Wax Snd Trk (#42)

Source to be found here. Originally broadcast on February 13, 1997.

This show features decorative and distracting sounds surrounding the audio from David Blair's feature-length film Wax or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees. Wax is a surreal allegory involving a beekeeper who skips across time and space to interact with Cain and Abel in the Garden of Eden, meet giant intelligent bees in the New Mexico desert, and become a high-tech weapons system in the 1991 Gulf War. It was the first motion picture to be available via HTTP in 1993.

I purchased a VHS copy of Wax from Blair after seeing a fragment of it in video studio at undergrad art school. Its unstuck-in-time story and the juxtaposition of disparate elements appealed to my new sense of Digital and The Internet, as well as fondness for the really strange. Using early non-linear editing, it exploits that technology's advantages, crafting archival, stock, and original video footage with early computer graphic animation into a disorienting but compelling visual epic.

Soundwise, Wax is simply narrated in the first person by Blair with ambient music and sound effects, so our audio contributions attempt to enhance it in the absence of the film's imagery. Mostly, they add another inscrutable layer, consisting of guitar scrapes, clangs, screeching hand-turned records, samples from Negativland's A Big 10-8 Place, and, finally, some good old drum-and-bass.

1. The first plutonium bomb
2. A message was waiting for me in my grandfather's diary
3. 'O' for the operator
4. The Tower of Babel
5. The language of Cain
6. Out of the dark machinery
7. I was Zoltan Abbasid
8. Priests and military planners
9. A machine large enough to scan an entire mourner
10. In the air over Basra, southern Iraq
11. We're genetic researchers
12. We've come for what's ours

Guitar (#104)

Source here. Originally recorded on April 16th, 1998.

If you look at the absurdly brief history of rock music, you'll notice that it both starts and ends with the acquisition and abandonment of the electric guitar. Barely an eyeblink in our cultural history, and yet it commandeers an exalted location in our minds.

Preposterous.

This show is made up mostly entirely of guitar samples. The sounds are occasionally processed.

1. Completely Attack-Free
2. Like an amplified spring doorstop.
3. Suddenly, Bass!
4. String Scraping
5. Tradition creeps in
6. Smooth meets Rough
7. Not strictly "Rock", per se
8. Drone Tuning with King Crimson
9. More careful instruction
10. Less practice more flailing
11. Distortion is an instrument unto itself
12. Crunch and Grind
13. Hammer no more the strings

Cineshow (#111)

Source here. Originally recorded on June 4th, 1998.

Careful observers of the main page for all the recordings will notice that we've almost come to the end of the list. There may be a short hiatus while the remainder of the shows are cataloged and uploaded, but I'll have to see exactly how it all rolls out.

Our Cinematic Wonderland show comes hot on the heels of the storybook wonderland show, at least in this world. A gathering of soundtracks from movies popular and otherwise was used to create this brooding, ethereal show. Where the previous show was a hyperactive fluff of dense sugar foam, this one comes across more like a thick vermouth of adult topics. There is some comedy as well, but the flavor is decidedly more mature.

1. Little child, on a postcard.
2. Nobody important, have you seen The Herald?
3. Transient or Resident?
4. I'm very sorry, sir, can you make us cry?
5. Somebody just complained, turn around
6. Rocky Horror Shortstop
7. I'll make it short, honk honk
8. Family Traditional Scream
9. Spirit in the Sky
10. Junkie Chase in Space
11. Just talking about a mine shaft
12. I am Iron Man
13. That dammed French computer again
    

"May Contain Some of the Following Ingredients..."

I wanted to chime in and mention that I've added flowsheet links to all currently posted shows, and I'll continue this as new shows get updated. Since Jason is posting the show itself, I'll add the flowsheet links to his posts as they appear. They are also collected into a Flickr set.

Flowsheets were the station's method of tracking which songs get aired when. This included "playlist" or recommended tracks as well as local artists and some genre variations. In earlier shows, I was solo and required to include playlist songs. Later, the show was designated specialty (exempt from playlist requirements), we sometimes had show themes, and I recruited friends into helping me. This meant I couldn't know what musics other people were adding, sometimes from another room, and I was just busier throughout the show.

From the early flowsheets, you can see these music and collage segments pretty clearly. I'd play a cluster of playlist tracks (marked in the margin with "I", "II", or "G"), and then I'd switch to audio-collage with various and random collected materials. Six playlist tracks were required each hour. I liked the playlist music, but for solo collage I often used thrift-store finds or non-musical audio to layer into "figure vs. ground" or "conversation" mixes. Of course, I was never able to write down every piece of sound that made it to the air. Some shows have only the barest notes on the corresponding flowsheet, due to the difficulty in reporting what we had specifically played.

The earlier shows are also "Excerpts" tapes, which means I was only stopping and starting the tape to record the collages as well as music I particularly liked. This means (almost) everything in the recording would be on the flowsheet, but not everything on the sheet was recorded.

In any case, between Jason's subjective "Notes" lists and the (more?) objective flowsheet documents, you might get a textual sense of what is contained in each show's audio. We were usually laughing out loud at the juxtapositions which occurred during the shows; for me, the point was to enjoy the absurdity and un-realism. Hopefully you the reader might also find the audio enjoyable to hear now, as time removes the recordings further and further from the current musical sound culture.

Collage-College Radio, Audio

This is the beginning of a probably soon-to-be-unreleased podcast of archived recordings from 1993-1999 of radio programs designed to annoy, confound, massage, perspicate, and gruntmuggle the listeners' ears. Programming was planned ad hoc in situ and realized three days later in the REM-cycles of the audience as they slept.

In this first episode (Introducing, 2009-03-29):

• what is audio collage?
• the grand gateway to audio collage
• first shows: the experiments, the ranting, the apologies
  
• Steve, Paul, and i
• 3 pairs of hands/lapsang souchong =
  6 turntables*e^(10-x)
• but what does it sound like? "bhwaannnngh"
  
• the roots of audio collage: tubers!
  
• meet the Beatles--again, and Again, & AGAIN
  
• thanks, go back to your room

The file is here.