8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Hitting the Links: Paper Synths, The Velvet Underground, and Cuban Numbers Stations

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Perhaps a budding Sunday tradition? Once again, I present five online articles that caught my fancy over the past week:

Meet The World’s Most Obsessive Fan Of ‘The Velvet Underground and Nico’

Satlof’s collection began in earnest in 1987: a $90 autographed copy from “a record dealer in an antiques mall on Canal Street,” with a scrawled signature that the seller said was Warhol’s, but turned out to be Reed’s. Satlof casually picked up more of the albums over the years, paying “$10, $20, like $100 for ones with the full banana.” He stresses that his hobby is due to the brilliance of the music and his love for it. But really: 800 copies?



Miniature Analogue Papercraft Synthesizers by Dan McPharlin

Each miniature synthesizer is meticulously handcrafted from framing matboard, cardboard, paper, plastic sheeting, string and rubber bands. Rather than replicating the existing machines, the focus was more about creating a revisionist history where analogue technology continued to flourish uninterrupted.



In Pictures: The 10 Most Stunning Places to Make Music

Some of the best making-of-the-album stories are those where a wild, remote or inspiring location becomes a powerful inspiration on the music-making – The Rolling Stones at the Cote D’Azur mansion Villa Nellcôte for Exile on Main St.; Can at Schloss Nörvenich for Tago Mago; Killing Joke inside one of the Great Pyramids at Giza. In those cases, the band brought their own recording equipment with them. For the less intrepid, the world has many ready-made, custom-built, luxurious studios in gorgeous locations to fire up creativity.



Cuba’s Mysterious Numbers Station Is Still On The Air

While evidence suggests HM01 is operated by the Cuban government, it’s virtually impossible to tell who it’s sending to, which is one of the main tactical advantages of numbers stations: You can easily see the intended recipient of an email, but you can’t prove someone listened to a radio broadcast unless you catch them in the act.



The Word-Of-Mouth Resurgence of Arthur Russell

Shortly before his death, Russell and his family took a small boat out to Baker Island, a flat rock half-covered by seaweed, four miles off the coast of Maine. The musician sat on a slab of granite and recorded the sound of the waves breaking against the shore. The next year, the Russells scattered his ashes from the same rock, and they watched as the waves slowly pulled him away. On summer nights, for decades, unbeknownst to Russell or his family, locals have boated out to this same rock. They play music, and move together under moonlight. They call the place the Dance Floor.

Hitting the Links: Grace Jones, Italian Futurists, and the Radical Politics of Love

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For your weekend, I present five intriguing missives from across the digital cosmos:

Stevie Wonder and the Radical Politics of Love

Here are three songs, from three albums recorded in three consecutive years, all from the Nixon era. Each year, the lyrics get more pointed, more obvious in their contempt. But it’s a contempt mingled with understanding, and grounded in a deep, deep love for the people most affected by political failure.



Brian Eno’s Latest Isn’t An Album – It’s A Process

The price point corroborates that, asking for the worth not of an album but of a piece of software. But even then, it poses challenges. We expect a certain amount of utility for our buck; I own one other app that costs $40, for example, and it is a cloud-based productivity suite, which is about as utilitarian as it gets. You don’t do anything with Reflection, and it doesn’t do anything for you. What sort of software is that?



Partying With Grace Jones

On May 19, 1978, Jamaican-born model and singer Grace Jones turned 30. On June 7, she released her second studio album, Fame. Five days later, she celebrated with a combination birthday/album release extravaganza at LaFarfelle Disco in New York. The fun and debauchery were captured on film by notorious paparazzo Ron Galella, who was famous in his own way for relentlessly pursuing celebrities and getting his teeth knocked out by Marlon Brando.



20 Dynamic Paintings From The Italian Futurists

Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded Futurism when he published his Futurist Manifesto in Parisian newspaper Le Figaro on 20th February 1909. Futurism was a key artistic and social development in 20th Century art history, originating and most active within Italy, but also a movement whose ideas spread to Russia, England and beyond.



Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’

This is what is most disturbing about “I feel like”: The phrase cripples our range of expression and flattens the complex role that emotions do play in our reasoning. It turns emotion into a cudgel that smashes the distinction — and even in our relativistic age, there remains a distinction — between evidence out in the world and internal sentiments known only to each of us.

Hitting The Links

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The Essential Sun Ra

Sun Ra is often cited as the founding father of afro-futurism, a tangent of thought which extends through the mothership connections of Parliament-Funkadelic, to the astral techno of Underground Resistance, to the aquatic, lardossian narratives of Drexciya; his work examines racial identity and the black experience in America through the eyes of an alien visiting humanity. The language of this deconstruction is peppered with his own neologisms, like the “astro-black” of outer space, the “myth-science” or “solar-myth” of creation, right down to the name he chose for his band, “the Arkestra”, a linguistic riff on Noah’s biblical safe haven.

Giant Abandoned Soviet Spaceship Made of Wood

Buran, the Soviet Union’s answer to NASA’s Space Shuttle programme, wasn’t quite as successful as its American rival. Just one flight-capable Buran orbiter (craft OK–1K1) was completed, and flew only once, unmanned, on November 15, 1988. Today, a handful of relics from the Buran programme lie strewn across the former Soviet Union and beyond, from half-finished orbiters to a series of full-scale engineering rigs and other test articles; among them was this wooden wind tunnel model, abandoned for years in a corner of Zhukovsky Airfield in Moscow Oblast.

Electron Microscope Shows How Vinyl LP’s Are Played

Have you ever wondered how a vinyl player actually plays a record? Well, wonder no more. Microscopic Images shared this image on their Twitter some months back, showing what a record’s groove looks like under 1000x magnification.

The Meenakshi Temple of Madurai, India

Meenakshi Temple was originally built by Kulasekarer Pandya in the 6th century BC, but the credit for the present look of the temple goes to the Nayakas, who ruled Madurai from 16th to 18th century. The reign of the Nayaks marks the golden period of Madurai when art, architecture and learning flourished expansively. The riot of colors, however, is a more recent addition.

Graphic Designer Mark Ohe of Matador Records

Mark’s approach to working with a band always began with hearing their ideas for the project first, because, he pointed out, they always had ideas for it. “It’s pretty rare that someone comes to me and says, ‘Hey I’m doing this record, but I don’t know what to do for the cover.’ That almost never happens. What they really usually need is for someone to edit those ideas.”

Hitting The Links

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Italian Photographer Documents The Ruins Of Former Nightclubs Across Italy

“Discotheques, the symbol of ’80s and ’90s hedonism, were fake marble temples adorned with Greek statues made of gypsum, futuristic spaces of gigantic size, large enough to contain the dreams of success, money, fun of thousands people. And then the dreams are gone, people disappeared and nightclubs became abandoned wrecks, cement whales laid on large empty squares, places inhabited by echo and melancholy.”



Billy Name’s Enigmatic Images Of Warhol’s Silver Factory And The Velvet Underground

Billy {Name} was Warhol’s brief lover, long-term friend and celebrated archivist, documenting the glamourous and surreal goings on of the Silver Factory, which he was commissioned to decorate by the artist in 1964. This decor took the form of coating the East 47th Street space almost entirely in silver foil or silver spray paint – hence its name – and creating a futuristic-looking playground for talents like The Velvet Underground and Edie Sedgwick.



How Punk And Reggae Fought Back Against Racism In The ’70s

Putting black and white bands on stage together was a political statement in itself. We didn’t go on stage shouting “smash the National Front” and all that sloganeering, but we did want to extend the argument and talk about Zimbabwe, South Africa and apartheid, Northern Ireland, sexism and homophobia. We wanted to go, “Look, the National Front is not just against black people, they’re against all of this as well.”



How Brian Eno Created A Quiet Revolution In Music

A proper “furniture music” had to wait until the invention of recorded sound. This made possible a new form of listening, which Eno’s Music for Airports embodies to perfection. Recorded music is infinitely repeatable, and subject to the listeners’ will. We can ignore it or pay attention, as we choose. Ambient music celebrates this special form of listening like no other genre. As Brian Eno said: “I wanted to make something you can slip in and out of.”



HC-TT Human Controlled Tape Transport

The HC-TT Human Controlled Tape Transport is a compact cassette manipulation device that lets you play a cassette tape with your hand, similar to how you scratch a vinyl record. It’s like the love child of turntablism and musique concrète, letting you ‘scratch’ cassette audio recordings and more.

Rhymes With ‘Naughty’?

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The Daily Beast:

While music might be intended to inform or incite, it is also designed to entertain. And as a glance at bestsellers lists can attest, conspiracy sells. The search for hidden meaning and coded symbols adds another level on which a product can be enjoyed. Which might explain why Jay Z keeps putting occult references in his songs and videos, even while he explicitly denies being part of the Illuminati. “Great rap should have all kinds of unresolved layers that you don’t necessarily figure out the first time you listen to it. Instead it plants dissonance in your head,” Jay wrote in his 2010 book Decoded. And what better way to plant dissonance than canny use of subversive imagery. Hip-hop was predicated on sampling and remixing older ideas into something new and relevant, and Illuminati myths and symbols can be sampled the same way a drumbeat can.



Then again, there might be a more pragmatic reason why hip-hop latched on to the idea of the Illuminati. As Rakaa Iriscience of the trio Dilated Peoples pointed out in a 2014 interview with Hiphopdx.com, “There were a lot of organizations that existed. That one [the Illuminati] just happened to rhyme with body, party, naughty and a lot of other things. It sounds cooler than some of the other ones do.”

Hitting The Links

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Tom Wilson, Record Producer For The Velvet Underground and Bob Dylan

As monumental as were those Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel albums {he produced}, Wilson’s most challenging work in the recording booth came after Columbia, when he became a staff producer at MGM/Verve in 1966 and helmed the debut albums by both Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention and the Velvet Underground within a two-month period (March-May 1966). You couldn’t get too weird for Wilson, who released cosmic freejazz philosopher Sun Ra’s first album in 1956. Jazz By Sun Ra came out on Transition, the label Wilson started in 1955, right after he graduated from Harvard with a degree in economics.



Vintage Drum Kits From The 1920s And 1930s

I am fascinated by the early drum kits: they were very creative assemblages that generally included Chinese tack head tom toms, wood blocks, China-type cymbals, the “low boys” or “sock cymbals” that preceded the modern hi-hat. And of course the big bass drums and snare drums on their spindly little stands. To me these first American forays into multi-percussion setups are things of sculptural beauty.



Brian Eno And Peter Schmidt’s ‘Oblique Strategies,’ The Original Handwritten Cards

The Oblique Strategies cards were idea-generating tools and tactics designed to break routine thinking patterns. While born of a studio context, Oblique Strategies translated equally well to the music studio. For Eno, the instructions provided an antidote in high-pressure situations in which impulse might lead one to default quickly to a proven solution rather than continue to explore untested possibilities: “Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation—particularly in studios—tended to make me quickly forget that there were other ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach.”



The Neuroscience Of Musical Perception, Bass Guitars And Drake

How humans perceive music is, of course, far more complicated than simply tuning in to tempo. Music draws up — and draws from — memories, emotions and pleasure and reward activity in the brain. Other acoustic qualities like melody, harmony and timbre also play important roles. And our conscious ability to apply symbolic meaning to sounds, lyrics and song — and to recognize when listening to music that what we’re listening to is supposed to be music — also certainly influences human musical perception.



Secrets to Long Haul Creativity

Being creative over a career involves a whole subset of nearly invisible skills, a great many of which conflict with most people’s general ideas about what it means to be creative. What’s more, being creative is different than the business of being creative, and most people who learn how to be good at the first, are often really terrible at the second. Finally, emotionally, creativity just takes a toll. Decade after decade, that toll adds up. So here are eight of my favorite lessons on the hard fight of long-haul creativity. A few are my own. Most are things I learned from others. All have managed to keep me saner along the way.

Hitting The Links

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It’s time for our semi-regular round up of articles and links that we found particularly interesting over the past week. And, yes, I do need a better title for this section.


A History of Female Afrofuturist Fashion

The term Afrofuturism might only have been coined in 1993 by author Mark Dery, but the black cultural experience of freedom achieved through sci-fi, ancient African cosmology and magical realism has been underway since the middle of 20th century. Time, for an Afrofuturist, is a fluid concept, and the terms past, present and future aren’t necessarily linear.


A Plea for Metadata for Music. What’s Wrong with You Label People?

I’ll just be blunt: why can’t you get metadata right? What’s keeping you from tagging digital song files with all the information I and everyone else needs? This is important data. And supplying everyone with this data is your job!


I Accidentally Convinced Voters That Donald Trump Hates Pavement

It’s just funny to imagine Donald Trump listening to Pavement. Trump has written real tweets praising stadium acts like Taylor Swift and Aerosmith. What if he heard Pavement? He probably wouldn’t like them very much! I imagine a man of such extreme wealth and ego being repelled by the uncompromising, lo-fi aesthetic of early Pavement recordings.


Finally, It Will Be Possible To Flip Someone Off Via Emoji

It appears that when Apple ships iOS 9.1, iPhone users will have access to a key symbol of human communication. In a beta posted yesterday, Apple greatly expanded the number of supported emoji, including multiple new hand gestures. Of course, there’s one gesture that all have been waiting for, and it looks like we’ll be getting it at long last.


The 8 Hipster Districts of Orlando to Explore Like a Local

Orlando is known around the world as a theme park playground for children and adults alike. Yet visitors often miss out on the relatively undiscovered sections of Orlando, cherished by locals as up-and-coming cultural havens. In our humble opinion, these neighborhoods—your friends may not have heard of them yet—are a destination vacation in and of themselves.


Chess Player Caught ‘Using Morse Code To Cheat’

Mr Ricciardi did not get up at all during hours of playing and kept his thumb tucked in his armpit. The 37-year-old player was also “batting his eyelids in the most unnatural way”, (referee Jean) Coqueraut said. “Then I understood it. He was deciphering signals in Morse code.”

The Residents – One Minute Movies

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Revisiting a wonderful and influential moment from ‘North Louisiana’s Phenomenal Pop Combo‘ The Residents:


“Perfect Love” – both the video and song – really are quite perfect.

Pitchfork:

More immediately influential are the “one-minute movies” the Residents made for songs from 1980’s Commercial Album. These illustrative clips were among the first to show how the music video could be its own form– not just a song or a movie or an ad, but something in between. That point was made all the more profound by the album, which includes a set of 40 one-minute songs that sound like concentrated extracts of larger tunes (liner notes actually suggest that each track should be played three times in a row to form a full pop song). They sound like jingles– and to further point out the blurry lines between art and advertising, the Residents bought 40 one-minute spots on a San Francisco Top 40 station, airing the entire album over a three-day period.


When I actually lived in North Louisiana there was a bit of Residents lore floating about (if you spoke to the right people) … that there were two core members from Shreveport, and that one had a rich stepfather who, frustrated and at odds with his increasingly weird stepson, gave him a bunch of money to move to San Francisco and buy recording gear. Or probably not. It’s sort of amazing that we still don’t really know their story.

The Quietus:

The band have strived to keep their identities a secret, employing all manner of conceptual subterfuge and sleight of hand to misdirect attention away from any singular version of the truth. When discussing conceptual art in the realm of pop music, people always talk about the KLF, but it’s worth pointing out that Bill Drummond would have been a young man of 21 when Meet The Residents was released.

Hitting The Links

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So many links, so little time. For your perusal, here’s a round-up of some unrelated articles that I’ve found interesting in the past week:

Alchemy Of Sound: On The Occult And Soviet Synthesizers

The father of futurist music, a Russian occultist and experimental composer by the name of Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, inspired the creation of an optoelectronic machine capable of converting into sound any symbols sketched onto a large pane of glass: the Soviet ANS synthesizer.


Dubbing Is A Must: A Beginner’s Guide To Jamaica’s Most Influential Genre

For many, dub appears an impenetrable genre – the sort of thing we know we should be into, but we don’t quite know where to start with. That’s why we asked David Katz – renowned reggae historian, photographer and more – to write us the Beginner’s Guide to Dub, with quotes from Bunny Lee, Niney the Observer, Glen Brown, Adrian Sherwood, Dennis Alcapone, Roy Cousins and more. We’ve also compiled an accompanying playlist on the last page of this article.


Apple Admits It Has ‘Homework To Do’ To Improve Apple Music

“There’s a lot of work going into making the product better. Our focus is on editorial and playlists, and obviously we have teams all around the world working on that, but we’re also adding features and cleaning up certain things,” Oliver Schusser, vice president, iTunes International, told the Guardian.



Asked about criticisms of Apple Music’s usability – which has seen users complaining of corrupted libraries and unintuitive interfaces – Schusser said: “The product is always our priority, and we are getting a lot of feedback. Remember, this was a very big launch in 110 markets instantly, so we get a ton of feedback. We’re obviously trying to make it better every day.” he said.


Lawrence Lessig: The Question For My Critics

Yes, we cannot know the details. But we cannot let the details stop us from the most important reform our democracy needs. The question isn’t simply, what might go wrong. The question is also, what do we know will go wrong if we do nothing? And is that risk greater than the risk of trying something different?