To operate a bit more sonically off the books and combine with the coolness of others, I recently created audiokayness (the phantom annex).
Lately, been having fun with Berna some more, using various recordings I've made played at varispeed to feed the Berna beast. Stuff like old 1950s tube intercom feedback. Stylophone and homemade zither run through the reverberant spring-loaded arm of a Luxo lamp via Nicholas Collins implementations of piezo contact mics/drivers.
To post the MP3s directly to the world o' Tumblr, I've kept these improvs [um, relatively] short. A mere 7 minutes each.
Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Thursday, October 22, 2009
posting records to the hinterlands
As I've said, I was a hick from the sticks.
Mark, a friend from high school, was one in a vanguard of people who would turn me on to the wide world of music. Post-punk music in particular.
Aside from his mixtapes bearing the likes of the Velvet Underground, he got me ordering from the Rough Trade Records USA catalog.
Meantime, someone was working in San Francisco, filling those mail orders & posting records to the hinterlands: Hilary, the bicoastal city mouse to us two country mice.
During our summer of discontent back home from college, she was our vinyl connection/muse/friendly crush and all around beacon of cool things happening in the big world.
scans slightly stalinized/click to make bigger . . .
And yes, the grass is always greener, even when the paper is pink . . .
This note probably piggybacked with one of my orders:
By summer's end, it was back to college (& college towns with better record stores).
Maybe for Hilary, too, since the next RT order was sent out by Bill.
Mark, a friend from high school, was one in a vanguard of people who would turn me on to the wide world of music. Post-punk music in particular.
Aside from his mixtapes bearing the likes of the Velvet Underground, he got me ordering from the Rough Trade Records USA catalog.
Meantime, someone was working in San Francisco, filling those mail orders & posting records to the hinterlands: Hilary, the bicoastal city mouse to us two country mice.
During our summer of discontent back home from college, she was our vinyl connection/muse/friendly crush and all around beacon of cool things happening in the big world.
scans slightly stalinized/click to make bigger . . .
And yes, the grass is always greener, even when the paper is pink . . .
This note probably piggybacked with one of my orders:
By summer's end, it was back to college (& college towns with better record stores).
Maybe for Hilary, too, since the next RT order was sent out by Bill.
Thursday, August 13, 2009
pinned down again
This is a pin I homebrewed circa 1982 to commemorate a fave post-punk band, Orange Juice.
The fine construction/New World craftsmanship is easily seen . . .
Their "Breakfast Time" (b-side to "Simply Thrilled Honey"), their work in general and that of other bands on Postcard Records was some influence on my own more rusticated inventions:
Instrumental for Plug
Something in the mood of another Orange Juice song, "In A Nutshell", might be heard in these:
Be Here Soon
Sunday, March 8, 2009
a legacy
My middle brother passed away late last month.
And for better or worse, for anyone in earshot, he had made some contributions to my music. Direct or indirect.
His old sax that he used to play fell into my untutored hands to be used in numerous tunes:
the ever popular Grunt Grunt Pig
the skronky Bobo
the comparatively refined Music and Candlelight
And tho' I'm leery of words like "inspiration", my brother was somewhere in mind when I wrote these:
Cascade
And for better or worse, for anyone in earshot, he had made some contributions to my music. Direct or indirect.
His old sax that he used to play fell into my untutored hands to be used in numerous tunes:
the ever popular Grunt Grunt Pig
the skronky Bobo
the comparatively refined Music and Candlelight
And tho' I'm leery of words like "inspiration", my brother was somewhere in mind when I wrote these:
Cascade
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
influences
[Insert here: some meaningful reference to the flashback scene in the movie SLC Punk! where the two main characters are in their mid-teens listening to Rush . . .]
Back when I started making noise/music/whatever of my own, post-punk was the underground genre. And even if 1977 was supposed to be some kind of pop music Year Zero and folks were supposed to be all DIY about everything, an inevitable question in a band interview or point of pride or conversation would be: "what are your influences?"
Of course I was hardly ever in such a situation as to be interviewed or even informally asked such a question. I would just do the uncool thing and wear those influences on my sleeve. Or more likely, on the lapel of one of my thrift store jackets. Cheap, out of sync and out of touch, I'd have some kinda obscure pin (Joy Division) and some obscure but hardly cool at the time pin (Swell Maps).
As I said, I was then (now & always) a hick from the sticks.
What I couldn't buy or inherit perhaps from a cooler friend with more disposable income, I might manufacture. An empty carton of orange juice became an Orange Juice pin. And crude Cray-Pas drawings on otherwise bland t-shirts created commemorations of a Young Marble Giants instrumental or a 12" EP Jah Wobble did with two guys from Can.
Points of fashion aside, influences were really very foggy notions. Was one really saying that one was a fan of a group? Could one claim Sly and the Family Stone as an influence if one played/wrote bluegrass music? More subtly, could anyone claim any band as an influence just in the vain hope of sounding like said musical hero? Can an influence be something one doesn't really like except for one song, one sound, one piece of a song that one can't forget?
All that said, let's dive into the deep end of this murky stagnant pool with a list of groups, artists or genres I'll claim one way or another:
Easy listening
Dan Fogelberg (Dan & Karlheinz S.)
Joni Mitchell
Television Personalities
Elvis Costello
Magazine
Mission of Burma
Dif Juz
the Broadman Hymnal (more about it)
John Cage
Glenn Branca
Fred Frith
The Orthotonics
Marianne Faithful
Leonard Cohen
Firefall
Scritti Politti
Cabaret Voltaire
Wire
Gang of Four
Debbie Reynolds
Jean Michel Jarre
George Beverly Shea
Rudy Ray Moore
Buzzcocks
Joy Division
The Durutti Column
Aztec Camera
The Association
The Fifth Dimension
some old black guy playing blues electric guitar and singing "Kansas City" over and over and over and over again at some festival in a Newport News VA park, Fall 1978
WCMS-FM
WGH-AM
WRVA-AM
WTJU-FM
nondescript Top-40 and album rock radio stations
music of every Sci-Fi, Western and 70s cop show or movie I ever saw
Orange Juice
Josef K
Charlie Rich
Charlie Pride
The Velvet Underground
The Banana Splits
Little Richard
Richard Thompson
Richard Pryor
Brother Dave Gardner
Anonymous Anonymous Anonymous
Burt Bacharach, Hal David & Dionne Warwick
Jonathan Winters
The Mekons
The Partridge Family
The Fall
Young Marble Giants
The Go-Betweens
The Raincoats
Essential Logic
X-Ray Spex
Mark, who turned me on to half of these folks
Those of you who turned me on to the rest
Brian Eno
Talking Heads
The Next of Kin
Half Japanese
Nico
Henry Kaiser
R.E.M.
Public Image Ltd.
Siouxsie & the Banshees
Pink Floyd
Can
Swell Maps
The Who
XTC
Pere Ubu
The Soft Boys
Television
Roxy Music
and who knows how many more . . .
Back when I started making noise/music/whatever of my own, post-punk was the underground genre. And even if 1977 was supposed to be some kind of pop music Year Zero and folks were supposed to be all DIY about everything, an inevitable question in a band interview or point of pride or conversation would be: "what are your influences?"
Of course I was hardly ever in such a situation as to be interviewed or even informally asked such a question. I would just do the uncool thing and wear those influences on my sleeve. Or more likely, on the lapel of one of my thrift store jackets. Cheap, out of sync and out of touch, I'd have some kinda obscure pin (Joy Division) and some obscure but hardly cool at the time pin (Swell Maps).
As I said, I was then (now & always) a hick from the sticks.
What I couldn't buy or inherit perhaps from a cooler friend with more disposable income, I might manufacture. An empty carton of orange juice became an Orange Juice pin. And crude Cray-Pas drawings on otherwise bland t-shirts created commemorations of a Young Marble Giants instrumental or a 12" EP Jah Wobble did with two guys from Can.
Points of fashion aside, influences were really very foggy notions. Was one really saying that one was a fan of a group? Could one claim Sly and the Family Stone as an influence if one played/wrote bluegrass music? More subtly, could anyone claim any band as an influence just in the vain hope of sounding like said musical hero? Can an influence be something one doesn't really like except for one song, one sound, one piece of a song that one can't forget?
All that said, let's dive into the deep end of this murky stagnant pool with a list of groups, artists or genres I'll claim one way or another:
Easy listening
Dan Fogelberg (Dan & Karlheinz S.)
Joni Mitchell
Television Personalities
Elvis Costello
Magazine
Mission of Burma
Dif Juz
the Broadman Hymnal (more about it)
John Cage
Glenn Branca
Fred Frith
The Orthotonics
Marianne Faithful
Leonard Cohen
Firefall
Scritti Politti
Cabaret Voltaire
Wire
Gang of Four
Debbie Reynolds
Jean Michel Jarre
George Beverly Shea
Rudy Ray Moore
Buzzcocks
Joy Division
The Durutti Column
Aztec Camera
The Association
The Fifth Dimension
some old black guy playing blues electric guitar and singing "Kansas City" over and over and over and over again at some festival in a Newport News VA park, Fall 1978
WCMS-FM
WGH-AM
WRVA-AM
WTJU-FM
nondescript Top-40 and album rock radio stations
music of every Sci-Fi, Western and 70s cop show or movie I ever saw
Orange Juice
Josef K
Charlie Rich
Charlie Pride
The Velvet Underground
The Banana Splits
Little Richard
Richard Thompson
Richard Pryor
Brother Dave Gardner
Anonymous Anonymous Anonymous
Burt Bacharach, Hal David & Dionne Warwick
Jonathan Winters
The Mekons
The Partridge Family
The Fall
Young Marble Giants
The Go-Betweens
The Raincoats
Essential Logic
X-Ray Spex
Mark, who turned me on to half of these folks
Those of you who turned me on to the rest
Brian Eno
Talking Heads
The Next of Kin
Half Japanese
Nico
Henry Kaiser
R.E.M.
Public Image Ltd.
Siouxsie & the Banshees
Pink Floyd
Can
Swell Maps
The Who
XTC
Pere Ubu
The Soft Boys
Television
Roxy Music
and who knows how many more . . .
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