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Honour your rambling mumble as a hidden radio programme
Shall we go out to the countryside and ramble on magnetic tape? This entry is dedicated to people who walk around, talking some kind of stream-of-consciousness stuff into recording devices as they go. It's dedicated to nutty recording angels, people who put the 'psycho' into geography and favour the ear over the eye. Take a memo, Miss Anthropy! New paragraph, new paragraph, yours sincerely.
Call it ancestor research; this is something I've been doing on Click Opera, and I'm only now learning the names of my precursors, the podcast pioneers, the people who did it and called it art. It's the new thing's old thing! If it's the new thing, let's enter it in Ars Electronica this year instead of music! If it turns out to be the old thing, let's make the old thing the new thing instead!
Of course we all did this in the 70s, when cassette tape recorders were new. Who didn't, on getting their first cassette tape recorder, record herself singing, interviewing family members, making up stories, editing together snippets of TV shows, thumping at a piano? I've got tons of tapes of me and my sister doing that, all burbly and squeaky. 1970s TV commercials in the background, wow! Beck spliced bits of his kiddy tapes into 'Stereopathetic Soul Manure'.
Here are two men who kept making those tapes. And a third man who did much, much more.
This is Wake by Sam Truitt. It's one of 28 'strips' released in a book called 'Transverse, a book in Vertical Elegies'. Truitt, a poet, bought an Olympus W-10 Digital Voice Recorder rather like the Olympus models my students are using for field recordings at FUN. Truitt's machine allowed for photographs to be taken simultaneously with the sound recordings and played back, in a fixed sequence but at random locations, with the sound. The results show language and visuals combining in unexpected ways, blazing fresh pathways through our synapses. (I was trying to do something similar with my combination of odd, almost Raymond Pettibonesque phrases and static video shots in last week's 'Noboribetsu TV', but I lacked the random wild card element Truitt's lo-fi technique allows.)
Someone else who rambles and mumbles is Adam Bohman. You can hear one of his 'talking tapes' (released on the 'Music and Words' album) here. "These tapes," says the album blurb, "consist of on the spot cassette recordings of his observations, both humorous, mundane and personal, as well as the day to day activities of his life. The sounds of the environment, the sluggish recording mechanism and the use of the pause button give this piece an almost concrète, sound text feel. This piece dates from 1994." (I remember Anne Laplantine recording a brass band in the Boxhagener Platz with an old cassette tape recorder in a similar way, using the pause button to edit the music randomly.)
Finally, here are two people mumbling and rambling in a much more focused way. It's Alan Moore interviewing Brian Eno on BBC Radio 4's Chain Reaction series. We'll forgive them their focus, though, because they say some interesting things. Moore introduces Eno as someone who started by experimenting with a tape recorder as his primary instrument and setting his stall out as a 'non-musician'... "Considering the influence you've had, as a non-musician, on music, should we be thankful that you didn't decide to become a non-serial killer or a non-dictator?"
Moore interviews Eno (BBC Radio player, file stays up there until Thursday).
Eno on songwriting: I've actually just finished a new album which is all songs... Songwriting is now actually the most difficult challenge in music... Lyrics are really the last very hard problem in music. Software and hardware have changed the rest of music dramatically in the last thirty or forty years. It's very very easy to make pretty good music... Pretty good isn't very interesting, but pretty good is possible. But writing songs is pretty much in the same place as it was in the days of Chaucer. Apart from hip hop, hip hop is the only breakthrough in a way, rap, because it breaks away from the strict adherence to melody and beat structure and so on... I'd love to try doing this really hard thing [songwriting] and see if I can.
Eno on risk: Since the age of 18 I've been in a midlife crisis... I've spent a long time trying to figure out what the point of being an artist is. I'm not intellectually dishonest enough to always come out in my own favour... The element of risk may play some part in our idea of the beautiful. If you're taking a risk, all your antennae are out. One day I'd rent a cello, one day a marimba. I couldn't play any of them. I'd have two ideas, I'm going to dangle a mic from the ceiling and I'm going to hire a trombone.
That reminds me of something on Roddy Schrock's blog, a quote from the New York Times, an interview with a crazy Dutch town planner: "To make communities safer and more appealing, Mr. Monderman argues, you should first remove the traditional paraphernalia of their roads - the traffic lights and speed signs; the signs exhorting drivers to stop, slow down and merge; the center lines separating lanes from one another; even the speed bumps, speed-limit signs, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view, it is only when the road is made more dangerous, when drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer."
Eno quoting Chomsky on the democratic power of the internet: There are two superpowers now, there's the United States, and there's world opinion.
Eno on Elective Citizenship: Educate your children in Sweden, pay your taxes in Denmark, support an English football team. (That's the only thing I can think of that's good about England.) This notion that our nation defines us is going away... Actually, British comedy is very experimental. Much better than British football. The Goon Show was radio dada, really. It was about as experimental as anything that was going on at the time. (Cue Derek and Clive impersonation.)
Eno on Oblique Strategies: When I went home from the studio I'd think of things that I'd forgotten to think about in the studio. And these were not things like "Put on a guitar solo." They were things like "If you listen from outside the door, you hear things you don't hear when you're in the studio." or "If you listen to all the quieter details of things, that's a nice way of listening to things." Me and Peter Schmidt started to think that maybe we could come up with a sort of universal set of cards that gave you some strategies you could use in difficult working situations to knock yourself out of the furrow you might have inadvertently got yourself into. Some cards, their ideas have entered the culture so much that you don't need to say them any more. Like "Honour thy error as a hidden intention..."
Call it ancestor research; this is something I've been doing on Click Opera, and I'm only now learning the names of my precursors, the podcast pioneers, the people who did it and called it art. It's the new thing's old thing! If it's the new thing, let's enter it in Ars Electronica this year instead of music! If it turns out to be the old thing, let's make the old thing the new thing instead!Of course we all did this in the 70s, when cassette tape recorders were new. Who didn't, on getting their first cassette tape recorder, record herself singing, interviewing family members, making up stories, editing together snippets of TV shows, thumping at a piano? I've got tons of tapes of me and my sister doing that, all burbly and squeaky. 1970s TV commercials in the background, wow! Beck spliced bits of his kiddy tapes into 'Stereopathetic Soul Manure'.
Here are two men who kept making those tapes. And a third man who did much, much more.
This is Wake by Sam Truitt. It's one of 28 'strips' released in a book called 'Transverse, a book in Vertical Elegies'. Truitt, a poet, bought an Olympus W-10 Digital Voice Recorder rather like the Olympus models my students are using for field recordings at FUN. Truitt's machine allowed for photographs to be taken simultaneously with the sound recordings and played back, in a fixed sequence but at random locations, with the sound. The results show language and visuals combining in unexpected ways, blazing fresh pathways through our synapses. (I was trying to do something similar with my combination of odd, almost Raymond Pettibonesque phrases and static video shots in last week's 'Noboribetsu TV', but I lacked the random wild card element Truitt's lo-fi technique allows.)
Someone else who rambles and mumbles is Adam Bohman. You can hear one of his 'talking tapes' (released on the 'Music and Words' album) here. "These tapes," says the album blurb, "consist of on the spot cassette recordings of his observations, both humorous, mundane and personal, as well as the day to day activities of his life. The sounds of the environment, the sluggish recording mechanism and the use of the pause button give this piece an almost concrète, sound text feel. This piece dates from 1994." (I remember Anne Laplantine recording a brass band in the Boxhagener Platz with an old cassette tape recorder in a similar way, using the pause button to edit the music randomly.)Finally, here are two people mumbling and rambling in a much more focused way. It's Alan Moore interviewing Brian Eno on BBC Radio 4's Chain Reaction series. We'll forgive them their focus, though, because they say some interesting things. Moore introduces Eno as someone who started by experimenting with a tape recorder as his primary instrument and setting his stall out as a 'non-musician'... "Considering the influence you've had, as a non-musician, on music, should we be thankful that you didn't decide to become a non-serial killer or a non-dictator?"
Moore interviews Eno (BBC Radio player, file stays up there until Thursday).
Eno on songwriting: I've actually just finished a new album which is all songs... Songwriting is now actually the most difficult challenge in music... Lyrics are really the last very hard problem in music. Software and hardware have changed the rest of music dramatically in the last thirty or forty years. It's very very easy to make pretty good music... Pretty good isn't very interesting, but pretty good is possible. But writing songs is pretty much in the same place as it was in the days of Chaucer. Apart from hip hop, hip hop is the only breakthrough in a way, rap, because it breaks away from the strict adherence to melody and beat structure and so on... I'd love to try doing this really hard thing [songwriting] and see if I can.
Eno on risk: Since the age of 18 I've been in a midlife crisis... I've spent a long time trying to figure out what the point of being an artist is. I'm not intellectually dishonest enough to always come out in my own favour... The element of risk may play some part in our idea of the beautiful. If you're taking a risk, all your antennae are out. One day I'd rent a cello, one day a marimba. I couldn't play any of them. I'd have two ideas, I'm going to dangle a mic from the ceiling and I'm going to hire a trombone.
That reminds me of something on Roddy Schrock's blog, a quote from the New York Times, an interview with a crazy Dutch town planner: "To make communities safer and more appealing, Mr. Monderman argues, you should first remove the traditional paraphernalia of their roads - the traffic lights and speed signs; the signs exhorting drivers to stop, slow down and merge; the center lines separating lanes from one another; even the speed bumps, speed-limit signs, bicycle lanes and pedestrian crossings. In his view, it is only when the road is made more dangerous, when drivers stop looking at signs and start looking at other people, that driving becomes safer."
Eno quoting Chomsky on the democratic power of the internet: There are two superpowers now, there's the United States, and there's world opinion.
Eno on Elective Citizenship: Educate your children in Sweden, pay your taxes in Denmark, support an English football team. (That's the only thing I can think of that's good about England.) This notion that our nation defines us is going away... Actually, British comedy is very experimental. Much better than British football. The Goon Show was radio dada, really. It was about as experimental as anything that was going on at the time. (Cue Derek and Clive impersonation.)
Eno on Oblique Strategies: When I went home from the studio I'd think of things that I'd forgotten to think about in the studio. And these were not things like "Put on a guitar solo." They were things like "If you listen from outside the door, you hear things you don't hear when you're in the studio." or "If you listen to all the quieter details of things, that's a nice way of listening to things." Me and Peter Schmidt started to think that maybe we could come up with a sort of universal set of cards that gave you some strategies you could use in difficult working situations to knock yourself out of the furrow you might have inadvertently got yourself into. Some cards, their ideas have entered the culture so much that you don't need to say them any more. Like "Honour thy error as a hidden intention..."
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(Anonymous) 2005-02-07 04:43 am (UTC)(link)Same thing happened to me. I believe he linked to Momus' website on COME RIDE MY COLUMN.
Now that I think about it, Nick, will you be doing any more essays? I know you're writing stuff for magazines, and Click Opera's kind of a faster version of the old Essay and Daily Photo section, but I miss them terribly.
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(Anonymous) 2005-02-07 11:51 am (UTC)(link)click opera is momus sashimi!
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(Anonymous) 2005-02-07 10:55 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
he has? good! He's turned his hand to writing songs in various of his comics -- see this from V for Vendetta, for instance -- and they're normally very word play-based, very intelligence-based, really quite Momus-oid songs.
(The link above is to a song dated 1988 or so, but more recently he's also done a rather fun quasi-rap in 'clicker music' -- imagine a world where robots are the niggaz and write their own rap. That's in his very fun Hill Street Blues-meets-superheroes comic Top Ten.)
Enossification
Except maybe Tony Schwartz: www.tonyschwartz.org
(As they say in golf, let's hit those links!)
In regard to the other day's entry, what Mr. Eno says sums up exactly what I would have liked to have said: "This notion that our nation defines us is going away... " Thank goodness! The last thing I want to be defined as these days is "an American."
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I was writing a review the other day of The Little Red Songbook (I hope you don't mind) and I became insatiably curious about the original cut of the album, with the Michelin song and everything still intact. I'm sure you get requests for it all the time, but is there any way of obtaining a copy?
And oh yes, my girlfriend brought home a copy of Switched-On Bach and I was wondering if you're familiar with that at all. Looks like the cover of Songbook.
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(Anonymous) 2005-02-07 04:35 am (UTC)(link)but if this gets out im hoping she'll sue me as well!
ive bought 3 copies of tlrs over teh years and they were all stolen from me. i hope u dont mind if i p2p it tonite...
xo
adam
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(Anonymous) 2005-02-07 04:31 am (UTC)(link)that's funny eno compares british football and the goon show. i once read a review of "I am the walrus" where the author claimed john lennon grew up with 'one ear to peter sellers and one ear on the football stats'
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Do you have an oblique strategy deck?
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It was funny, it got a laugh from the audience. I thought of our Terror Tales interview, as a matter of fact! It's not even online any more, is it? The zine has disappeared, hasn't it? Come on, admit it, you bastard!
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Yes, it's true, about the interview. I very much want to pass the blame to Terror Tales (as was). I do actually feel guilty, after all the hassle I gave you. I wanted to post a link to the interview somewhere (and to my essay, which has also been lost), but I noticed it's all gone. The impermanence of all things. I was vaguely thinking of asking you whether I could post the interview on my blog instead, just so it's not lost to the internet (it was a very good interview, I thought), but I thought my personal little blog might be a bit of a comedown after a big, proper 'magazine' website.
I'm also rather mourning the loss of Terror Tales/Horror Quarterly. It's strange to realise the influence some of these online communities have.
If it weren't for Terror Tales, in it's original incarnation, I would never have met one of the people who has led to me publishing this book (http://homepages.pavilion.co.uk/users/tartarus/morbid.htm). It's quite sad to me that they decided to jack it in (I hate dead links on the Internet).
Anyway, so yes, I do feel rather like Alan Moore to Brian Eno here.
Thanks Momus
(Anonymous) 2005-02-07 02:15 pm (UTC)(link)thanks again Justin Lincoln
Musical roadsin Hokkaido
(Anonymous) 2005-02-07 02:55 pm (UTC)(link)Hokkaido installs musical roads
--
"Japan has already dabbled here and there with road surfaces that keep
drivers awake by using appropriately-placed troughs to play rhythms
through your tires.
Now the Hokkaido Industrial Research Institute has gone a step
further, with grooved sections of road that boom a melody up through
your car. The grooves are a few millimetres deep and 6-12 mm wide;
unsurprisingly, the closer they're grouped together the higher the
pitch of the note produced.
They're planning to use different melodies for different areas,
picking songs that have some association to the locale."
--
http://www.we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/004449.php
from Justin
mildly off topic
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=41815576
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Ahhh, ain't that special, Eno's PC, luckily such retarded displays don't get in the way of his finer moments as a human being (notably On Land).