Untitled (#126)

Source found here. Originally broadcast on September 17, 1998.

An energetic workout of the unthemed genus. Featuring crackly records, French whispers, zany whirling, violent spoken word poetry courtesy Attaboy, rushing digital effects, melodic polyrhythms, tinny cheesy tunes, unprepped tape warble, a blind walking tour, xylophonic studies, overblown guitar wringing, and a macro-sense of balance between the chaotic and the orderly.

1. Crumbly whispering
2. The French hang around
3. An unhinging progression
4. [...download complete...]
5. Ranting obscured by synesthesia
6. The mess dissipates outdoors
7. Phased reggae French gurgles
8. The sighted person
9. Dreams losing color
10. Hypnotic vocal chime
11. Metallismo
12. Resonance in cavernous tubes
13. Led Zep on the shortwave

1, 2, Free, Form (#112)

A happy Earth Day to our audience. This week's show source file found here. Originally broadcast on June 11th, 1998.

A grubby and unthemed little show. It starts off vocal and voice-based, gets progressively harsher and muddier, ends abruptly, and then starts again. It is well-worn, and thick with dense, chewy layers.

My cohort of helpers always preferred to have a thematic guide for the shows, but I tended to not plan very far in advance, so more often than not, this kind of thing is what we got. In my opinion, this is a good example of when it worked.

I also can't tell if the two sides of the tape got swapped, or this is a combination recording of a couple of different shows. The break near the middle where our show ends and the hip-hop deejay is baffled by the wall of noise he is following comes at exactly the right time. But that's free form college radio for you—a kind of audio whiplash that is an acquired taste, but can be oh-so-tasty.

1. WHANH WHANH!/Wash ray
2. Abracadabra to you, boss
3. Bells and frothing
4. Epic kung fu battle in crystal bamboo forest
5. Wailing and foam
6. A trick ending
7. Appliance-percussion jazz
8. One big fat hoax
9. Machine breathing/feeling so good
10. Wake up now, the satellite's singing
11. A glitch-beat with tacky synth
12. Japanese Vader
13. Mandarin disco Strauss/abrupt end

Gradual Brightening, pt 3 (#56)

Source can be found here. Originally broadcast on May 18, 1997. This is Part 3 of a four-part, six-and-a-half hour show that we performed one morning during a gap in the programming between spring and summer schedules at the radio station.

Part 1, Part 2

This segment of this show features a lot of vocalization—mumbled, hollered, gasped, giggled, foamed, and belted. If you've ever pulled a marathon shift, you know that things get loopy after a certain stretch, and hours four and five here are sure showing it. But that was the point, I guess, to go beyond our normal endurance for mixing and test the limits.

It does get tired and fallback upon some late-ninties IDM for a bit, but then there's a great bit where we say "Hello to the universe". The walls of noise and newborn baby reference also play along with the early morning theme, I suppose.

1. Ode to Dinah Shore
2. Extended sleep episode
3. Braying and chimes
4. whatisitwhatisitwhatisitunclecleottototo
5. Round and round-dnuor dna dnuor
6. What's so funny about power electronics?
7. Foul-mouthed open letter
8. They're so cute when they start reading poetry
9. The martial art of jazz-golf
10. Screamix
11. Melodic moans of damned doors
12. Bombast and cheese
13. Yes, records ARE fantastic

Gradual Brightening, pt 2 (#56)

Source can be found here. Originally broadcast on May 18, 1997. This is Part 2 of a four-part, six-and-a-half hour show that we performed one morning during a gap in the programming between spring and summer schedules at the radio station.

Part 1

This one is getting going with full-force (already? Save it up, you still have pts 3-4!) raucousness and mayhem. Featuring a cruise-band record from my parents' Bermuda honeymoon, Lewis Carroll poems, the trusty HAL-9000, and some serious out-there skronk and noise, scattered amongst the drone.

1. On a ship: Lounge act, engine drone
2. A Wonderland revue
3. Anime exclaims with light industrial ditty
4. Primitive scree, rawk overclocked
5. Wait. Who started the self-destruct sequence?
6. This is it. We're going to die.
7. Your life flashes before your eyes—oddly with singing chipmunks
8. Limbo = electronique opera overture
9. Getting the saxophone started on a cold morning
10. Airplane mimicry in shop class
11. The Avant-garde vs. the Vienna Philharmonic
12. Absurd getting ugly, draws in John Williams
13. Twinkling beats. Get it? Beats?

Gradual Brightening, pt 1 (#56)

Source file found here. Originally broadcast on May 18, 1997. This is Part 1 of a four-part, six-and-a-half hour show that we performed one morning during a gap in the programming between spring and summer schedules at the radio station.

The idea was to begin quietly in the dark of early morning and very gradually increase the energy and mixing as the sun rose and morning progressed. Six plus hours is not a recommended amount of time to do anything non-stop with any consistency or high amount of success, but there are some notable bits here and there once we got into the mode.

Part 1 here starts with the station ID "looping" on the phone delay, and we move into a start-stop section until we work it out with some terrible organ music. From the 30 minute mark onward things are solid in a extended drone and animal-sounds way. Definitely worth taking a listen to, especially on a weekend morning on the couch.

1. ID...ID...ID...ID...
2. Is it funny already?
3. Rather Aphex-y so far
4. Anton plays an extended etude
5. Pretty annoying: calliope/R2D2 impression/tinnitus
6. Practicing my squiggles
7. Circular breathing through drainpipes
8. Forest empties of fauna in advance of an approaching menace
9. Fauna return to bliss out
10. Thick pulses surfacing
11. Dulcimer and prepared piano solos
12. Interesting loops, half-musical
13. A crumbly accordion

May Flowers May Day (#53)

Source is found here. Originally broadcast on May 1, 1997.

This is another fun show I remember listening to repeatedly. I think the title here is purely nominal and doesn't relate to any springtime or labor-related content. The energy level starts pretty high and active. There is a prevalance of spastic burbling and garbled chatter, bobbing back and forth between music fragments and blasts of verbal nonsense, and feedback—ranging from a hollow, ringing sheet to a rolling bass shudder—recurs throughout the show.

Featured largely throughout is Atavistic Records' 1996 "State of the Union" compliation, a two-disc set of 146 one-minute tracks of avant musics, spoken word, and collage bits. I am also happy to hear Protoblast's "Ex-Neurosurgeon" again at about the 1 hour 23 minute mark, a great, compact song from the great NC comp "Cognitive Mapping Vol 2" from Friction Media. I will need to pull that CD out again.

1. Saxophone overtakes tape deck
2. Backwards sucking vampire guitar
3. Meta-radio instructions
4. Let's turn on
5. You're the earth
6. The singing stone
7. I know you can
8. Record player won't turn, it's stuck
9. Sounds of being the sky
10. Mr. Price is amused
11. Thriller loop, screams, and static
12. Body bomb with background turntablism
13. Trash can party

XmasShowXDU (#87)

Source here. Original Airdate December 18, 1997.

We did a number of Christmas shows in 1997, mostly because we got lots more time to fiddle around during the holiday break due to many people being simply gone. This seems like a practice run for the longer show a week later.

That said, the source material spans a good century of popular Christmas cheer (although a mid-century version of "Let It Snow" shows up time and again). Shows like this require an astonishing catalog of sonic stuff. Nowadays, something like this would be easier to assemble; what with keeping everything as digital files and tagging and whatnot. Alternately, the various formats (vinyl, tape, CD, computer) lend their own sonic overtones to the mix, and the process of searching through deep, dusty boxes leads to much serendipity.

Ultimately, there's no one right way to do this.

1. Can it beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
2. Bad idea, Beck
3. Too many competing fanfares
4. A shockingly ahistorical account of Christmas in early America
5. Sonic Youth, Back from the North Pole
6. Let it snow let it snow letitsnowletitsnowletitsnow l e t i t ssssssnnnnnnnooooowwwww
7. Santa might be feeling a little unwell
8. Keeping the Christ in Christmas
9. Rescue Santa!
10. The Rocket has failed
11. Turn that racket off!
12. Kittens of sugarplums.
13. Did we ever manage to rescue Santa?
    

Music and Noise, Pt. 2 (#20)

Originally broadcast on October 5, 1996, and show source found here.

I feel my role for these programs now is part historian and interpreter, and sometimes apologist. I recount the facts and details about the original show and how it was made, I provide context from the intents and environments at that time, and I also admit when the shows fail to live up to their potential. This one feels at times like it needs apologizing for, with dead-air minutes and interminable stretches of unpleasant scrapings.

This is, however, what this show is also fundamentally about: pointing out the subjectivity of sound appreciation and attempting to sow seeds in the extreme outer corners of the possible aural field. Music is sometimes differentiated from noise as being organized or desired sound. But putting Music and Noise on a linear axis varying in degrees of Organization or Desirability does not address the subjective nature of those factors. Repetitive factory sounds, clumsy guitar dismemberment, slap funk bass, scrambled tape feedback, reverberating vocal grumbles as found within this show are all equally organized/disorganized, or desirable/undesirable based wholly upon the listener's sensibilities.

As the second of a two-show theme, this recording captured myself, possibly alone at the controls, challenging my future self's definitions and acceptance of music versus noise, contrived versus accidental, and beautiful versus unlistenable in the context of radio programming. I won't bore you how I like it now, but I find it still makes me think, which I count as a kind of success.

1. Dot matrix guitar
2. Guitarpentry
3. 1959 guitar lessons with 3-minute break
4. Hi and lo white noise
5. Cave flautism
6. Caveman at open mic night
7. Actual beats and basslines
8. Jajouka versus breakaway tape machine
9. Fire engines in freefall
10. Weird noise club next door
11. Behemoth speaking slowly
12. More cave guitars with Anton LaVey
13. Relentless house paranoia

Excerpts (#11)

Source here. Originally recorded on July 19, 1996.

Another one from the random file. This one starts in the deeply ridiculous and does a random walk from there. Much spoken word work here: poetry, chanting, documentary. Environmental, atmospheric, soundtracklike music fiercely backs it up. The second half is less wordy than the first, but more dense and layered.

1. PeePee McDooDoo? Seriously?
2. Drum and Bass and Film Noir
3. Drum Solo with Record Manipulation
4. Weatherman One
5. (muffled laughter)
6. Men have dreamed of landing on our moon
7. 80's Soap Music, Hey, What About Me?
   
8. We have placed everything under a layer of foam
9. Maybe it's just that it's AM radio and we're out in the country now like the KLF or something
10. Caw Caw Caw Kong
11. Monks and Frogs
12. Saxophone Busker in Alien Subway
13. Music Box Winds Down
    

Excerpts (#8)

Source here. Originally recorded on June 28th, 1996.

SUPERBOWL SUNDAY. Accolades for the yearly American Football finals pop up in the strangest places, and this place is no exception. However, I simply don't care. I do this to annoy people, and not to profess a deep and abiding love for a "team" (an outmoded abstract concept as they come). Still, the bread and circuses (circii?) beckon; promising scantily clad women advertising disappointingly mundane Internet services, and burly drugged man-children pretending to avoid concussions. One must do as one does.

Enough about that. I should have a twofer this week, as there is a video I'd like to share with you in a later post (maybe around noon? Who knows?). This is another themeless show from the early period.

1. Flute at the moon
2. Bongos and birdsongs
3. Subtle Miami Vice Themes
4. SPLASH (and reprise of the first three)
   
5. Wood Shop Metal Shop
6. FBI Swing Instruction
7. Full Film Noir Treatment
8. I'm a train!
9. Chinese New Year Hovercraft Parade
10. Moderate Rabbit Dragon Roar
11. Meditation on lo-fi bass distortion
12. Movie chase scene with ragtime music
13. And we second line out...
    

Excerpts (#5) Frags of #5?

Source here. Originally recorded on June 7th, 1996.

And now we begin to loop around. I've managed to get a few new ones uploaded, but of course they're mixed in with all the others. This would be a problem except for the fact that I've got a spreadsheet (that I'm using as a database), that keeps track of all this.

Of course, I'll make a mistake and I'll be gratified if someone points it out, simply because that means that someone is paying attention.

1. Laugh more every day
2. Trip Hop Nerd Loop
3. Mormon Tabernacle Choir drops a phat beat
4. Too many priests spoil the choir
5. Electric critters with sitars
6. No static at all
7. Merry Go Round Black Hole
8. Laser Organ Attacks
9. That's What I Want
10. The Dutch Company
11. Gamelan Calliope Hurdy Gurdy
12. A moment of disco
13. The Deep House has Termites

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
    

JAPAN (#103)

Source here. Originally recorded on April 9th, 1998.

Part hyperbole, part hubris, part hysteria, part hagiography, part hectoring. I'm sort of torn between the bizarre thought that one could capture all of Japan in a 90 minute tape, and the uneasy suspicion that we captured none of it. This tape is full of interwoven words and music and samples and fiction of what other people think of when they think of Japan. Some of us got in there, too.

1. Chipmunk Geisha
2. Country music melodic lope loop
3. Single String Final Battle
4. I'm afraid we played the Vapors
5. Garbage Percussion
6. Mecha-Elvis has returned
7. A Challenger Appears!
8. Up From the Depths
9. Pearls created by Swine
10. The reluctant warrior awakes
11. So, you think you can defeat me?
12. A perception of no true value
13. Return from whence you came
    

Added by IanF-R:We probably should have titled this show "Naïve Westerners' Japan: A Cultural Mis-mapping Odyssey".

Much To Do / Mush TuTu (#71)

Source also here. Recorded on August 28th, 1997.

This one's a shorty, so I should have done long before this. Oh well.

There are fewer elements in a shorter time in this, so the descriptions while accurate, are a little repetitive (heh). I don't know why "Baby Driver" was so popular with us, I can only plead inebriation. I have two favorite loops in this track, and they should be pretty obvious. Some good points happen in the middle and near the end, with the school-house-rocky kind of loops.

1. Hello, this is Ricardo Montalban
2. Bumping the Electric Orchestra
3. Carsick Guitar Tuning
4. Low Rent Counterpoint
5. Ricardo Returns
6. Secret Arpeggio
7. One Car Traffic Jam
8. We might - in fact - take it, after all
9. A fine mess, indeed
10. Cartesian Duality Refuted
11. Ziddy Bop
12. Classic Computer Music Sound Collection
13. Everything we wanted to do crowded in at the end

Added by IanF-r:
Flowsheet? Here.

Moods of TKDF (#63)

Source available here, and the show was originally broadcast on July 3rd, 1997 (thirteen years ago today).

Mood music? Aside from the Space Invaders disco near the beginning of the show, most of the sounds in this episode fall on a mood scale between "Zen-like/Lethargic/Asleep" and "Spacey/Dreamy/Artificially Stimulated". A quiet, or at least sitting/lying down show, for most.

An orchestral record of the smooth, mood music type seems to linger throughout the show in various echo and flange-effect chambers, which to me gives the whole show a happy-sappy feel. Other recognizable sounds are yours truly trying in vain to put a caller on the air, clipped phone messages, and a recording of fireworks mailed to us from another radio show in Minnesota of *their* Fourth of July show.

1. Kosmische Orkester
2. Vague Difficulties
3. Sardonic Warfare
4. Crumbly Snow
5. Blue Flowers
6. Limping Acid
7. Swooping Absence
8. Speedtape Burbles
9. Reverbed Cowbell
10. Misirlou Jazz
11. Gymnasium Pianos
12. Kosmische Kindergarten
13. Churchill's Funeral

Added by Ian F-r:
This show's flowsheet.

Music & Noise (#18)

Source also found here. Recorded September 14th, 1996.

The first one with a title! This is a momentous occasion, best left unmarked although remarked upon.

Or maybe not. I will say that this is the first one I've posted with a title, and hence a theme to the show. This is also a bit short. There are probably others in my ever growing back catalog that have names that were recorded before this.

There's been a question as to what to _do_ with the tapes once I've finished this endeavor. I'm boxing them up and probably will include a printout of the documentation as a guide, but they're too fragile to put in an attic/basement, and yet not worth keeping around for close perusal. The debate rages on! (I've been told disposal is an option, though one I'm going to choose not to exercise)

All this is more logistics than art, and perhaps inherently uninteresting.

1. The Best Meat Tenderizer Ever
2. This one was hard to start
3. Permanent damage to hearing
4. Shaking their whole body
5. Utilitarian music
6. Quiet Products
7. I wear black on the outside
8. Castanets / Pianos
9. Outside, looking in
10. Whoa, dude
11. A Rhodes Piano Was a Bad Choice Here
12. Belt Sander
13. Hamsters

Added by IanF-R:
I wish I had a flowsheet for this show, but it's gone with the tornadoes of time. I know that the pleasant chug-chug-chug machine drone throughout this show is a slowed down tape of myself beating on an aluminum foil take-out pan. Other music incidentally recognizable includes:

• Negativland's Escape From Noise
• Perry & the Redd Foxxe
• Daniel Johnston
• Beck (loser)
• Herbie Hancock's Rockit
• Fudge Tunnel
• Meat Beat Manifesto
• Laurie Anderson's For Electronic Dogs
• Scratch Acid
• Space Streakings

Revisit

A friend of mine from undergraduate years has completed for the second year a large project. It involves a lot of coding and time spent on his part, as well as being humorously succinct in writing. I am not so succinct, humorous, or ambitious, but I appreciate the effort and energy that projects of this scale require, and I also appreciate the resultant satisfaction derived from their completion. But check it out, for the humor, the music, and the scale of the endeavor. (Photo by Fellowship of the Rich.)