It still holds a special place in my memories.
Also Bill Cosby Talks to Kids about drugs....great record. it never gets old to me.
Oh yeah, I got the whole Old Testament on a 16rpm box set...
Henry Jacobs - Radio Programme no.1 -Folkways LP
Review from Dusted Magazine
Cracks in the Concrete
One day, your textbook has convinced you that Pierre Schaeffer invented Musique Concrete in 1948, and the next day, Jerome Noetinger's Metamkine record label releases Walter Ruttmann's "Weekend", a German noise symphony from the 1930's. The ability to radically redefine history with numbers smaller than 50 is astonishing. More importantly than coming first, Ruttmann's 11-minute piece has the distinction of not being French. His work does not reflect the conscience of a French composer witnessing the growing influence of technology on rural countryside. Ruttmann's work shows a pre-Nazi fascination with single-minded progress at all costs; a celebration of mechanical achievements and Nationalism. Of course, Schaeffer himself only acquired access to the technology that defined a genre after being appointed the head of a Nazi-owned organization's audio research division. Add in 1913's Art of Noise manifesto by Mussolini-supporter Luigi Russolo and you can start to make a case for progressive electronic music being entirely routed in fascist nationalism.
It's no wonder a present-day, public avant-garde figure like Jim O'Rourke would see such a necessity in finding an American identity in Musique Concrete. His Rules of Reduction, while still being a fantastic attempt, did not entirely succeed. It was based so much in subverting his highly-personalized view of Concrete clich??s that it still remained a bit too indebted to the tradition he was trying to escape. Eureka, of course, might have been the culmination of his ideas. Defining his own perception of Americana through ???70s AM Pop, looking at America's more accessible, slightly gaudy history of technological display. Yet the Locust record label's new release has given new context to U.S.-birthed tape music.
Like Pierre Schaeffer, Henry Jacobs began his work with the intent of radio broadcast. Yet, from what Dawson Prater suggests in the liner notes, the three or four years that led up to Folkways??? 1955 release of Radio Programme no. 1 had more in common with the fictional manipulation of Radio drama, Sinclair Lewis-reminiscent social satire, ethnographic field recording and the open-minded, intellectual bohemian culture of the time. It's hard to believe that these ideas have since devolved into whatever schtick your local hard-rock Morning Guys are pulling. The release of Radio Programme, however, took a step past its already dense beginnings. As the record announces almost immediately, "Audio collage, audio collage, audio collage." Yet, it is the content of the audio collage that is so startling. Jacobs describes this in his original liner notes: "???reminiscences of a hobo, the ravings of an aged schizoid, the comments of a very contemporary 'hipster', and a musical collage of a modern jazz group." Very early in the album, the listener might be shocked to hear what might be the posthumous and paradoxical birth of American Musique Concrete.
This is not to say America hadn't had its share of tape collage by this point. ??migr??s Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening were experimenting in the Ivy League, and John Cage's "Williams Mix" premiered in 1953, for instance. Yet, none of these technology-centered first steps really had any sense of American national identity. Perhaps Cage's intellectual pursuits, his somewhat random assemblage of sounds, was American in its lack of focus and its source materials, yet it???s hard not to get the impression that "Williams Mix" was a usual experiment in Cageian formal formlessness, except with non-instrumental source material. Henry Jacobs is different. Radio Programme is for the working class, made to play with the expectations and beliefs of the American public at large. Apparently, irate listeners called the show, insisting that the false interviews that Jacob conducted were factually inaccurate.
Maybe it could be contended that there is nothing more American than several cultures in collision. Jacobs utilizes Indian music. He takes a phony, fairly hysterical anthropological look at the relation between Judaica and Calypso music. He conducts an interview with an "expert" on Chinese music. He includes an incisive cut-up of bebop on the second track that seems to bring to attention the similar threads of popular music twenty five years before John Oswald got his start. The final track has several friends imitating African drumming. There is a stand-out, staged interview with a mock beatnik.
So, there is already an overwhelming amount to be excited about on this release. Sharp parody, American tape collage, warped cultural perceptions, and what Prater pretty accurately sums up as "ethnosurreal incursions". There is, yet, another layer to this work: Where a good portion of Radio Programme plays with the fictional possibilities of radio, there are also some more musical experiments, specifically Jacobs' drum loop collages. Forty years before Mouse on Mars, Jacobs is staggering and speeding up beats. One loop sounds almost identical to the opening beat on 10cc's How Dare You from 1976. In the liner notes, there is only Jacobs humble suggestion he was trying to create a polyrhythmic style in the "musique concrete medium".
It's hard to gauge Jacobs' influence. Or the influence he might've had if he had reached more people with his work. There is a small line of heritage in surreal radio fiction, including Ken Nordine, Joe Frank, and maybe the Firesign Theater. But our current musical environment is so indebted to Jacobs' work, from avant-garde electronics to pop radio, it's hard to believe that up until now, he was doomed to obscurity. Locust Music has once again given the listener a chance to discover a distinctly American avant-garde tradition, something unaffected and fiercely relevant; a chance to uncover some of the underpinnings of why we are the way we are.
By Matt Wellins
Indeed. A good one. As is:
Get me started on that angry Black shit.
"Ken Nordine, yeah I know that guy, I heard his voice 1000 times Ken Nordine is the real angel sitting on the wire in the tangled matrix of cobwebs that holds the whole attic together he's the lite in the icebox, he's the blacksmith on the anvil in your ear."
- Tom Waits, 1990
This guy is a true beat poet.
The white one with the woman on the front is cool, but a little tiring (it??s a double LP....). The woman has the greatest voice ever, and even if the matters she discusses get crazy boring, her voice just oozes GOOD out of the speakers. She sounds like someone who??s really dicovered what she means is a right path in life.
The blue one is my favourite, and CHOCK-full of excellent vocal samples + it contains some good wisdom of a more concentrated/specific sort than your regular "all eastern philosophy in a easily digestable, lo-carb, diet kiddie-package"-type deal.
The moon one is cool cause it has a bunch of trippy sound effects added to it, and the commentator tells the story of the launch like a real adventure.
Details of gatefold with the booklet. Note the step-by-step action cycle towards the bottom.
- J
Side 1:
Introduction
Basic Hip
Vocabulary Building
The Loose Wig
The Riff
The Hang Up
Side 2:
Put On, Put Down, Come On, Come Down, Bring Down
Cool
Uncool
Field Trip No. 1
Field Trip No. 2
Field Trip No. 3
Summary
Mercury, SR-61245
Is this the same as yours? Is yours the same as peacefulrotation described (watertower cover)?
Bam,
Don't tell me you're slippin on the Watts Towers game!
Dude, it's how the locals pronounce it, duh...
Watts Towers >> WattsTowers >> watertower
:whoops:
The Florrie Fisher video is some crazy shit. There are a lot of lines that SWC either lifted verbatim or only very slightly tweaked, but besides that appeal, it's also some oddly compelling viewing. Florrie basically just chain smokes and rants in an extremely tangential manner. The Q&A segment is crazy, too--she barely ever answers the actual question, preferring to go off on another tangential rant, and she usually ends up insulting the questioner somewhere along the way.
P-RO: That Shorty Petterstein record is bugged out. "Drums in the Typewriter" is dat ol' crazy shit.
I have had both. I'm pretty sure the original is gatefold with the book and the other is second press.
http://www.tonyschwartz.org/#bio
He did audio documentaries about New York for decades, recording children singing playing, street musicians, interviewing people, or just capturing the city sounds. There's not much suicide or drug addiction, but a lot of mentally unstable folks!
Although i have only one record.. this one-sided one:
This is a scan from basichip.com, my copy has a different handwritten dedication, says: to Roy Kuhlman(!). I got it for some $10 on ebay, when it arrived it had an old pricetag of $99. what about that
But, yay, i have a bunch of mp3s!
Newyorkers, if you find any Tony Schwartz records out there feel free to send them to me. There's a bunch on Folkways. Especially this one:
thanks!
Also, i haven't seen much of these in foreign countries so i don't know if it's (was) a worldwide trend, but during the 70s and 80s it was often the case that theatre shows were pressed on the LP here in Yugoslavia. Maybe to present the work to wider audiences because there was not a good theatre in every city, i don't know, but there were really some good plays, and as i enjoy the radio drama i enjoyed those even more because they were recorded live from the stage so you could hear a person act with the whole body, moving.. giving out a better performance then when i hear them sitting in a studio. I always buy that stuff, theatre on vinyl. Pero Kvrgic kicks ass in Ionesco's 'Chairs'.. goddamn
I've talked with the lady who speaks on this album, very friendly, and... in fact, I'll have to write to her again, as I wanted to interview but there was always some scheduling conflict on her part.
I will reveal this. The voice you hear on the album is slowed down a notch, as they wanted to give her a, as she told me, slightly sexier "in the morning" voice.
======
I just wrote to her now, so... if she says yes and grants an interview, anyone interested in running and/or printing it? I know it's not Mingering Mike, but let me know.
Great albums. I used to pass e-mails a bit with Mal Sharpe's daughter, Jennifer, who used to run a website at sharpeworld.com
Although as I'm looking at this coyleandsharpe.com website, she is still around. Her website was great, lots of oddities. I did a track for her pirate radio broadcast, which involved a lady yelling at her son for not having and finding a job. The idea was that she gave various people a spoken recording, and we could do anything with it. I am not sure if the recording was from her father's archives or from something she had found on her own.
And of course, this infamous section:
The Groupies On Music
I have a secret crush on the voice of the groupie who says "have all these kids around me..." I don't know why, but I've always suspected that voice is coming from the face of Phoebe Cates from Fasttimes at Ridgemont High?
Phoebe Cates google image search = so scandalous at work. Jesus.
That's the record where she explains how to practice giving head on an ice cream cone? That's the best of all the spoken word sex records I have come across. The best music one is the red cover Red Holloway (or Callender?) record, you know, with the gatefold, Music For Sensous Lovers maybe?
Dan
That would be her, and the infamous "lick the crack".