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

Spies & Conspiracy (#25) Late in the Evening.

Original source here. Recorded on November 9, 1996

This one enters the murky, misunderstood world of international espionage. The jets screaming through the sky in this track mirror the heavy winds currently outside my window, the errant cool breeze carrying an imaginary whiff of JPTS.

This is heavy on the 50's and 60's. The height of the sexy Cold War antics. The later decades, while still dangerous (look it up?) were decidedly less sexy as the budgets shrank and the glamor faded. Perhaps, too, do the Russians and Eastern Bloc countries pine for the early years, where Leon Theremin himself was designing bugs for his country.

The toys got too small, the nerds took over, it became a war of blue jeans and bean counters. It's over, of course. We no longer hide under our desks as practice. Such is the way of the future.

1. Secret Flyover
2. Psychedelic Transatlantic
3. Join the smaller, slower Air Force
4. Torture Swing
5. Mission Ricochet
6. Here comes the rain again
7. Yet another Bond theme
8. Can we make Mancini smoother? No.
9. Damn you, Samuel Morse
10. The phone call came from the next hotel room
11. Mistaken Identity
12. Salute the Flag
13. Woosh and we're gone
    

Added by IanF-R:
Flowsheet for this show.