In his documentary “Discovering Electronic Music” director and writer Bernard Wilets explores the basics of early analog synthesizers and the first digital sampling techniques. With its dreamlike and slightly dated approach, it’s a worthwhile watch— and if you’re curious about how future technology was referenced in the past, this short documentary is every paleofuturist’s dream.
Musik Von Harmonia
The Germans invented electronic dance music, just as surely as German engineers, working between the wars, had invented magnetic tape. And, at the same time, groups like Tangerine Dream, Popol Vuh, Cluster, and Neu! were playing songs that seeped much more softly into the atmosphere. It took Brian Eno to coin the phrase “ambient music,” but it’s worth remembering that he did so after playing with German musicians, and after collaborating with David Bowie on “Low”—an album (the first in Bowie’s Berlin Trilogy) that might be heard as an homage to Krautrock and, at its worst, becomes Krautrock pastiche.
Harmonia was a sort of supergroup, composed of Hans-Joachim Roedelius, Dieter Moebius, and Michael Rother, a guitarist who had played in Neu! and an early incarnation of Kraftwerk. The trio made two albums: “Musik von Harmonia,” in 1974, and “Deluxe,” in 1975. They played to audiences that were indifferent or hostile. “Harmonia was completely ignored or hated,” Rother told me, over Skype, recently. “Ignored would have been the better thing. People did not understand it, did not want our music.”
The idea, Rother told me, was to scrape clean the musical palate. “By that time,” he said, in lightly accented English, “I had left behind the idea of being a guitar hero, of trying to impress people by playing fast melodies. So I went back to one note. One guitar string. It was quite a primitive music, really.” What this meant, in practice, is that Rother—who’d grown up covering Cream, the Stones, and the Beatles—had subtracted the blues (if not the funk) from his playing. Eventually, he’d simplified chord progressions, or removed them entirely, playing single-note runs against a tight matrix set up by his partner in Neu! and Kraftwerk, the drummer Klaus Dinger. The resulting songs, most of them instrumental, could sound like a stream or a flood; either way, the effect was one of constant, cleansing forward motion.
Yes, indeed, let’s listen to Harmonia today.
Here’s their music on Apple Music
and Spotify
and YouTube.
The History Of Copyright And The Wunderkind Of The Free Culture Movement
In a new book, The Idealist, writer Justin Peters places {Aaron} Swartz within the fraught, often colorful, history of copyright in America. Brooke {Gladstone} talks with Peters about Swartz’s legacy and the long line of “data moralists” who came before him.
Via the always dependable On The Media, this is a fascinating report on copyright law and the contemporary influence of the sadly departed Aaron Swartz, alongside some enlightening historical context. We’re also treated to this quote from the dawn of copyright legislation: “My neighbor might love the light but that gives him no right to steal my candles.” Have a listen:
Hitting The Links
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’?
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
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.
Remembering D. Boon Of The Minutemen
Dennes Dale Boon died 30 years ago this month, on Dec. 22, 1985, to be exact.
{As frontman for the Minutemen} Boon had become a talented guitarist with a distinctive staccato picking style that meshed with {Mike} Watt’s increasingly fluid bass playing and {George} Hurley’s innovative, jazz-influenced drumming. They were a part of the punk scene, but the band’s music, with its elements of funk, hard rock, jazz and punk, was unlike anyone else’s on the scene.
Daily Breeze music writer Michael Lev captured it best in this 1985 appreciation of Boon:
“On stage, D. Boon as performer and singer was pained. He didn’t bother to keep his huge body under control. Instead, it grabbed him, flinging him around the stage so it appeared he was holding onto the neck of his guitar for dear life.”
D. Boon was a self-described corndog, but he shed his inhibiting outer layer and became much more; a prodigiously talented guitarist, a spectacular showman and a wonderful songwriter and singer. He fronted a band that, though usually labeled “punk” or “post-punk” was sui generis. Minutemen records sound as fresh and challenging today as they did over 30 years ago. But the most ringing endorsement I could offer is that D. Boon was truly one of the nicest men I have ever met, a rare kind soul in a business that usually exalts and rewards the exact opposite.
It almost seems like an understatement to say that the Minutemen changed my life. They opened me up to the idea that a band doesn’t have to be pigeonholed to exist. They introduced me to the art of the lyric. They helped me become politically aware and concerned with what happens in other parts of the planet. They sold me on the worthy ethos of ‘jam econo‘. So much change in so little time … I embraced the Minutemen in their heyday and soon after I’m reading about D. Boon’s fatal accident in a bottom-of-the-page news item in Rolling Stone Magazine. I still listen to them often – unarguably more than any other band that I was into in my teenage years – and I believe I’m still learning from them.
Here’s an ‘Intro To Minutemen’ playlist on Apple Music.
Here are the Minutemen on Spotify.
Here’s the Minutemen channel on YouTube.
Music On The Bones
The latest Fugitive Waves podcast discusses the fascinating history of Soviet ‘bone records’:
Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.
“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole,” says author Anya von Bremzen. “You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”
Listen to the podcast here:
These records only played on a single side, and the quality was low, but they were extremely cheap: A single disc only cost about one ruble on the black market, as opposed to five rubles for a two sided-disc. And it was subversive. According to Artemy Troitsky’s 1987 book Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia, they often contained surprises for the listener: “Let’s say, a few seconds of American rock’n’roll, then a mocking voice in Russian asking: “So, thought you’d take a listen to the latest sounds, eh?” followed by a few choice epithets addressed to fans of stylish rhythms, then silence.”
Soon, an entire underground network of bone music record distributors popped up, called the roentgenizdat, or X-Ray press. Analogous to the samizdat that reproduced censored publications across the Soviet bloc, the roentgenizdat was soon distributing millions of Western records.
Here’s a great TED Talk on X-ray bone records where Stephen Coates asks the question, “What would you risk for the sake of music?”:
And here’s a lively debate over on Discogs.com on whether bone records should be included and cataloged on the site.
The Recording Of “I’m Not In Love”
I just finished watching the recent BBC documentary on 10cc … the bit about the studio wizardry that went into recording “I’m Not In Love” was a definite highlight. Enjoy:
Sarah Records And The Qualities Of An Enduring Label
An excellent article from London In Stereo on the once maligned (by some) and now revered Sarah Records:
In the current era of Bandcamp, everyone has a fighting chance (in theory at least) of taking on the big players. But none of that existed when two people – Clare Wadd and Matt Haynes – operating out of the basement of a terraced house in Bristol (45 Upper Belgrave Road – immortalised in former signing The Hit Parade’s poignant farewell note, ‘The House Of Sarah‘. They’d later set up shop in another house on Gwilliam Street) graduated from fanzine writers to label bosses in 1987 and never looked back. Over 100 carefully-curated releases and with a combination of guile and determination they amassed coverage and a fanbase that had the majors at once scratching their heads in disbelief and tearing their hair out out of annoyance. Moreover, Wadd and Haynes showed you could do it without existing in a manic, drug-fuelled frenzy like Creation’s Alan McGee or being a well-connected media wizz like Factory’s Tony Wilson. It’s a story of doing things your own way, sticking to your principles and overcoming the odds.
Much of the article is devoted to a fascinating interview with label co-founder Clare Wadd:
“There are pretty much three ways a record label can end – put out increasingly duff records and fizzle out; get bought; or go bust – we were always very clear that our choice was none of the above, which meant that we had to find a different way. I still think it makes us pretty unique, and I really believe that the end was as important as the beginning, the last ten records as important as the first ten etc.”
“A couple of people have used the “curatorial” word recently – well it’s used in the film – but that’s certainly never the way we thought of it. It was all about pop music, pop art statements, not doing what you’re supposed to do, not turning into a business that does what it does because that’s what it does. Neither of us is a collector, and we always rather enjoyed poking fun at the people who are.”
I’m always into histories of independent record labels and the qualities that make for a ‘classic imprint’ so I read about Sarah Records with much interest. There’s a lot to be learned from the philosophy of these labels of yore. In this age when starting a label is as easy as logging onto SoundCloud the spirit of creative statement-making and a long ambitious vision seem to have gotten lost.
What can we learn from Sarah Records and this article? These might be some of the qualities that helped make them a label of renown:
Develop and Stick to a Philosophy. I’m not expecting you to be an indie-Socrates, but it would be nice to have a philosophy as well as guidelines set by an outlook or world view. With Sarah, the founders were motivated by regard for anti-capitalism and feminism which, though hardly apparent in their releases, subtly shaped how they presented themselves and who they would sign. A guiding philosophy can be a thread that glues it all together. It also makes for a better story than “I started a label ’cause I wanted to put out some good music.”
Create a Community. A label that serves its fans will prosper over one that simply markets. Your label should be a club house … not everyone is invited but those who are inside are having a blast and don’t want to leave. Fans should communicate with each other and with you, and your label provides the avenue. Each release serves as marching orders for your army and should be treated that way.
Be Indifferent to the Press. You have such faith in what you’re doing that bad reviews don’t matter and could be considered a badge of honor. You’re just ahead of your time, anyway, and they’ll eventually come around. But, who needs press when you’ve got such a diehard community of label devotees? They’re the ones spreading the word without axes to grind or agendas to fill and deserve the focus of your label’s energy.
Have a Strong Localized Identity. The classic labels with the strongest personalities exist almost as homages to the cities they sprung out of. Where would Factory Records be without Manchester? Sub Pop without Seattle? Trax without Chicago? Sarah Records was deeply tied to Bristol, right down to cover art based on city scenes and mass transit.
Consider Your Legacy. Embrace a long view. Each release will represent your label forever, so it’s best not to skimp on those early releases. If you can’t afford proper mastering, nice cover art, or are tempted to put out your buddy’s song even though it’s just kinda so-so, you might want to put your label ambitions on hold. If you have any longevity (and you should aspire to) then those short-sighted missteps will eventually haunt you.
Putting out great releases that you are unconditionally in love with helps, too, but that should really be a given.
This article also alerted me to My Secret World, a documentary on Sarah Records. Here’s the trailer: